This post has since been deleted, perhaps in part because it drew the attention of Benjamin Riley, who has been reporting on the cultish practices of Alpha School at Cognitive Resonance. But many other posts, also from purported students, described the same lesson. A poster whose profile claims they are a 15-year-old student at the academy prefaces a summary of the assignment by saying, “Today, [at Alpha School], we got to hear what our parents really thought about us.”

While Alpha School has stated that “the substance of the characterizations [Riley] describe[s] are false,” they have not pointed to any factual inaccuracies in Riley’s reporting, and have confirmed that “the heart rate challenge” assignment was part of the eight-week “Alpha High School Boot Camp” which kicks off the academy’s freshman experience. Moreover, the extensive posting by Alpha School students was itself a “life skills” challenge within the extensively metricized bootcamp: students were tasked with launching an account on X and accumulating over 100 organic followers to pass.

If you’re not sure which of these assignments is a more nauseating violation of the social contract which should exist between students and their schools, you’re certainly not alone. As Audrey Watters succinctly puts is, “What the hell are we doing to these children?”

If you want the fullest accounting of, as Riley adroitly says, “the nightmare fuel” details of the Alpha School experience for both primary and secondary schools students, head on over to Cognitive Resonance. More reporting is forthcoming, as Riley’s inbox is apparently overflowing with testimonials, most recently from former students. I also recommend Todd Feathers excellent reporting for Wired this year and last, and Vauhini Vara’s questions about Alpha School (which now seem more urgent than ever) in her broader survey of AI in education for Bloomberg.

The contribution I hope to make here is to placing the Alpha School “model” within a broader framework of extractive and exploitative disruption to education during the 2020s. To do so, I need to start by highlighting two crucial details about Alpha School which might not be evident even if you have been following the recent media coverage.

1.) Alpha School did not start marketing itself as “teacherless” or as an “AI school with no teachers” until 2023.

When Emergent Academy was enrolling a few dozens students in the Austin metropolitan area - as it did starting in 2014 - and even for several years after it rebranded to Alpha School in 2019 (adding additional locations elsewhere in Texas), its recruiting materials were focused on project-based learning, personalized learning plans, and self-paced assessment. These are all established pedagogies, supported by research, though, of course, the devil is in the details of how they are executed.

Alpha School’s “version of teachers” were always referred to as “Guides,” as many of them did not have degrees in education or previous teaching experience. If you’re familiar with private experimental or public charter schools, none of this is particularly surprising. Such schools often use idiosyncratic nomenclatures to signal their ambition to innovate, which is part of the recruiting pitch to parents. And they frequently hire - either strategically or by necessity - fewer credentialed student-facing staff so that they can spend money elsewhere (not always on extractive technology and graft, but not never).

But the absence of credentialed teachers was not something Alpha School started broadcasting as a reason to attend until 2023, shortly after Joe Liemandt became the schools “principal” (a title which exploits the word’s dual connotations in private equity and education). A more robust and attention-grabbing marketing strategy was also necessary at this point because Alpha School was undertaking a nationwide expansion. Liemandt has reportedly invested $1 Billion (through some combination of his private fortune, the private equity firm he leads, and the software companies he or the firm owns), much of it devoted to developing Alpha School’s eLearning platform.

2.) Alpha School’s eLearning platform is being developed for hyperscale.

One of the central tenets of the Alpha School model is that students spend two hours daily on the academic curriculum, all of it delivered via “adaptive technology” or, the nomenclature which has become more common since 2023, “AI tutors.”

From the outset, the proposition from Emergent Academy’s cofounders, MacKenzie Price (who remains Alpha School’s public face) and Brian Holtz (who now leads The Drew School, a Alpha School-resembling primary school associated with Drew University which opened this Fall), was that they could build a platform which, if students were required to use it for two hours daily, starting in kindergarten, would train them to excel at the standardized testing which was frequently used to accredit schools, to accumulate college credits, and to determine college admissions and scholarship eligibility. And, if they successfully designed such a platform, the rest of the school day would be freed up for alternatives to, as educators often put it, “teaching to the test.”

I want to be perfectly clear, in theory, I understand the appeal of this proposition. So long as the largely extractive and inequitable regime of standardized testing retains its stranglehold over U.S. education, the ethical quandary every educator faces is how to deliver the test scores they and their students need while minimizing the interference of tyrannical standardized testing services in the actual day-to-day project of education1

Other EdTech providers are merely aspiring to the extractive and coercive power which The College Board and Educational Testing Service (ETS) attained decades ago. If Alpha School can limit “teaching to the test” to two hours a day without themselves becoming a tyrannical childhood-devouring monster some parents and students will regard that as a reasonable bargain given the present education policy landscape. Much, of course, depends on whether they can deliver, and also what they do with the rest of the day.

In 2022, Liemandt took control of Alpha School’s internal eLearning platform, then known as 2HourLearning.2 The platform, or some version thereof, has since been rebranded as Timeback, which the Alpha School website now describes as “a ‘Shopify for schools’ that empowers entrepreneurs to build the next generation of highly effective, for-profit educational institutions.”

What has usually been covered as a network or chain of private schools is also part of a bundle of corporate holdings, among them Alpha School, Alpha Holdings, Timeback, Future of Education, Crossover Markets, and 2HR Learning. Most of them are registered to Andrew Price, who is both MacKenzie’s husband and the CFO of Liemandt’s primary businesses, the enterprise software company, Trilogy, and the investment firm, ESW Capital. Liemandt was the best man at the Prices wedding, having recruited both of them out of Stanford through the “Trilogy University” program which Emily Chang gives credit for writing the tech industry’s “bro code” in the 1990s.

One of these corporations, Future of Education, has been used to make at least one large donation to a Republican candidate (Glenn Youngkin) in a state Alpha hoped to expand into (Virginia). Their “interconnectedness is part of how the game is played,” as Peter Greene puts it in his coverage of a proposed Pennsylvania charter school, Unbound Academy, also run by the Prices: “So we have a total of five organizations involved in the proposed school, all tied to MacKenzie and Andrew Price, and all proposing to pass a pile of Pennsylvania taxpayer money back and forth. And what a pile of money it is.”

Vauhini Vara, an experienced tech reporter, put it thusly in Bloomberg Businessweek last year: “The financial arrangements among these entities is unclear, but the filings suggest that Alpha has been serving as a sort of in-house distribution channel for a corporation developing AI products for schools.” An Alpha spokesperson disputed this characterization. Last week, Vara put it more plainly: “This school is a literal subsidiary of a tech company. Pass it on.”

The former students Riley interviewed return again and again to the impression that their parents were paying large tuition fees for them to be part of the Beta-testing (or maybe, more accurately, Alpha-testing) phase for Liemandt’s software. “He’s not disclosing to students that when they enter into Alpha, that it is an experiment. He’s saying this is a school and it’s going to work,” one says, “It’s not a school and it’s not guaranteed to work. What it is…is a science experiment that’s been framed as a school.” Another says, “I was a guinea pig, and I knew that I was a guinea pig. They were not subtle about it.”

While MacKenzie Price continues to emphasize that Alpha School is expensive and exclusive private academy, only for “the right families,” Liemandt has contrarily been expressing his ambition to not only expand Alpha School nationwide, but hyperscale its eLearning platform to the globe. As he put it to the podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy, “We need to scale this. We need to get out to a billion kids.”

Liemandt has many times regurgitated this intention to scale to “a billion kids.” According to UNESCO, there are only about 1.67 billion school-aged children in the world. So what Liemandt’s describing would be one of the most totalizing global monopolies in world history.

The aspiration to outrageous scale is characteristic of the AI boom, of course. And Alpha School and its associated brands have been, at least since 2023, committed to the accelerationist optimism endemic to the AI bull market. It is quite possible Alpha School will prove to be just another varietal of tulip which succeeds in capturing the desires of the superrich during this period of speculative mania. Media coverage, both positive and negative, is totally out of proportion with the schools enrollments, which, across all grades and more than twenty branch schools, likely do not much exceed the median size of a single U.S. public secondary school.3

But make no mistake, if Joe Liemandt gets his way, all our kids will soon be spending two hours everyday on a platform he owns.

“There’s going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on the planet everything they need to know in two hours at day and they’re going to love it,” he told Jeremy Stern.

Buried in one of the longest and most hagiographic profiles of a tech founders you will ever read is a nearly perfect sentence:

When GenAI hit, I thought, ‘Oh, neural nets, it’s finally here,’ Liemandt said as we rode in his Cybertruck across Lady Bird Lake to MacKenzie Price’s Alpha School, where for the last three years he’s been able to capture an enormous amount of data.4

Every once in awhile it’d be nice if there were a tech bro who envisioned a “potential trillion dollar market” that didn’t depend on extracting huge reservoirs of capta from children and young adults. (And Liemandt is, as Chang puts it, “a total bro” whose “bro style - his volatile mixture of entitlement, hubris, and risk-taking - came to be shared by many founders and CEOs in the 1990s.”) Timeback captures a vast array of aptitudes and behaviors, twelve years before Instagram can legally do so, so that it can, as Liemandt puts it, “generate personalized lesson plans for every kid that are 100% engaging,” “can track their knowledge graph,” and “monitor it all - the anti-patterns, the habits slowing them down, the mistakes they make, the time they’re wasting.”

As one parent, Kristine Barrios, who witnessed the transition from Graham Frey (Alpha School principal from 2017 to 2022) to Liemandt put it to Feathers: “It switched from being about the kids to the metrics and the data and the numbers.”

Education As a Mind Virus

“It’s putting a mind virus into a kid’s head, which is what education is,” Liemandt told Stern, “And it’s being done by a teacher you trust.”

Regardless of how realistic it is to see the Alpha School model scaling to a billion students, Liemandt’s definition of education speaks directly to the current plan for education at the federal level. He echoes the “woke mind virus” diagnosis which Elon Musk foisted on the AI Model Wars and the 2024 election cycle, the origin of which the SpaceX founder alleges is “Berkeley politics.”5

Much as Musk speaks of Grok, Liemandt does not suggest Alpha School is an antidote to “mind virus,” but rather the introduction of a variant, maybe even a super-strain. The goal, as he frames it, is not to release young people from indoctrination, but to replace brainwashing by radical teachers you can’t trust with brainwashing by tech bros you can.

A common distrust of educators and desire to exert dominance over U.S. education is one of the things that most reliably binds the fractious constituencies aligned behind the second Trump administration. The federally-authorized takeover of the "core infrastructure” of U.S. education is supposed to generate revenues which will help float the bankroller of the multitrillion-dollar AI buildout through the uncertain and increasingly illiquid phase of diffusion to consumers. In return, the AI-forward education platforms are expected to provide indispensable systems for surveilling and disciplining two despised populations - educators (especially unionized ones) and young people - who remain durably resistant to fascist propaganda.

Christopher Rufo crowed, after the inauguration, that “the first field of battle is higher education.” And Trump signed several AI and EdTech-friendly executive orders in his first hundred days, including one which created a White House Task Force on AI Education (explicitly K-12 focused), led by Michael Kratsios, a longtime capo of Peter Thiel.6 That task force launched the Presidential AI Challenge, the explicit goal of which was to put AI tools in the hands of “every student in America from kindergarten to twelfth grade.” It is explicitly supported, unsurprisingly, by all the major AI developers, the biggest brands in EdTech, numerous venture capital and private equity firms, and Alpha School.

The messaging from this Task Force, flowing through members like the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, the First Lady, Melania Trump, and the former “AI & Crypto Czar,” David Sacks, is eerily similar to the marketing of Alpha School in the Liemandt era. They predict that AI will act as a personalized tutor for students at every grade level. It will unlock their entrepreneurial potential. It will make teaching credentials irrelevant. And, most importantly, diffusion to classrooms must be rapid, unregulated, and indifferent to risk. As one Alpha School Guide told Vera, “In a traditional school you get in trouble if you’re using AI, and here you get in trouble if you’re not…The starting point of every conversation I have with a kid is ‘Is there an AI that can do this, so that you’re not spending your time on it?’”

Alpha School has been regularly cited by Task Force members as an example they hope other schools, private and public, will follow. Earlier this month on an episode of Sack’s All-In Podcast, his co-host, fellow venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, described Joe Liemandt as “our friend” and Alpha School as “the leading edge” and the “answer that’s going to win” the policy debates about AI in schools. Sacks himself ranted about Zohran Mamdani’s AI ban for New York City public schools, characterizing it as an appeal to his “downwardly mobile progressive” voting base by “trying to sabotage those kids” and “put them through Doomer Academy.”

In an interview with CNN last month, when McMahon was asked if she was “concerned that students are effectively becoming sort of guinea pigs for chatbots,” she answered by describing her visit to the Alpha School flagship campus in Austin and claiming “AI is really working in that particular school.” When State of the Union host Dana Bash asked her if Alpha School was a “proper model,” McMahon said, “It’s incredibly effective for this school, for these students, and I’m not saying that works everywhere, but that’s what we have to look at.”

The Dream of Teacherlessness

The current alliance against educators started taking shape during the tumultuous Summer of 2020, when, recognizing the progressive populism which had been unleashed by the combination of police violence and pandemic mismanagement, reactionaries started planning their counter-attack. Christopher Rufo created the education strategy in an anti-DEI executive order signed by Trump in September 2020.7

Though this was not apparent from the outset, Rufo’s aspiration to remake U.S. education as automated white libertarian apologia would soon appeal to the resentments of at least three constituencies. The first were true believers in the triumphalism of the late 20th century U.S. Establishment members of both major parties were holding tight to the “end of history” and “great moderation” discourses, to Washington Consensus political economy and cultural imperialist foreign policy. To Rufo and his allies in this contingent, the U.S. had solved all its major social problems by the end of the Reagan administration, and had created the template for perfectible hyper-capitalism which could be exported to the rest of the world.

To somebody with this worldview, the diagnoses of systemic racism, intersectionality, white privilege, and implicit bias - which had been gaining popularity throughout the 2010s but were further validated by adoption into corporate, campus, and government policies in the early 2020s - were nothing short of enraging. It was like being dragged out of the “shining city upon a hill” and remigrated into the sturm and drang.

While many politicians, pundits, and their donors shared nostalgia for the Washington Consensus and its associated orthodoxies, the explicit white grievance of Rufo’s education strategy made them queasy, especially following the January 6th insurrection. But something happened in the latter stage of the pandemic and the transition out of it which converted them: the so-called Great Resignation (remember that?). Workforces across occupations and wage classes were refusing “return to office” initiatives, were “quiet quitting,” were organizing against policies and projects they found reprehensible, and, worst of all, it was revealed in 2021, the rate of union membership had increased nationwide for the first time since 2008.

The establishment had been willing to tolerate a politics of social equality, but was not willing to tolerate a politics of equitable economic distribution. Where were the previously docile workers in tech and healthcare getting these crazy notions about their collective power to dictate terms to CEOs and private equity principals? Such collectivism had been mostly dormant since the 1970s. Educators were unionizing more rapidly than any other profession. And they were being gratingly loud about it. To even the most compassionate conservatives it became imperative to cut the resurgent labor movement off at the knees, and education seemed like the best place to start.

The pandemic had created a boom in education technology. Venture investment in EdTech startups quintupled between 2019 and 2022. Brands like Zoom and Lockdown Browser became ubiquitous, while a wide range of bespoke applications had helped educators deliver remote instruction. But a disjunction came when educators and students alike abandoned EdTech products en masse as soon as they were able to return to in-person instruction.

Nobody in the EdTech industry had accounted for this exigency, and it enraged them. They had built the digital infrastructure for remote instruction at blazing speed under crisis conditions, but were left flailing as a series of once-promising platforms skidded towards insolvency. Valuations crashed. The teachers who had once treated them as lifesavers would no longer use their products unless someone forced them to.

The commercial launch of ChatGPT in 2022 made possible an EdTech pivot from remote instruction to AI instruction. The flood of money into AI models had started years earlier, but in the early 2020s, existing EdTech startups integrated the models or merely rebranded themselves as AI applications. Their resentment towards educators was still fresh. They felt betrayed and wished for vengeance in kind. Chatbots and AI agents wouldn’t decide they preferred whiteboards and group study around a table. They could be trained on what to teach and how to teach it, and could by “fine-tuned” to the whims of school boards, state legislatures, and partisan regulators.

These three constituencies united on the “first field of battle” in 2025. Largely thanks to Rufo, they had a pretty refined plan of attack. They could disrupt revenue streams via anti-DEI, anti-immigration, and viewpoint diversity initiatives deployed by both federal regulators and state legislatures. With this leverage, they could pressure schools to adopt AI platforms, accept partisan oversight of curriculums, subsidize conservative civics centers and libertarian thought leaders. The goal was to destabilize U.S. educational infrastructure and carve out a large space for reactionary indoctrination within it. I think we have to acknowledge, though progress towards this goal has been uneven and not without impediment, it has been substantial everywhere and in some places the goal has already been reached.

The question is, once you have made space for reactionary indoctrination, what do you do with it?

Cruelty Is The Curriculum

I first got a sense of their answer while covering the Academic Transformation of West Virginia University under Gordon Gee in the Fall of 2023.8 As I put it then:

A common refrain coming from administrators, boards of trustees, and certainly the hydra-headed mollusk of EdTech and private equity whom they serve: Students are too soft, too kind-hearted, too idealistic, too entitled.

They side with their unionized instructors who demand living wages. They demand divestment from fossil fuels in the name of climate change. They fill the streets calling for ceasefires. They need less history and more real-world lessons.

Make no mistake, the curriculum is cruelty.

Sustaining the neoliberal order, which has reigned from the 1970s forward, relies upon convincing a large proportion of the electorate that cruelty is normal and politically expedient. Cruelty is, in fact, the very height of rationality. Within the epistemology of neoliberalism (an epistemology for which we can thank the Chicago School disproportionately), cruelty is intelligence itself.

Those who best acclimate themselves to it, who develop the most tolerance for witnessing the suffering of others and the greatest capacity to exact that suffering for profit, they are the masters of the universe, or as Twain put it, “the blessings of civilization trust.”

The project which Chicago School Economics, led by George Stigler, had undertaken explicitly during the midcentury “Chicago Fight” with Robert Maynard Hutchins and his idea of the university as a “center for independent thought” was to produce a set of “market signals” (foremost replacing state funding with student debt financing) which would convert the politically radical students of the postwar period into entrepreneurial individuals who would embrace neoliberal rationality, cutthroat competition, anti-union and anti-New Deal political realignments, the rhetoric of meritocracy, and the dismantling of regulatory protections and public services.

What we are seeing today within the coalition Rufo mobilized against education is nostalgia for the success of that project. For those who regard the Washington Consensus of the millennial decades as an “end of history” nirvana, the hope is to revive the disciplining apparatus of Chicago School doctrine. The fatal blindness within this nostalgia is that the success of this brand of responsibility politics in the late 20th century was conditioned by real upward mobility and shared prosperity. The education gospel was believable for generations of Americans because they had evidence of it in their own families and communities, and a living memory of decreasing inequality and rising living standards.

The Chicago School and their acolytes could construct a positive curriculum in the epistemology of neoliberalism based on freedom of choice, self-reliance, and “small government,” drawing on widespread belief that each generation of Americans was predestined to be better off than their parents. Contemporary disciplining frameworks cannot rely on such belief. There is no longer any pretense that the “rising tide will lift all boats,” so the curriculum of cruelty must return to the “fear of sinking” which characterized capitalist apologia during the first Gilded Age.9

I have seen many attempts, some more successful than others, to implement the cruelty as a curriculum for higher education over the past four years, Riley’s reporting on Alpha School demonstrates its tenets being applied as early as kindergarten. Among them:

1.) Hierarchies of leisure and suffering.

The students Riley interviewed describe a hierarchical system founded on extreme rewards and punishments. Students who earn “Rocket Ship” status (primarily, it seems, via high scores on standardized tests) have “more privileges,” “no rules,” “snacks for free,” “a special room,” etc. Students on “Pirate Ship,” on the other hand, were subjected to ever-increasing workloads, isolation, confinement, stigmatization, and, as one student put it, “pretty much a concentration camp.”

2.) Supervision at all times.

Totalitarian surveillance of college students has been an explicit aspiration of EdTech platforms and their investors since 2023. Alpha is extending this surveillance to much younger cohorts. Riley cites one of Alpha’s consultants, Carl Hendrick, describing his hope for the school:

Schooling fulfills the function of accountability. In the future, this will mean cameras on, and an AI monitoring student behavior, their latency, what websites they are looking at, their ability to focus and then producing a report for a human tutor.

Cameras on is apparently already the default. As one student told Riley, “They would get frustrated if we taped over it. We had to keep the camera on.” Another reported, “It would also track your facial expressions…It would tell me that I look really sad, which is fair because I was really sad.”

3.) Entrepreneurship is the only legitimate knowledge.

The Alpha School workshops - which comprise the portion of the day not spent not glued to a computer - are overwhelmingly focused on building businesses. At the so-called “Founders School” - Alpha’s new and unaccredited outlet in New York City - they explicitly promise that students who enroll as Freshman will earn “$1M in profit” by graduation, or their parents will receive a “full tuition refund.”

When Liemandt and Price promote Alpha School, they always talk about how teenagers are building businesses. And students have noticed this emphasis. Liemandt, one student told Riley, “didn’t care about the education. He cared about…creating businesses that he could be part of. It seemed like he was more after the ideas of the students, profit-wise, than the actual learning.”

Hyperscaling The Ideology

As I put it earlier in this long essay (sorry), “Much depends on what they do with the rest of the day.” When Secretary McMahon says “we have to look at” whether Alpha School is the “proper model” for the whole of U.S. public education, is she considering mandating adoption of one or more of the eLearning platforms its incubating (Timeback, 2HRLearning, Studient, etc.), or is she considering its whole curriculum, its associated pedagogical practices, the rocket ships and pirate ships, and the underlying worldviews upon which these are based?

I want to be clear. I don’t trust Alpha School’s founders when they tell us their students are testing in the 99th percentile while only spending two hours daily on their test-centric eLearning platform.

And even if they could prove to me they were telling the truth, I would not trust that their model was scalable to a billion kids, or even a million kids, or even ten thousand kids. As Dan Meyer put it, “They haven’t replaced teachers with AI. They have replaced poor kids with rich kids.”

I expect if the Alpha School model had representative demographics, it would not only fail to produced exceptional test results, it would make many more students very sad, and many more parents very angry.

But I don’t actually think the coalition organized by Rufo over the course of the 2020s cares much about hyperscaling the software. The software is just techwashing for their dream of teacherlessness and totalitarian surveillance of students and schools. That’s what they really want to hyperscale.

From the 10th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, hosted by the Center For Mark Twain Studies, comes a conversation about how scholars nineteenth-century culture and media technology analyze the contemporary AI boom and broader changes to the media ecosystem of the 21st century.

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Lauren Goodlad, Jeff Jarvis, Gregg Camfield, Jess Goldberg

Date Recorded: July 30, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the Chair of Rutger’s interdisciplinary initiative in Critical AI, co-organized by the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Center For Cognitive Science. She is also the founding editor of Critical AI, published by Duke University Press. Her long record of scholarship includes The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic (Oxford UP, 2015) and Victorian Literature & The Victorian State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003).

Jeff Jarvis is Visiting Professor in the School of Communication & Journalism at Stony Brook University and Distinguished Fellow in Montclair State’s Center for Cooperative Media. His long career in journalism includes founding Entertainment Weekly, being a TV critic for People and TV Guide, and blogging at Buzzmachine. His most recent books include The Gutenberg Parenthesis (Bloomsbury, 2023), Magazine (Bloomsbury, 2023), and Hot Type (Bloomsbury, 2026).

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor for American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, host of The American Vandal Podcast, and a member of the AAUP subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions.

Episode Bibliography

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)

Walter Benjamin, “Theses On The Philosophy of History” (1940)

James W. Carey, Communication As Culture: Essays on Media & Society (1992) [2008 Routledge Revised Edition]

Molly Crabapple, “Vampire Slop” Critical AI (April 2026)

Charles Dickens, "Sketches by ‘Boz’” (1833-1836)

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press As An Agent of Change(Cambridge UP, 1980)

Timnit Gebru & Émile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics & The Promise of Utopia Through Artificial Intelligence” First Monday (April 2024)

Jess A. Goldberg, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (U Minnesota, 2024)

Lauren M. E. Goodlad, “We Have Always Been Action Theorists: Toward a Critical Theory of Language for the Era of ‘Large Language Models’” Representations (Summer 2026)

Lauren M. E. Goodlad, “Victorian ‘Artificial Intelligence’: An Ongoing History” Genealogies of Datafication (2023)

Lauren M. E. Goodlad & Katherine Bode, “Data Worlds: An Introduction” Critical AI (October 2023)

Jeff Jarvis, Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth To Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print & Its Lessons For The Age of The Internet (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jeff Jarvis, “AI Communism” BuzzMachine (July 27, 2026)

Jeff Jarvis, Magazine (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Matthew Kirshenbaum, “The Writing Lesson Revisited: AI [and | in | is] the Scriptural Economy” Social Research (Summer 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “When Words Are No Longer For Us” Project Syndicate (September 14, 2026)

Brian Merchant, “The Luddites Take New York” Blood In The Machine (July 10, 2026

Bruce Michelson, “Mark Twain Legacies in the Dawn of Gen AI” Mark Twain Annual (2024)

Thomas Pettitt, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition & Digital Technologies” MIT Media Studies (April 1, 2010)

Matt Seybold, “After OpenAI” The American Vandal Podcast (May 12, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Facebook Files & The Gutenberg Parenthesis” The American Vandal Podcast (April 1, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “Newspapers Worse Than Dead, But Print Is A Rent Strike” The American Vandal Podcast (April 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Gilded Network” The American Vandal Podcast (March 21, 25)

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin, 2008)

Mark Twain, No 44, The Mysterious Stranger: The Authoritative Text (U. California, 2011)

Raymond Williams, Culture & Society, 1780-1950 (1958)

Daniel Yankelovich, The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict Into Cooperation (Touchtone, 2001)

The ruling was a mixed bag. It led to multibillion dollar settlements, yielding four- and five-figure paydays for authors whose pirated works were scraped off the internet and dumped into the corpuses of commercial LLMs. More consequentially, it established a precedent for regarding this practice as a violation of copyright and therefore forced the frontier model developers to start negotiating with publishers.

This precedent has not been universally applauded by professional writers. As Cory Doctorow argues in The Reverse Centaur’s Guide To Life After AI (2026), it essentially created a framework for developers to strike deals with publishers, but created no parallel inducement for workers - writers, editors, illustrators, designers, etc. - to have a seat at the negotiating table. It turned media conglomerates and tech giants into a powerful alliance in the extraction of creative labor and the busting of unions in the creative industries.

It was as part of the discovery process for Bartz v. Anthropic that Project Panama became part of the public record. Project Panama was, as Anthropic itself put it in internal documents, “an effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Anthropic realized this sounded like something The Joker would say. So they instructed their employees: “You should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.” The industrialized guillotining of books during a worldwide resurgence of fascism was quite taboo, they realized, but it was not illegal. Right?

In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge William Alsup decided that it was not. Alsup cited a well-established exception to copyright for cases of “transformation” by the owner. As a podcaster who sometimes creates audio montages I am familiar with this exception and grateful for its reaffirming. But Judge Alsup was also, knowingly or otherwise, sentencing millions of books to the guillotine.

Alsop’s argument, in brief, is as follows. Anthropic obtained the print books legally (either by purchase or remaindering from libraries), transformed them into digital tokens which are transmitted in a different media, and in the process “the print original was destroyed.” The latter stage of the transformation is essential, according to Alsup, because it prevents Anthropic from expanding the quantity of salable copies on the market and thus cutting into the revenues of the copyright holders.

It is not my intention to critique Alsup’s judgment, though some legal scholars and political economists have. Regardless of the quality of Alsup’s reasoning, his judgment has since created a perverse incentive. He signaled to developers that it is illegal (and therefore costly) to freely obtain and transform digital texts, which, so long as they remain freely accessible, are almost infinitely reproducible, while simultaneously signaling that it is legal to obtain, transform, and destroy print texts, which are, in many cases, finite.

By pirating digital books Anthropic (and many of its competitors, at least as alleged in both settled and ongoing litigation) had not changed the fundamental “stock” of digital books. By guillotining books it had. And in the case of books which were rare, out-of-print, undigitized, and/or published by defunct presses, it had put the work a step closer to extinction.

The frontier developers understood Alsup’s decision perfectly well. He had, in a fashion characteristic of neoliberal governance, turned the legal limbo of corpus scaling into an arbitrage calculation, one which could be computationally modeled. In the procurement of text, developers had three options: 1.) scrape and settle, at the estimated cost of $3,500 a book plus legal fees, 2.) negotiate purchase of corpus development rights (potentially with exclusivity clauses) directly from publishers, or 3.) legally obtain and guillotine print books.

Developers set about doing all three, likely choosing the procurement strategy for each publisher or even individual book based on proprietary financial models. For at least some of the frontier model developers, this meant ramping up their book extradition and execution operations, while also accounting for the fact that Anthropic had been proven correct. Planning to “destructively scan all the books in the world” is “not a headline that generates sympathy,” as ISBNdb put it as part of sales pitch to keep AI companies anonymous by subcontracting procurement. ISBNdb quickly discovered how right they were, deleting the pitch from their website and issuing a public apology.

Several news organizations, notably 404 Media, have been tracking the book extraditions and executions to remote and nondescript warehouses, like the VGT3 facility in exurban Nevada, owned by Amazon, which features this rage-inducing logo:

I can only interpret the dinosaur as taking pleasure in the imminent extinction of the book, which mirrors his own.

In some cases, booksellers have been doing their own sleuthing, attaching unobtrusive tracking devices to suspicious orders from anonymous customers, hoping to prevent themselves from unknowingly sending large numbers of irreplaceable books to be guillotined. One such bookseller, who spoke with the Wall Street Journal, tracked shipments to both Amazon and Meta facilities, and from there one surreptitious tracker made it, presumably still attached to a decapitated spine, all the way to a paper recycling facility in Mexico.

While acknowledging the outrage people feel at these operations, an outrage which drives traffic to news sites, the Wall Street Journal reporting has been characteristically unwilling to name the actual harm book-guillotining is doing, instead insinuating that it is a victimless practice that merely offends soft-hearted people’s sentiments. WSJ reporters Mellissa Korn and Jessica Mendoza both describe physical books as possessing a kind of “magic” which stirs nostalgic fondness because of “that feeling you get when you open a book for the first time” or the “wonder” of “who owned this before and what’s their story.” But, Korn clarifies, “Is this going to completely destroy the used book industry? No.” In fact, “rare book sales are booming” precisely because “they’re getting sliced up and fed to AI.”

And to some extent I agree with them. We are a long way from Bradburyian dystopia. There are billions of volumes of books in circulation, with millions of new titles published every year. It is undeniably a technofeudal fantasy of frontier developers like Sam Altman and Elon Musk to enclose the general intelligence of humanity in a statistical model, accessible only by chatbot, and censorable by them personally. But that is, at least for now, still a very far-fetched fantasy.

However, the books that developers are most eager to extradite, execute, and enclose the contents of are the ones at greatest risk of extinction. The WSJ reporters acknowledge that there are an increasing number of titles on sites like Biblio and Abebooks for which there are fewer volumes for sale than there are frontier AI developers. The cost of those titles is sky-rocketing, as anybody who has been regularly purchasing used books online can testify. Much as data centers are pushing up the price of electricity for surrounding communities, corpus scaling is pushing up the price of out-of-print books for researchers.

The contraction of used book stock and the inflation of used book prices is happening simultaneous with the reduction of library collections, the defunding of physical archives, and the enshittification of digital archives, and all of the above are at least partially caused by the same pressures from frontier developers. It is a cruel detail of Anthropic’s Project Panama that it was overseen by an executive who previously worked for Google Books, a once-vital digitization project that is increasingly non-functional.

It is humanities scholarship that will suffer most immediately, as it is more likely to depend upon obscure texts, specific editions, and material books, and it relies on methods of quotation and citation for which LLMs offer no alternative. The cost of the Alsop decision has already been millions of books. It is highly likely that some idiosyncratic text has already been lost to the world for good, now nothing more than tokens on the silicon of post-history.

Our second episode from the “Public Bugets, Public Good” workshop, hosted by Wayne State University and co-sponsored by ⁠Labor@Wayne⁠,⁠ ⁠⁠AAUP⁠⁠, ⁠⁠HELU⁠⁠, and Public Good U features Christopher Newfields ⁠”AI & The Public Good,”⁠ followed by a lengthy Q&A [21:00], then the Bluestone Labor Workshop helps us make the most of FOIA requests [45:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Elizabeth Faue, Jamie McQuaid, Christopher Newfield, Bruce Simon, Brian Deyo, Matt Seybold, Sean O’Brien, Sofya Aptekar, Yasmeen Hishmeh, Justin Flores, Stephen Hastings-King

Date Recorded: April 30, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

Yasmeen Hishmeh is a student at Wayne State University, an intern for Labor@Wayne, a member of the Bluestone Labor Workshop, and the lead author of its “Annual Review of the State of Unions in Michigan, 2024-2025.”

Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation. He was formerly Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities, and How We Can Fix Them (Hopkins UP, 2016), Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, (Harvard UP, 2008), Ivy & Industry: The Business & Making of The American University, 1880-1980 (Duke UP, 2004), and The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (U Chicago, 1996).

Sean O’Brien is an Academic Services Officer at Wayne State University, an advisor in the Employment & Labor Relations program, and the director of the Bluestone Labor Workshop.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor for American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, host of The American Vandal Podcast, and a member of the AAUP subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions.

Episode Bibliography

Daron Acemoglu, Dingwen Kong, & Asuman Ozdaglar, “AI, Human Cognition, & Knowledge Collapse” NBER Working Papers (February 20, 2026)

Coalition Against Campus Debt, Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities (Common Dreams, 2024)

Coalition Against Campus Debt, “Debt Audit Toolkit”

Dominique Baker, Anna Kornbluh, & Matt Seybold, “Theory At The Bargaining Table” The American Vandal (January 7, 2026)

William Bowen & Eugene Tobin, Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles In The Governance of Higher Education (Princeton UP, 2015)

Alexander Hartley, “To Whom Does The World Belong?” Boston Review (December 10, 2024)

Yasmeen Hishmeh et al, “Annual Review of the State of Unions in Michigan, 2024-2025.” Wayne State Labor Workshop (2025)

Walter McMahon, Higher Education, Greater Good: The Private & Social Benefits of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009)

Christopher Newfield, “AI & The Public Good” Remaking II: Long Revolution (May 2, 2026)

Christopher Newfield, “Academics Must Seize The Means of Knowledge Production” Public Books (October 6, 2025)

Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities & How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

Christopher Newfield, Unmaking The University: A Forty-Year Assault On The Middle Class (Harvard UP, 2008)

Christopher Newfield, Matt Seybold, & Whitney Trettien, “Criticism & The Chatbot Bubble” The American Vandal (October 31, 2025)

Britt S. Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up (U. California, 2026)

Matt Seybold, “Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production” The American Vandal (November 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “After OpenAI” The American Vandal (May 12, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Secret History of Canvas LMS, Corporate Raiders, & The Chatbot Bubble” The American Vandal (March 24, 2026)

David Stromberg, Victor Lei, & Yanhai Wu, “The Generative AI Learning Penalty” SSRN (June 3, 2026)

Owen K. Terry, “I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.” Chronicle of Higher Education (May 12, 2023)

Ted Underwood, “AI is The Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It” The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 4, 2025)

Event Copy

The first of two episodes recorded at the “Public Budgets, Public Good” workshop hosted by ⁠Labor@Wayne⁠, and co-sponsored by ⁠AAUP⁠, ⁠HELU⁠, and Public Good U. This episode features presentations on the ⁠Lend & Rule⁠ theory of campus debt, the bourgeois coldness of budget models, the Locus of Authority playbook for university presidents, and a pro-friction approach to EdTech.

Cast (in order of appearance): Sofya Aptekar, Matt Seybold, Brian Deyo, Kelly Grotke, Stephen Hastings-King, Justin Flores, Sean O’Brien, Bruce Simon

Date Recorded: April 30, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

Sofya Aptekar is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies. As part of the Coalition Against Campus Debt she co-authored Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities (Common Dreams, 2024).

Brian Deyo is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University and scholar of Ecotopia.

Kelly Grotke is a founding partner of Pattern Recognition Research Collective and the author of many essays on college finances, including at The American Prospect.

Stephen Hastings-King is a founding partner of Pattern Recognition Research Collective and the author of, among other things, a multi-part essay on “The Yale Model” of endowment investing.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor for American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, host of The American Vandal Podcast, and a member of the AAUP subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions.

Episode Bibliography

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

Coalition Against Campus Debt, Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities (Common Dreams, 2024)

Coalition Against Campus Debt, “Debt Audit Toolkit”

Dominique Baker, Anna Kornbluh, & Matt Seybold, “Theory At The Bargaining Table” The American Vandal (January 7, 2026)

Samantha Cole, “University Professors Disturbed To Find Their Lectures Chopped Up & Turned Into AI Slop” 404 Media (April 27, 2026)

William Bowen & Eugene Tobin, Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles In The Governance of Higher Education (Princeton UP, 2015)

Jelani Favors, Shelter In A Time Of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership & Activism (UNC Press, 2020)

Liza Featherstone, “Data Centers Are The Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For” The New Republic (February 17, 2026)

Michael Jensen & William Meckling, “Theory Of The Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, & Ownership Structure” Journal of Financial Economics (October 1976)

Henrike Kohpeiss, Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) [trans. Grace Nissan]

Brian Merchant, “Understanding The Luddites In The Age of AI” Blood In The Machine (June 19, 2026)

Brian Merchant, “The Luddite Renaissance Is In Full Swing” Blood In The Machine (September 21, 2025)

Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013)

Christopher Newfield, “AI & The Public Good” Remaking II: Long Revolution (May 2, 2026)

Christopher Newfield, Unmaking The University: A Forty-Year Assault On The Middle Class (Harvard UP, 2008)

Britt S. Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up (U. California, 2026)

Matt Seybold, “The Black University Concept & The Second Curriculum” The American Vandal (October 31, 2024)

Dean O. Smith, How University Budgets Work (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

Edward Whalen, Responsibility Center Budgeting: An Approach to Decentralized Management of Institutions of Higher Education (Indiana UP, 1991)

Event Copy

Like Cottom, I’ve been spending a large portion of my time engaging with scholars and journalists who “aim to explain how technology, politics, money and power are reshaping our world” and I’m specifically looking for “common themes, patterns and novel questions about data politics.” If you’ve been reading or listening to American Vandal for more than a few weeks, you already knew that.

I’ll return to the content of these lists at the end of this post, but I don’t think the content matters as much as what Cottom proposes we should do with it. I actually think that if you were to pick any three books at random out of the dozen or so Cottom or I mentioned the desired outcome would not be meaningfully different. And we could pretty easily find another dozen or so books well worthy of being included on this list, some of which have been published very recently.2 It is the invitation to read deeply from these macro-theories of the present, to listen carefully to their creators, and to have critical conversations about them that I think matters most about what Cottom proposes.

At one time in history these might have been relatively standard practices for readers of the New York Times. But these days I see little evidence that deep reading, careful listening, and critical conversation about our present epoch regularly take place. There is no reason it must be that way. But one thing that will happen if you do what Cottom prescribes is that you’ll figure out that it did not become that way by accident.

Cottom’s preliminary list is comprised of books from trade publishers about topics (A.I., fascism, etc.) and people (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, etc.) that are regularly in the news. She has intentionally chosen books that are written by professional journalists or public scholars, but despite being stylistically accessible these books do not affirm any of the conventional accounts one is most likely to encounter from news headlines and soundbytes. I promise that if you read Cottom’s list (or, I suspect, even half of Cottom’s list) you will have an experience of epiphanic defamiliarization. Things you thought you comprehended will seem newly strange and terrifying. And you will have to reckon with feelings of ignorance, complicity, and victimization. Sounds like fun, right? Can’t wait to get started!

What I love most about Cottom’s invitation, however, is that if we take it up, it is not a prequel to action, it is direct action of itself. This is not a case of go do the reading and then you can start making a plan. Reading, listening, and having conversations is the plan, and it could be, I believe, a highly effective one, even before it converts into boycotts or protests or electoral campaigns. And if people take up Cottom’s invitation en masse, it will convert into those things.

It is a type of direct action because one of the things which will become apparent as you read the books Cottom is recommending is that powerful forces are aligned against the practices of reading books, listening to researchers, and discussing why this period in our history is the way it is (and why maybe the next one doesn’t have to be). Deep reading, careful listening, and constructive conversing are harder to do than they used to be. And that is not because of some individual, professional, or generational failure. These things have been made harder to do by structural adjustments to our systems of media, politics, and economy on behalf of consolidated power. These adjustments are being defended and reinforced, but are not inevitable or permanent.

Almost two decades ago, Nicholas Carr wrote a series of popular jeremiads about the effect digital media was having on our ability to read, reflect, and remember. He brought the term neuroplasticity into the common parlance, describing in particular the extent to which information technologies can physiologically alter the brains of their users by cortical remapping and digging new neural pathways. A few years later Maryanne Wolf popularized the neuroscience of the reading brain, revealing the extent to which literacy, unlike language, was not intrinsic to human physiology. Every individual brain has to construct new circuits in the process of learning to read. Every individual brain does not construct these circuits the same way. Unlike speech, it is not a foregone conclusion that mass literacy will endure from generation to generation. And we may be shocked by what cognitive and affective capacities disappear if human communities stop doing the hard work of building reading circuits within their members.

Neither Carr nor Wolf are technological determinists. While they identified the internet revolution as the cause of collective neurological changes, they did not posit that we were helpless to counteract them. They hoped, in fact, that greater awareness of the cognitive impacts of new media would in itself provide some countervalence. Neuroplasticity is, after all, our friend. Our brains can, to some degree, be retilled and recircuited continuously, by triumph of will, habit, environment, and acculturation. Rereading these books today yields further proof of their non-deterministic premise. Some tools which seemed oppressive when they were written, like the search engine, are now in decline. Others, like microvideo, were not then a consideration. And the progress (or regress) of digital influence on collective neurology has not been consistent across cultural circumstances, even where the diffusion of digital technologies has.

But in the 2010s neither Carr nor Wolf were adequately frightened (I say with the advantage of hindsight) by the possibility that the retilling and recircuiting of our collective neurology might be something that was not done by us, but to us. What any selection of three books from Cottom’s list will make clear is that tech entrepreneurs, tech investors, and tech policymakers chose, especially over the course of the 2010s and 2020s, to make products which were more addictive, to monetize that addiction in increasingly invasive ways, to aggressively sideline and suppress new and existing alternatives, and to enclose corpuses of information which people wanted in tech products which were potentially harmful to them. In other words, the urges we might have to exercise our neuroplasticity, though not impossible to fulfill, are actively thwarted by oligarchy, and therefore require either spectacular efforts from individuals or, far more realistically, collective organization to be realized.

In the final pages of Reader, Come Home (2018), Wolf confesses that she “could never have imagined that research about the changes in the reading brain, most of which reflect increasing adaptations to a digital culture, would have implications for a democratic society.” But, she concludes, the effortful mass-production and maintenance of reading circuits in the brains of community members is a necessary precursor to collective conscience and therefore to democratic governance. This mass-production and maintenance is not automatic. It is laborious, co-dependent, and preferably institutionalized. Unwittingly perhaps, Wolf’s research also showed that one of the surest strategies for amassing autocratic power is what I call deliberate deliteracy: the destruction, restriction, and monopolization of the infrastructures that make mass literacy possible. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s vivid phrase - “colonizing the mind” - is not metaphorical. Our cerebral territory is a physical space of conquest.

What Cottom proposes is therefore a praxis, a synthesis of political action and knowledge acquisition. By reading, preferably by reading physical texts, one participates in a data politics even before one understands the substance of that data politics well enough to ratify the account of it I have just offered. This is something individuals can do independently, but that is not how it grows from a proposal to a movement. For neuroplasticity as a praxis to create a countervailing power to what Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff dub sovereignty as a service, it will require a constellation of locally-organized discussion groups, book clubs, group texts, lending circles, mini-seminars, etc. You don’t have to organize them around the books Cottom suggests, but organize them! We can read our way out of this mess.

To that effect, below you’ll find the “long list” of books from Cottom’s list, mine, and a couple others we bandied back and forth over the past few months. I have also included some links to things like excerpts, reviews, and podcasts which might help you and your community build your own reading list.

American Vandal Pod | New Republic | The Guardian

American Vandal Pod | Wired | Project Syndicate

The Guardian | American Vandal Pod

American Vandal Pod | New York Review of Books

MIT Tech Review | LRB | American Vandal

The Guardian | LRB | The New Yorker Pod

American Vandal Pod | e-flux

American Vandal Pod | The Baffler | Public Books

Los Angeles Review of Books

American Vandal Pod | MIT Media Studies

Los Angeles Review of Books

The statement is absurd on its face, of course. Many science fiction stories have been based on once-plausible theories which were thereafter disproven, like the capacity of Jupiter to support humanoid life (as dozens of authors from the 1870s to 1920s postulated) or the preservation of animal DNA in amber, as Michael Crichton hypothesized in his 1990 bestseller, Jurassic Park.

Other science fictions are based on competing visions of potential futures which cannot all simultaneously “come true.” Human extinction, for instance, can only be arrived at once, via one causal chain. Armageddon has a hard limit which eschatology does not.

But Spielberg’s assurance in his statement, and the readiness with which his interlocutors (Sean Fennessey and Bill Simmons of The Ringer) accept it, perfectly captures the state of confidence in the weeks leading up to the SpaceX IPO, which happened to fall on the same day that Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, opened in U.S. theaters.

While they represent opposite sides of a narrow mainstream political imaginary in the United States, Spielberg’s statement echoes what SpaceX founder and CEO, Elon Musk, said a few months earlier, during an event at SpaceX’s Texas Starbase: “The purpose of SpaceX is like, we want to make Star Trek real. Okay? We want to make Starfleet Academy real, so that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact.”

Ali Riza Taşkale has dubbed Musk’s aspiration “materialized science fiction,” a process by which existing narratives - usually extremely popular ones - “function simultaneously as both inspiration and blueprint” for speculative enterprises. The entrepreneurs of materialized science fiction - not only Musk, but Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, and Mark Zuckerberg (all covered in this Taşkale essay) - do not necessarily believe that “all science fiction eventually comes true,” as Spielberg phrases it, but that all science fiction contains the possibility of actualization, a submerged potentiality waiting to be activated by the heroic application of their surplus capital.

As such, to them science fiction is not about imaginative expansion beyond the constraints of present society, as many defenders of the genre have long argued; it is, rather, another means of enforcing limits on what’s possible. The entrepreneurs of materialized science fiction claim a right to choose speculative visions of the future based on which best positions them to retain and calcify their existing power. Whether the visions from which they choose are dystopian is not really pertinent to this process of claiming. Totalitarian dystopias are utopias to the totalitarians.

Jordan S. Carroll has referred to this as “reactionary futurism,” a recent trend of powerful technolords embracing the “metapolitics” of the alt-right, who have long insisted on “reading science fiction as an imperative.” Alt-right appropriators of SciFi narratives treat them as prophecies of real battles to be won or lost, usually along racial lines, rather than as “speculative indeterminacies” onto which readers can mount the “unresolvable tensions” between their lived experience and “multiple forms of futurity.”

Reactionary futurism (closely related to what I have elsewhere called cruel futurism) is central to the fractious alliance between the MAGA polity, the PayPal Mafia which funded (and to some extent runs) the second Trump administration, and a broader technofeudal (or aspirationally technofeudal) class, many of whom are willing to pursue any dystopia in which they retain their oligarchic status, but are equally willing to accept a return to something like the neoliberal order in which they flourished for decades. I think this is the conflict which Spielberg allegorizes in Disclosure Day. There is a culture war unfolding within the ownership class between the fascistic futurist fantasies which ascended from the alt-right and a centrist nostalgia, equally fantastical, premised on reviving the Washington Consensus which many the power elite perceive as having peacefully redistributed wealth upwards for four blissful decades.

i. an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations

Spielberg’s allegory is not deeply veiled. It sits on the surface of the film’s plot in the form of a shadowy corporate villain with an superfluous “X” at the end of its brandname - WARDEX - and its CEO, Noah Scanlon, who dresses in all black and manages to seem bumblingly incompetent even while wielding immense power (played to clammy perfection by Colin Firth). WARDEX, the film makes sure we know, is an abbreviation for “Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction,” which is an actual term of art used by U.S. federal agencies to describe the reduced public disclosure requirements for private contractors when they are working on highly classified projects.

WARDEX is, to an extent, a mash-up of brands scandalously associated with graft, corruption, and privatized violence. There are overt allusions to private military contractors like Palantir and Blackwater, suggestions of de facto utilities like Amazon and Oracle, and hints of Klepto-Keynesian financial vehicles like BlackRock. WARDEX amalgamates all the bad shit that has happened in the United States as a result of “privatization” schemes since 9/11. The film transports viewers through WARDEX’s web of surveillance centers, bunkers, and black sites, from which we view WARDEX employees practicing “enhanced interrogation,” testing weaponry, and spying on civilians.

In other words, Spielberg has done more than enough to shield Universal Pictures from libel, but it’s still obvious what WARDEX is most directly an avatar for. Not just because of how Firth plays Scanlon, but because Scanlon shares Musk’s understanding of futurism as a blueprint for consolidating power. He can only see the extraterrestrial encounter through the lens of extracting the aliens’ intellectual property, expanding WARDEX’s imperialist agenda, and guarding against any disruption which might jeopardize their entrenched power. While the film is premised on Scanlon’s lack of empathy, it is this lack which allows him to temporarily inhabit conflicting ideologies of Catholicism, technolibertarianism, isolationist apocalypticism, and American Exceptionalism. Scanlon’s is the kind of mind which can tolerate the cognitive dissonance of colonizing Mars while demonizing immigration, of calling aid to children wasteful while seeking government subsidies for his social media platform, and of building a company on carbon credits while his private jets burn 10,000 gallons of fuel in a month.

SpaceX and, indeed, all of Musk’s companies, are built to maximize government capture, para-governmental authority, and, short of that, bureaucratic symbiosis, as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff detail in Muskism (2026). Slobodian and Tarnoff coin the phrase “Sovereignty As A Service” to describe the extent to which fundamental functions like policing, bombing, and intelligence-gathering, which were once thought to be monopolized by the sovereign, are now co-authorized with (if not entirely offloaded to) private corporations like SpaceX. And leaders of these companies have the power to neutralize sovereign functions if and when they wish. Disclosure Day exaggerates only slightly from SpaceX’s actual status as a ward turned warden of the state when it attributes to WARDEX full immunity from disclosure and oversight. WARDEX engineers, not unlike DOGE programmers, are granted higher security clearances than elected heads of state, military commanders, and bureau chiefs, and WARDEX executives make extrajudicial decisions on the state’s behalf continuously and with impunity.

The consequences of this immunity - and Sovereignty As A Service generally - for civil society, for social psychology, for the victims of extrajudicial violence, and even for those who commit such violence, is what Disclosure Day is interested in more than it is interested in aliens (although it is definitely also quite interested in aliens). The film explores (some might say exhaustingly) a concordance between the power being sought by WARDEX and that attributed to monotheistic deities. The effort necessitated to both carry on the hubristic pursuit of supra-sovereignity and keep the pursuit secret from the public pulls the whole world into polycrisis. The effort is so debilitating that even Scanlon, the person who drives the pursuit and stands to benefit most directly from it, seems relieved when “full disclosure to the whole world, all at once” is achieved in the film’s final scene. His storm troopers…storm out of the KCXE studios after he slumps into a chair, not so much defeated as burnt-out by the decades of grinding for ever more destabilizing power.

The version of empathy which Spielberg endorses is perhaps most unsettling at this moment, when we are asked, not for the first time, to feel sorry for Scanlon, despite the fact that the alternative to his defeat is, the film leaves little doubt, violence at unprecedented scale.

ii. internal fears about the unreality of daily life

While Spielberg’s Disclosure Day hit theaters on the same day SpaceX hit the stock market, disclosure day for Elon Musk had actually taken place three weeks earlier, when SpaceX had to file its S-1 registration statement with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). For the first time since the company was founded 24 years earlier, there was a public accounting of its operations.

The SpaceX prospectus is, at least as much as Disclosure Day, a work of science fiction. It acknowledge as much. “For decades, a reality where humanity travels between the planets and the stars has felt tantalizingly close but still locked in the pages and screens of science fiction,” the Prospectus promises, “We are capable of better understanding the universe, exploring the universe, and ultimately making life multiplanetary across the universe.”

Its most-discussed section - “Other Matters” - promises a “grant of 1 billion performance-based restricted shares of Class B common stock to Mr. Musk,” but only if SpaceX’s market capitalization reaches $7.5 Trillion and they establish “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” It is, as Taşkale puts it, a series of “science-fiction scenarios deliberately encoded into compensation milestones.” The prospectus takes for granted that SpaceX will be able to engineer its way past problems like the inhospitability of Mars, the existence of Earth’s gravity, and Elon Musk’s own mortality.

Right up to the IPO, even people who should’ve know better, people who did know better, kept their gaze, at least publicly, stubbornly fixed on these speculative fictions. And by sheer willpower many continue to avert their eyes from the cybertruck behind the curtain. But Musk is now chasing supra-sovereignity with an imperative to publicity that even he is having trouble keeping up with. SpaceX valuations and the ventures those valuations make possible are presently sustained mainly by making what even the prospectus characterizes as the achievements of a distant future seem increasingly imminent. A speculative bubble is what exists in the space between futurist euphoria and presentist sobriety. What happens when the distance between the two collapses?

Disclosure Day had a huge opening weekend, the biggest of Spielberg’s career, buoyed no doubt by an inventive and expensive marketing campaign. SpaceX’s opening days went equally well, for much the same reason. The company increased its liquidity by $86 Billion. For the founders, employees, and pre-IPO investors who held more than 95% of the stock on June 12, it was no doubt tempting to sell as the price rallied to $60 above the IPO offer by the third day of trading. Some obviously did. Some are barred from selling until later this year, at which point they likely will.

But as with Spielberg’s film, which trailed off fast and may not make back the cost of its production and distribution from box office receipts, SpaceX’s share price has sloped downward since mid-June, now sitting well below the IPO offer, let alone the post-IPO peak. One reason for this slump, utterly predictable, is that investors have the opportunity to buy SpaceX’s downside for the first time. Even if all science fiction did come true, it would do so only on the longest time horizon, and you can buy options on SpaceX today. Via the IPO, Musk created a mechanism for negative sentiment towards him and his company to find its way onto what was, until then, a quaintly utopian balance sheet. Many people are willing to short Star Trek it turns out.

The curse of public corporations is that, no matter how promising and/or stable their actual business is, past a certain point shareholders, whether activist investors, employees, board members, or memestock fanboys, get panicked. And public efforts to stem that panic are just as likely to create more of it. “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know,” is the message Spielberg’s alien race chooses to introduce itself to 21st-century humanity. They clearly never observed a day trader on the wrong end of a margin call, or a tech whistleblower stumbling upon their employer’s darkest secrets.

iii. gratuitous reminiscences

Disclosure Day has two didactic theses. The first is that “the right to know outweighs the consequences of knowing.” However bad the effects of unsettling, but accurate disclosures are on public confidence, they are preferable to the long-term effects of non-disclosure. This has long been the conventional wisdom of those who study financial and economic crises as well. Economic booms and bull markets can be prolonged by disinformation, but only temporarily. And the longer people are allowed to continue behaving on the basis of falsified market signals, the worse will be their anger and distrust when the revelation comes. The resulting parsimony and prolonged aversion to risk is what turns recessions into depressions.

The film’s second thesis is that empathy is the measure of individual intelligence and civilizational advance. Spielberg has been forwarding this thesis, especially in his alien movies, since the 1970s. In Disclosure Day extraterrestrial empathy manifests in the aliens’ non-consensual human ambassador (another Spielberg trope) as a kind of superpower for persuasion. Margaret Fairchild becomes not only a skeleton key for every language barrier, but becomes “unstoppable,” as one WARDEX henchman puts it, because she intuits exactly what people need to hear in order to do what she wants them to do.

The empathy superpower is, the film hypothesizes, the antidote to what ails us: paranoia, isolation, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, fear-mongering, etc. Which, fine, I guess. Feel your neighbors’ feels, or whatever. Where this turns retrogressive is in how Spielberg imagines the empathy superpower would achieve full disclosure at scale.

The circular hero’s journey which Fairchild goes on in Disclosure Day is back to her workplace, the local Kansas City television station, KCXE, where, earlier in the film, she expresses her modest aspiration to rise from on-camera meteorologist to weekend anchor. When she returns during the finale, she is no longer a subordinate, but the station has been chosen as her instrument to access mass media and therefore deploy her empathy superpower to the multitudes, simultaneously waiving WARDEX’s disclosure immunity and revealing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Criticisms of this scene have focused on the procedural verisimilitudes of how a regional broadcast affiliate preempts a national network. But such quibbles are easily explained away by the empathy superpower. A substantive critique must address the scene at the level of the allegorical. If empathy is the antidote to totalitarian creep, what is the means by which such an antidote gets administered? Spielberg’s answer could not be more solipsistic.

Disclosure Day climaxes with the fantasy of humanity united by experience of a longform motion picture narrative. The inverse of WARDEX’s mass surveillance and supervision is mass projection and persuasion, some might say counterpropaganda, mediated by the same tech monopolies upon which WARDEX’s totalitarian creep depends. The leader of the insurgency which commandeers this communications infrastructure is Hugo Wakefield (played by Colman Domingo), who behaves like a film director or showrunner. He oversees the construction of sets and the acquisition of props. He masterfully massages the egos of anxious performers. He dictates the schedules and the logistics. And in the final scene, he watches from offset as all that he has orchestrated comes together in front the KCXE cameras.

Spielberg asserts that somehow the escape from being monitored lies in collectively receiving what someone like himself narrativizes. The imperative Fairchild expresses in the film’s final line is to just “Listen.” In mass culture - monoculture even - we will find freedom! If we all just go back to blockbuster movies and primetime TV, we’ll be able to practice compassion again.

iv. successful manipulation and containment

But Disclosure Day is not just nostalgia for the Reaganalog. The extension of extraterrestrial empathy is due, the film insists, foremost to the totalitarian. Nobody punches Scanlon or handcuffs him. To the contrary, Wakefield stands with him, caresses his shoulder, and looks tenderly into Scanlon’s eyes as the disclosure day programming begins; as though to signal that though NGO immunity no longer empowers him, he still won’t have to answer for anything he’s done. Let bygones be bygones, possessor of nuns, torturer of aliens.

Disclosure Day thus dramatizes the fantasy of retro-neoliberalism which has stultified contemporary American liberalism, most egregiously the establishment figures in the Democratic Party, many of them one-time architects of the Washington Consensus. If we all abandoned the platform politics of microtargeting and rage-faming, couldn’t we go back to how it was in the ‘90s? Can’t we take a mulligan? Can’t we all just get along?

Does Spielberg think that this science fiction will eventually come true?

In Fredric Jameson’s famous reading of Spielberg’s Jaws he argues that the film “touches on present-day contradictions and anxieties only to use them for its new task of ideological resolution.” I think the same is true of Disclosure Day. It is reactionary futurism for Gavin Newsom voters. It desires the revival of a presumption of decency which reinforces class solidarity to neutralize rising class animus.

The empathy aliens are not coming to save us. The weapons of mass disclosure do not exist. The saboteurs of civil society will not mend their ways if we bail them out.

On a hot Summer night in Brooklyn, Matt Seybold is joined by McKenzie Wark to launch ⁠the Intellectuals issue⁠ of ⁠e-flux Journal⁠. They discuss the legacy of the public intellectual (and other mythic species), the belated reception of the vectoralist hypothesis, education and other other spaces, the practice and pleasures of being vulgar. Followed by an energetic Q&A.

Cast (in order of appearance): Brian Kuan Wood, Matt Seybold, McKenzie Wark

Date Recorded: June 11, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

Featured Speakers

McKenzie Wark is Professor of Culture & Media in the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. She is the author of, among other things, Capital Is Dead (2019), General Intellects (2017), and Molecular Red (2016), all from Verso Books. She edited the Intellectuals issue of e-flux Journal and contributed “A Toast To Femmunism.”

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast. He is the author of “The Useful Narcissist” for the Intellectuals issue of e-flux Journal.

Episode Bibliography

A. Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization (Intersystems, 1980)

Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism & The New Class Struggle (Verso, 2025)

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1972)

Verónica Gago, “A Fragment, A Message In A Bottle, A Toolbox” e-flux Journal (May 2026)

Karl Marx, “A Contribution The The Critique On Political Economy” (1859)

Annie McClanahan, Beneath The Wage: Tips, Tasks, & Gigs in The Age of Service Work (Zone Books, 2026)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (1972) [1988 Indiana UP Edition]

Matt Seybold, “The Useful Narcissist” e-flux Journal (May 2026)

Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Text” The American Vandal (August 25, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “Newspapers Worse Than Dead (But Print Is A Rent Strike)” The American Vandal (April 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold & John Warner, “The Technology That’s Taking Your Freedom” AAUP Center For The Defense of Academic Freedom (February 3, 2026)

David Sirota, “The Attacks On Graham Platner Are Politically Motivated” Jacobin (June 8, 2026)

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024)

John Walsh, “Graham Platner & The Rise of White Male Identity Politics” The Nation (June 5, 2026)

McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)

McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: 21 Thinkers For The 21st Century (Verso, 2017)

McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory For The Anthropocene (Verso, 2016)

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004)

McKenzie Wark, “Editorial: Intellectuals” e-flux Journal (May 2026)

McKenzie Wark, “A Toast To Femmunism” e-flux Journal (May 2026)

The final episode recorded at the ⁠⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠⁠, hosted by the ⁠⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠⁠ focuses on media, mediation, and machine-generated texts. It opens with Nicholas Baer and Pardis Dabashi’s “Unattainable Texts,” followed by David Bates’s “Reading and Writing” [20:00], Nina Beguš’s “Novel Audiences in ‘Finnegan’s Wake’” [37:30], Hannes Bajohr’s “Surface Reading LLMs” [57:00], Matt Seybold’s “The Technofeudal Reader” [81:00], and a brief Q&A [100:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Nicholas Baer, David Bates, Nina Beguš, Hannes Bajohr, Matt Seybold, Jacob Gaboury, Deniz Göktürk, Jonathan Kramnick

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

Nicholas Baer is Associate Professor in the Department of German and the Department of Film & Media at UC-Berkeley, as well as the author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema & The Crisis of Historicism (U. California, 2024)

Hannes Bajohr is Associate Professor in the Department of German at UC-Berkeley and the editor of Thinking With AI: Machine Learning The Humanities (Open Humanities, 2025).

David Bates is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, as well as the author of An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence (U. Chicago, 2024)

Nina Beguš is Assistant Professional Researcher at the Center For Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society, with further affiliation in the Berkeley Institute for Date Science. She is the author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI (U. Michigan, 2025)

Yael Segalovitz is the Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley and the author of How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024). She is also the co-host, with Emma Lieber, of the Psychoanaliterature podcast.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in The Cultures of Theory (Princeton UP, 2005)

Isaac Asimov, “The Fun We Had” (1951)

Nicholas Baer, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema & The Crisis of Historicism (U. California, 2024)

Hannes Bajohr, “Artificial & Post-Artificial Texts: On Machine Learning & The Reading Expectations Towards Literary & Non-Literary Writings” Media Culture & Cultural Techniques (2023)

Hannes Bajohr, (Berlin, Miami) (MIT Press, 2027)

Nina Beguš, First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing (U. Michigan, 2026)

Nina Beguš, Metahaven, & Gasper Begus, “Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans” Antikythera (February 2026)

Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text” Screen (Autumn 1975)

Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction”Representations (Fall 2009)

David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema” in Cinematic Text: Methods & Approaches (AMS Press, 1989)

David Bordwell & Noël Carroll (eds.) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (U Wisconsin, 1996)

Noam Chomsky, “The Case Against B. F. Skinner” New York Review of Books (December 30, 1971)

Noam Chomsky, [Review of Verbal Behavior] Language (Spring 1959)

Pardis Dabashi, “Introduction to ‘Cultures of Argument’: The Loose Garments of Argument” PMLA (October 2020)

Jodi Dean, Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism & The New Class Struggle (Verso, 2025)

Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” Tel Quel (1968)

Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance” PMLA (October, 1997)

Jeff Dolven, Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (U. Chicago, 2017)

Todd Feather, “Parents Fell In Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out.” Wired (October 27, 2025)

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” Journal of Curricular Theorizing (2000)

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading” symploke (2024)

John Guillory, On Close Reading (U. Chicago, 2025)

Lucas Hilderbrand, “The Big Picture: On The Expansiveness of Cinema & Media Studies” Cinema Journal (Winter 2018)

Jared Cooney Hovrath, “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed” After Babel (November 12, 2024)

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From A Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Immanuel Kant, “On The Injustice of Counterfeiting Books” (1785)

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford UP, 1999)

Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago, 2023)

Jonathan Kramnick, “Response To Review Forum on Criticism & Truth”Modern Language Quarterly (December 2025)

Marjories Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA (March, 2007)

Pierre Levy, “Artificial Reading” SubStance (1997)

Deirdre McCloskey, “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured, & Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The 21st Century”Erasmus Journal for Philosophy & Economics (Autumn 2014)

D. A. Miller, “Hitchcock’s Understyle: A Too-Close View of Rope” Representations (Winter 2013)

Toril Moi, “Crisis In The Profession, or The Failure to Imagine The New” in American Literary History (Winter 2024)

Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness & The Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006)

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema” Screen (Autumn 1975)

Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies & Methods: Volume 1 (U California, 1976)

Fabian Offert & Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, “The Method of Critical AI Studies, A Propaedeutic” (December 10, 2024)

Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of The Word (1982)

Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)

Bo Ruberg & Elizabeth Ellcessor, “Yes, It Is Media: Introduction To The Special Issue” Journal of Cinema & Media Studies (Fall 2025)

Pooja Salhotra, “AI-Driven Education: Founded In Texas & Coming To A School Near You” New York Times (July 27, 2025)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading & Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings of Fiction (Duke UP, 1997)

Yael Segalovitz, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024)

Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Text” The American Vandal (August 25, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is Having A Moment” The American Vandal (July 7, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading For The 21st Century” The American Vandal (February 10, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is A Conversation” The American Vandal (February 18, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)

Matt Seybold, “The Medium Is Not The Method” Modern Language Quarterly (March 2025)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Antonio Somaini, “Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence & Visual Culture” Grey Room (Fall 2023)

Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time: Vol. 1-3 (Stanford UP, 1998-2010)

Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Stanford UP, 2009)

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024)

Thorstein Veblen, “The Engineers & The Price System” The Dial (1921)

Johanna Winant, “The Claims of Close Reading” Boston Review (November 26, 2025)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in A Digital World (HarperCollins, 2019)

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The second episode derived from the ⁠⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠⁠, hosted by the ⁠⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠⁠ assesses what it means that “close reading is having a moment” through papers titled “What is Close Reading?” [8:00], “Finding The Right Place For Close Reading” [30:00], “The Affected Fallacy” [56:00], “On Generalizing” [77:30], and “Close Reading as Field-Making” [100:00]

Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Matt Seybold, Jonathan Kramnick, Toril Moi, Joshua Gang, Dora Zhang, Farah Bakaari

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Farah Bakaari is Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley and the founding editor of Mid Theory Collective.

Joshua Gang is Associate Professor of English at Berkeley and the author of Behaviorism, Consciousness, and The Literary Mind (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021).

Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and the author of Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U. Chicago, 2023).

Toril Moi is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University and the author of an important review essay related to close reading, “Crisis In The Profession, or The Failure to Imagine The New” in American Literary History (Winter 2024).

Yael Segalovitz is the Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley and the author of How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024). She is also the co-host, with Emma Lieber, of the Psychoanaliterature podcast.

Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English at Berkeley and the author of Strange Likeness: Description in The Modernist Novel (U. Chicago, 2020).

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Bhen Alan, “Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?” Syracuse University Art Museum (2024)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

Farah Bakaari, “First as Tragedy, Second as Farce” Africa is a Country (September 2022)

Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” Representations (Fall 2009)

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)

NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory (Viking, 2022)

Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality” in The Novel: History, Geography, & Culture (Princeton UP, 2006)

Catherine Gallagher & Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (U. Chicago, 2000)

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” Journal of Curricular Theorizing (2000)

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading” symploke (2024)

Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972) [1980 Cornell UP English Edition]

John Guillory, On Close Reading (U. Chicago, 2025)

O. B. Hardison, “Commentary” in Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation & Commentary for Students of Literature (Prentice-Hall, 1968) [Trans. Leon Golden]

Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP, 2012)

Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social Text (Autumn 1986)

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976)

Maxine Hong Kingston, “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers” in Asian & Western Writers in Dialogue (Palgrave, 1982)

Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago, 2023)

Jonathan Kramnick, “Response To Review Forum on Criticism & Truth” Modern Language Quarterly (December 2025)

Liam Kruger, “Literary Value & The Prizewinning African Novel” Novel (May 2025)

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface (HarperCollins, 2023)

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton UP, 2017)

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)

György Lukács, Theory of The Novel (1916) [MIT Press Edition]

György Lukács, “The Novel As Bourgeois Epic” (1934)

György Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) [1983 University of Nebraska Edition]

David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (U Chicago, 2016)

Toril Moi, “Crisis In The Profession, or The Failure to Imagine The New” in American Literary History (Winter 2024)

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Wizard of the Crow (Harvill Secker, 2006)

Frank O’Hara, “Lana Turner has collapsed!” (1964)

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

I. A. Richards & C. K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (1923)

Paul Saint-Amour, “The Medial Humanities: Toward A Manifesto For Meso-Analysis” Modernism/modernity (February 1, 2019)

Yael Segalovitz, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading For The 21st Century” The American Vandal (February 10, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is A Conversation” The American Vandal (February 18, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)

Matt Seybold, “The Medium Is Not The Method” Modern Language Quarterly (March 2025)

C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (1944)

William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies In The Meaning of Poetry (1954)

William K. Wimsatt & Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” Sewanee Review (Fall 1946)

William K. Wimsatt & Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy” Sewanee Review (Winter 1949)

Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1991)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Zadie Smith, “Fascinated To Presume: In Defense of Fiction” New York Review of Books (October 24, 2019)

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1938) [PennSound]

Johanna Winant, “The Claims of Close Reading” Boston Review (November 26, 2025)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read A Book?” Yale Review (Autumn 1926)

Dora Zhang, “The Mark of The Detail: Universalism, Type, Difference” Modern Language Quarterly (June 2023)

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An episode recorded as part of the ⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠, hosted by the ⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠ begins with a discussion of John Donne’s insomnia and Wilfred Bion’s undigested nightmares, followed by a vigorous discussion of attention, sleep, and immersion as they relate to literature and criticism [39:00], after which the symposium’s organizer (and host of the ⁠Psychoanaliterature⁠ podcast) flips the studio for some analysis of The American Vandal’s creator [90:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, David Marno, Yael Segalovitz, Jonathan Kramnick, Toril Moi, Emma Lieber, Nicholas Baer, Dora Zhang, Anne-Lise François, Farah Bakaari, Sina Dell’Anno

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby, ⁠L. D. Miller

Featured Guests

David Marno is Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley and the author of Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (U Chicago, 2016).

Yael Segalovitz is the Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley and the author of How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024). She is also the co-host, with Emma Lieber, of the Psychoanaliterature podcast.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Dave Bangert, “A Playlist & Portrait of Don Seybold, A Jazz Champion For Lafayette” Based In Lafayette (December 7, 2025)

Dave Bangert, “Tony Zamora, Longtime Purdue BCC Director & Lafayette Jazz Legend, Remembered As More Than ‘That Damn Good Musician’” Journal & Courier (July 3, 2020)

Wilfred Bion, Learning From Experience (1962)

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism & The Ends of Sleep (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)

John Donne, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” (1624)

Ofra Eshel, “Whose Sleep Is It, Anyway? Or ‘Night Moves’” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Summer 2008)

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

John Guillory, On Close Reading (U Chicago, 2025)

Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago, 2023)

David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (U Chicago, 2016)

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals (1992)

Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection” Yale Review (March 1964)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day [Morgenrothe] (1881)

Yael Segalovitz, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024)

Yael Segalovitz, “Probably Not Book Learning At All’: The Gender of Attentive Reading in Woolf & Lispector” Poetics Today (March 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is A Conversation” The American Vandal (February 18, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is Not A Luxury” The American Vandal (March 18, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Donald Winnicott, “The Capacity To Be Alone” (1958)

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A discussion of the historical trajectory informing the current polycrisis reverberating from the Strait of Hormuz with two historians of Iranian Oil, authors of Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran (Edinburgh UP, 2025) and Machineries of Oil (MIT Press, 2018).

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Katayoun Shafiee, Mattin Biglari

Date Recorded: June 1, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Mattin Biglari is Lecturer in Asian & Middle Eastern Environmental History at University of Bristol and the author of Nationalizing Oil & Knowledge in Iran (Edinburgh UP, 2025).

Katayoun Shafiee is Associate Professor of History at University of Warwick and the author of Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (MIT Press, 2018).

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Mattin Biglari, Nationalizing Oil & Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonization & Colonial Modernity, 1933-1951 (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, & The Making of The World Market (Verso, 2025)

Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities & Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Verso, 2025)

Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War & Trade: Shipping & Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020)

Laleh Khalili, Séamus Malekafzali, & Dylan Saba, “Strait Outta Hormuz” Turbulence Podcast (March 31, 2026)

Laleh Khalili & Matt Seybold, “The Suez Canal, #Stuckboat, & The Sinew of War & Trade” The American Vandal Podcast (April 8, 2021)

Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (MIT Press, 2018)

Two events organized by the Center For Mark Twain Studies focus on the complex legacy of Mark Twain and the omissions and misrepresentations of his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, and extended family.

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Ann Ryan, Kerry Driscoll, Barbara Snedecor, Chuck Lindsay

Dates Recorded: October 16, 2025 and November 30, 2023

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Kerry Driscoll is Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers & Project and the author of Mark Twain Among The Indians & Other Indigenous Peoples (U. California, 2018).

Ann Ryan is Professor of American Literature at Le Moyne College and author of The Ghosts of Mark Twain (U. Missouri, 2025)

Barbara Snedecor is Emeritus Director of the Center For Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and the editor of Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (U. Missouri, 2023).

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol & Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (U. Wisconsin, 1997)

Joshua Chadwick, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (U Mississippi, 1998)

Ron Chernow, Mark Twain (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)

Kerry Driscoll, “A Delicate Balance: Work & Play in Mark Twain’s Creative Process” Center For Mark Twain Studies (October 15, 2025)

Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain Among The Indians & Other Indigenous Peoples (U. California, 2018)

Percival Everett, James (Doubleday, 2024)

Susan K. Harris, The Courtship of Olivia Langdon & Mark Twain (Cambridge UP, 1996)

Harper’s Magazine, “A Mark Twain Revival” Harper’s Magazine Substack (May 23, 2025)

Ann Ryan, The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Manhood, Race, & The Gothic Imagination (U. Missouri, 2025)

Ann Ryan & Josephy B. McCullough, Cosmopolitan Twain (U. Missouri, 2011)

Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine” Mark Twain Annual (2023)

Matt Seybold, “Mark Twain’s Playground” North American Review (Spring 2024)

Matt Seybold, “The Gospel of Revolt: Mark Twain in Elmira” C19 Podcast (December 17, 2019)

Matt Seybold, “Twainspotting” Harper’s (August, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Life, In Purgatory” Center For Mark Twain Studies (April 13, 2020)

Laura Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in The Company of Women (U. Pennsylvania, 1997)

Barbara E. Snedecor, Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (U. Missouri, 2023)

John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Twain Dreams” Harper’s Magazine (June 2025)

Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson: The Authoritative Edition (U. California, 2024) [Review by Matt Seybold for ALH Review]

Mark Twain, “The The Person Sitting In Darkness” North American Review (February 1901)

Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom” Prospects (October 2000)

Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (U. California, 1969 )

Mark Twain, “Which Was It?” in Which Was The Dream? & Other Symbolic Writings of The Later Years (U. California, 1966)

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“Special Mark Twain Birthday Conversation: Barbara Snedecor Shines Light on Olivia Langdon in New Book”

A live crossover podcasting event with the This Guy Sucked podcast, hosted at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The question is not only whether and how much Mark Twain might have sucked, but also the potential for Twain’s complex legacy to be altered by politics, propaganda, education, and scholarship.

Date Recorded: May 6, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

Featured Guests

Claire Aubin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University with appointments in the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, & Transnational Migration, and the Whitney Humanities Center. She is the executive producer and host of This Guy Sucked.

Erin Bartram is the Associate Director of Education at the Mark Twain House & Museum and the founding editor of Contingent Magazine.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol & Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (U. Wisconsin, 1997)

Joshua Chadwick, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (U Mississippi, 1998)

Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain Among The Indians & Other Indigenous Peoples (U. California, 2018)

Susan K. Harris, The Courtship of Olivia Langdon & Mark Twain (Cambridge UP, 1996)

Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans & The Phillippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford UP, 2011)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain & African-American Voices (Oxford UP, 1994)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out For The Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain & American Culture (Oxford UP, 1998)

Fred Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain (PenguinRandomHouse, 2005)

Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-Century American Literature & The Long Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Linda A. Morris, Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing & Transgression (U. Missouri, 2011)

Ann Ryan, The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Manhood, Race, & The Gothic Imagination (U. Missouri, 2025)

Ann Ryan & Josephy B. McCullough, Cosmopolitan Twain (U. Missouri, 2011)

Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine” Mark Twain Annual (2023)

Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine: Citizen Holbrook & The Geopolitics of Colloquial Humor” Center For Mark Twain Studies (July 28, 2022)

Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine” Center For Mark Twain Studies (May 10, 2022)

Matt Seybold, “Darnella Frazier’s Smartphone & Mark Twain’s Notepad: The Vigilante Origins of American Police” Center For Mark Twain Studies (August 6, 2022)

Matt Seybold, “Mark Twain’s Playground” North American Review (Spring 2024)

Matt Seybold, “The Gospel of Revolt: Mark Twain in Elmira” C19 Podcast (December 17, 2019)

Laura Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in The Company of Women (U. Pennsylvania, 1997)

Barbara E. Snedecor, Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (U. Missouri, 2023)

Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam & Eve (1906)

Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)

Mark Twain, “Does The Race of Man Love of Lord?” The Spectator (April 19, 1902)

Mark Twain, “What Have The Police Been Doing?” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (January 18, 1866)

Mark Twain, Letters From Hawaii (Appleton-Century, 1966)

Marcia A. Zug, You’ll Do: A History of Marrying For Reasons Other Than Love (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)

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As part of the Spring Symposium at the Wake Forest Humanities Institute, Matt Seybold discusses the present and future of AI speculation, including an extended discussion with Wake Forest faculty, many who were part of WFHI’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Language, Theory, & Artificial Intelligence.

Cast (in order of appearance): Jennifer Greiman, Matt Seybold, Derek Lee, Michaela Appeltova, Nisrine Rahal, Barry Trachtenberg, Jeff Bills-Solomon, Dean Franco, Amanda Gengler

Date Recorded: April 29, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Jennifer Greiman is Professor of English at Wake Forest University and Director of The Humanities Institute there.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con (HarperCollins, 2025)

Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. “On The Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT 2021

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers AI is Running on Fumes” The New York Times (April 29, 2025)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (U California Press, 1984)

Virginia Dignum, The AI Paradox: How To Make Sense of a Complex Future (Princeton UP, 2026)

Ronan Farrow & Andrew Marantz, “Moment of Truth” The New Yorker (April 13, 2026)

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams & Nigthmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI (Penguin Random House, 2026)

Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism & The University (U Chicago Press, 2022)

E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Tyler Johnston, “The reporters at this new site are AI bots. OpenAI’s Super PAC appears to be funding it.” Model Republic (April 24, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Grok is an Epistemic Weapon” Tech Policy Press (January 13, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Texpocalypse Now: AI and The New Political Economy of Writing” PennAI (April 17, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum & Rita Raley, “AI & The University as a Service” PMLA (May 2024)

Christopher Newfield, Unmaking The Public University (Harvard UP, 2011)

Britt S. Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up (U. California, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People & The Planet (Verso, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, “The Next Crisis is Coming” Politics Joe (April 1, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, “Is the next financial crisis only a matter of time?” De Balie (February 16, 2026)

Daniel Roher & Charlie Tyrell, The AI Doc, or How I Became An Apocaloptimist (2026)

Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education” The American Vandal (June 10, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Text” The American Vandal (August 25, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production” The American Vandal (November 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold & Eric Hayot, “The ‘Crisis In The Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.” Chronicle Of Higher Education (December 29, 2025)

Matt Seybold & John Warner, “The Technology That’s Taking Your Freedom” Academic Freedom On The Line (February 3, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Secret History of Canvas LMS, Corporate Raiders, & The Chatbot Bubble” The American Vandal (March 24, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “HBCUs & The Philanthrocapitalist Swindle” The American Vandal (February 4, 2025)

Jacob Silverman, “The Death of an AI Whistleblower” The Nation (May 2026)

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight For The Future of AI (Polity, 2026)

Ben Tarnoff, “Frankenstein’s Regret” The Nation (May 2026)

Wake Forest Humanities Institute, “Language, Theory, & Artificial Intelligence” (May 2026)

McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)

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A discussion of the forthcoming book "Muskism: A Guild For The Perplexed" with its authors. Topics includes Muskism as the antidote to Musk Fatique, methods of historical research under threat of enshittification, the cultural imaginary of Elon Musk and Grok, satellite data centers, and more.

Date Recorded: April 1, 2026

Music: Redd Holt & The Heptet

Featured Guests

Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at Boston University and the co-author of Muskism (Harper, 2026), as well as the author of Hayek’s Bastards (Zone Books, 2025), Crack-Up Capitalism (Metropolitan, 2023), and Globalists (Harvard UP, 2018).

Ben Tarnoff is the co-author of Muskism (Harper, 2026). He is also the co-founder of Logic(s) magazine and the author of Internet For The People (Verso, 2022), The Bohemians (Penguin, 2014), and several other books about technology and finance in the United States.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (1979)

Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 2025)

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, & Silicon Valley’s Crusade To Control The Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, 2025)

Nick Bostrum, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford UP, 2014)

Mark Carney, “Special Address” World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026

Jordon S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction & The Alt-Right (U Minnesota P, 2024)

Gil Duran, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism & The War On Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser & The Post-Structuralist Debates” Critical Studies In Mass Communication (June 1985)

Alexander Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, & the Future of the West (Penguin, 2025)

Jill Lepore, X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story (BBC/Pushkin, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al. “The Gilded Network” The American Vandal (March 21, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al. “The Mutational Romances of Silicon Valley Speculation” The American Vandal (June 9, 2025)

Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals & The Dream of A World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023)

Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, & the Capitalism of The Far Right (Zone Books, 2025)

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire & The Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard UP, 2018)

Quinn Slobodian, “Post-Neoliberalism Is The New Centrism” LPE Project (December 19, 2025)

Quinn Slobodian & Gil Duran, “You Don’t Need Democracy If You Don’t Have People: Quinn Slobodian’s Warning” The Nerd Reich Podcast (February 10, 2026)

Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide For The Perplexed (Harper, 2026)

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight For The Future of AI (Polity, 2026)

Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

Ben Tarnoff, Internet For The People: The Fight For Our Digital Future (Verso, 2022)

Ben Tarnoff, The Bohemians: Mark Twain & The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature (Penguin, 2014)

Opens with Matt Seybold's short history of Instructure, the makers of Canvas LMS, with special emphasis on the takeover by Dragoneer and KKR in 2024.

This talk was delivered at Utah Valley University, but a selection from another talk at University of Albany has also been inserted as supplement.

The recording of the talk is followed by a studio conversation with two UVU faculty and a student about the impact of the Generative AI boom on their institution.

Date Recorded: March 3, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

Christa Albrecht-Crane is Professor of English & Literature at Utah Valley University and the author of Writing Off Code.

Angie McKinnon Carter is a Senior Lecturer specializing in composition and editing at Utah Valley University and the author of “Why Do You Think I’m Asking?” (Journal of Teaching Writing, 2022)

Chiler Moore is an English Major at Utah Valley University, who is also part of the Honors program and student government.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Christa Albrecht-Crane, “Thinking Smarter, Not Harder?: Google NotebookLM’s Misalignment Problem in Education” SIGDOC 2025

Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead (HBO, 2025)

Sofia Barnett, “ChatGPT is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism” Wired (January 30, 2023)

Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con (HarperCollins, 2025)

Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. “On The Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT 2021

Lee Bruno, “Scale Eight’s Twist: More For Less” Red Herring (October 2000)

Brian Burrough & John Helyar, Barbarians At The Gate (Harper & Row, 1989)

Brett Christophers, Our Lives In Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own The World (Verso, 2024)

Michelle Chihara, “Radical Flexibility: Driving For Lyft & The Future of Work in The Platform Economy” Distinktion (Winter 2021)

Josh Coates, “Poison In The Well: Could Utah’s Unorthodox Debt-Funding Term Sheet Tactics Be Hurting Economic Growth?” Connect Magazine (October 2005)

Sonel Cutler, “He Vibe-Coded a Crisis For Higher Education” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 4, 2026)

Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse & What To Do About It (Verso, 2025)

Matthew Gault, “What’s The Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?” 404 Media (February 25, 2026)

Andy Hines (ed.) University Keywords (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Thomas A. Hutton, The New Economy of The Inner City (Routledge, 2008)

J. P. Morgan Research, “AI Capex - Financing The Investment Cycle” November 2025

Christopher Newfield, “Academics Must Seize The Means of Knowledge Production” Public Books (October 16, 2025)

Tom Nicholas, VC: An American History (Harvard UP, 2019)

Michelle Kassorla, “The First Agentic AI LMS Killer is Here” The Academic Platypus (February 25, 2026)

Roxana Marachi & Lawrence Quill, “The Case of Canvas: Longitudinal Datafication Through Learning Management Systems” Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives (Spring 2020)

Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education” The American Vandal (June 10, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Text” The American Vandal (August 25, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production” The American Vandal (November 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold & Eric Hayot, “The ‘Crisis In The Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.” Chronicle Of Higher Education (December 29, 2025)

Matt Seybold & John Warner, “The Technology That’s Taking Your Freedom” Academic Freedom On The Line (February 3, 2026)

Meg Walter, “Josh Coates Has A Tank & An Arsenal of Data” Deseret News (June 14, 2022)

John Warner, “How Humans Work (Or Sometimes Don’t)” The Biblioracle Recommends (March 1, 2026)

Marc Watkins, “Einstein & The Rise of Nuisance Tech” Rhetorica (February 27, 2026)

Brian Whitmer, The Other Brian Whitmer [blog]

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From the Close Reading For The 21st Century Symposium, hosted by Emory University. What are the challenges, strategies, and rewards for teaching close reading? What are the stakes of teaching close reading through the nightmare of the contemporary?

This is the third episode in this miniseries from Emory, following from “Close Reading For The 21st Century” and “Close Reading Is A Conversation.”

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Cast (in order of appearance): Johanna Winant, Brian Glavey, Matt Seybold, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Lindsay Reckson, Christopher Spaide, Katie Kadue, Dan Sinykin, Jeff Dolven, John Lysaker, Omari Weekes, Patrick Sui, Oren Izenberg, Paul Buchholz, Farah Bakaari, Annie Abrams, Beci Carver

Featured Speakers

Brian Glavey is Associate Professor of English at University of South Carolina and the author of Relatability: Sharing & Oversharing with the New York School Poets, forthcoming in 2026 from U. Chicago Press.

Katie Kadue is Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (U. Chicago, 2021)

Lindsay Reckson is Professor and Chair of English at Haverford College, as well as the author of Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, & Performance in American Literature (NYU, 2020)

Christopher Spaide is Assistant Professor of English at University of Southern Mississippi and a columnist at LitHub.

Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and the co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025).

Johanna Winant is Associate Professor of English & Humanities at Reed College, co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025), and the author of Lyric Logic, forthcoming from Columbia UP.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

Honore de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832)

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (U Texas, 1981)

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

Sean Bonney, “What Teargas is For” (2016)

Peter Brooks, Reading For The Plot: Design & Intention in Narrative (Harvard UP, 1992)

Douglas Dowland, “The Problem of the Parlor” Los Angeles Review of Books (October 21, 2025)

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy (Algonquin, 2022)

Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991)

John Guillory, On Close Reading (University of Chicago, 2025)

bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress (Routledge, 1994)

Fredric Jameson, “Reification & Utopia in Mass Culture” Social Text (Winter 1979)

Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago P, 2023)

Richard Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (1974)

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1977)

Alexander Manshel, “High School English & The Making of American Readers” American Literary History (Winter 2025)

John McPhee, “Omission” New Yorker (September 7, 2015)

James Metcalf, “Close Reading in Crisis Times” Textual Practice (February 2026)

Fred Moten, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me” from Moten/Lopez/Cleaver (2022)

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005)

John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941)

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

Sonya Posmentier, “Your Studies Shall Become Life Studies” ELH (Fall 2025)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke UP, 2003)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Anality: News From The Front” Studies in Gender & Sexuality (Summer 2010)

Matt Seybold, et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)

Dan Sinykin, “Sufficient Passion: An Epistemology of Historicist Close Reading” New Literary History (Summer 2025)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Hortense Spillers, Black, White, & in Color (U Chicago, 2003)

Wallace Stevens, “Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction” (1942)

Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats & Lyric Form (Harvard UP, 2007)

Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard UP, 1983)

Johanna Winant, “The Claims of Close Reading” Boston Review (November 26, 2025)

Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn To Sit Down Together & Talk About A Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays (Peepal Tree Press, 2022)

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From the Close Reading For The 21st Century Symposium, hosted by Emory University. Why is close reading best understood as a conversation? What are its evaluative standards? How does it extend the conversation beyond literary studies?

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Cast (in order of appearance): Johanna Winant, Matt Seybold, Farah Bakaari, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Dan Sinykin, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Oren Izenberg, Beci Carver, Brian Glavey, Miranda Hickman, Patrick Sui, Jeff Dolven, Katie Kadue, Omari Weekes, Lisa Lee, Daniel Reynolds, Julie Orlemanski, Joshua Kotin

Featured Speakers

Kimberly Quioque Andrews is Associate Professor of English at University of Ottawa and the author of The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry & The American University (John Hopkins UP, 2023)

Farah Bakaari is Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley and the founding editor of Mid Theory Collective.

Oren Izenberg is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine and the author of Being Numerous: Poetry & The Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2011)

Lisa Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and author of Thomas Hirschorn from Graphic Design to Art (MIT Press, 2025)

Daniel Reynolds is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at Emory University and the author of Media in Mind (Oxford UP, 2019)

Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and the co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025).

Johanna Winant is Associate Professor of English & Humanities at Reed College, co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025), and the author of Lyric Logic, forthcoming from Columbia UP.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Rudolf Arnheim, Film (1933)

Rudolf Arnheim, Film As Art (1957) [50th Anniversary Edition]

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

Farah Bakaari, “Affectability, Temporality, & Postcolonial Subjectification in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Journal of African Literature Association (Summer 2023)

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (U Texas, 1981)

T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (1985) [1999 Princeton UP Edition]

Paul de Man, Blindness & Insight (U Minnesota, 1983)

Douglas Dowland, “The Problem of the Parlor” Los Angeles Review of Books (October 21, 2025)

Shannon Doyne, “Could You Spend Three Hours Looking at Just One Work of Art?” New York Times (November 14, 2025)

T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) in The Perfect Critic (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965)

Maxim Gorky, “The Kingdom of Shadows” (1896)

Peli Grietzer, “A Theory of Vibe” Glass Bead (2017)

John Guillory, On Close Reading (University of Chicago, 2025)

Fredric Jameson, “Reification & Utopia in Mass Culture” Social Text (Winter 1979)

Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago P, 2023)

Auguste & Louis Lumière, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896)

Edouard Manet, Argenteuil (1875)

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005)

John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941)

Matthew Pelowski et al, “Beyond The Lab: An Examination of Key Factors Influencing Interaction with ‘Real’ & Museum-Based Art” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, & the Arts (2017)

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

Jennifer Roberts, “The Power of Patience” Harvard Magazine (Nov-Dec 2013)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Anality: News From The Front” Studies in Gender & Sexuality (Summer 2010)

Matt Seybold, “You have to use it. You have to trust it.: Forced Adoption of AI is The Subtext of Davos” The American Vandal (January 23, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “BookTube, BookTok, Wattpad, & Audible Creation Exchange” The American Vandal (October 12, 2023)

Matt Seybold, et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)

Dan Sinykin, “Sufficient Passion: An Epistemology of Historicist Close Reading” New Literary History (Summer 2025)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)

Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard UP, 1983)

Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn To Sit Down Together & Talk About A Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays (Peepal Tree Press, 2022)

William Butler Yeats, “The Collar-Bone of a Hare” (1917)

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The first of three episodes based on the “Close Reading For The 21st Century Symposium” hosted by Emory University. The symposium’s opening address is followed by short provocations on “Freedom,” “The Best,” “Language,” and “Difficulty,” after which a there is a lengthy Q&A.

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Cast (in order of appearance): Dan Sinykin, Matt Seybold, Johanna Winant, Beci Carver, Joshua Kotin, Julie Orlemanski, Omari Weekes, Anthony Cuda, John Lysaker, Dez Miller, Jeff Dolven, Oren Izenberg, Benjamin Reiss, Miranda Hickman, Emma Davenport, Farah Bakaari

Featured Speakers

Beci Carver is a Senior Lecturer in 20th-Century Literature at University of Exeter and the author of Modernism’s Whims, forthcoming from Oxford UP.

Joshua Kotin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University and Director of the Shakespeare & Company Project.

Julie Orlemanski is Associate Professor of English at University of Chicago and currently the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute.

Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University and the co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025).

Omari Weekes is Assistant Professor of English at CUNY-Queens, a poet, and Black Studies scholar.

Johanna Winant is Associate Professor of English & Humanities at Reed College, co-editor of Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025), and the author of Lyric Logic, forthcoming from Columbia UP.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past & Future (Penguin, 1961)

W. H. Auden, “The Dream” (1936)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption (2011)

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (U Texas, 1981)

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 1999)

S. T. Coleridge, Specimens of The Table Talk (1835)

Edward Denby, Dance Writings (Knopf, 1986)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth & Method (1960)

Eric Griffiths, If Not Critical (Oxford UP, 2018)

John Guillory, On Close Reading (University of Chicago, 2025)

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard UP, 2001)

Martin Heidegger, Being & Time (1927)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)

Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969)

Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Salt, 2001)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987)

Cary Nelson, Modern American Poetry Site [MAPS] (1999-Present)

Peter F. Neumeyer (Ed.) Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle (Prentice-Hall, 1969)

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco, 2004)

Richard Rorty (Ed.) The Linguistic Turn (1967)

Michael Roth, “Ebb Tide” History & Theory (February 2007)

Walter Pater, Appreciations (1889)

Namwali Serpell, On Morrison (PenguinRandomHouse, 2026)

Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)

Hortense Spillers, Black, White, & in Color (U Chicago, 2003)

Verity Spott, “Went to Get the Sink Unblocker” (Eternal Sections, 2025)

Keston Sutherland, Meditations (Last Books, 2024)

Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (1939)

Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard UP, 1983)

Omari Weekes, “Reliquary For The Digital in Nine Key Words” ASAP Review (April 26, 2021)

Omari Weekes, “A Heartbreaking Work of Swaggering Genius” BookForum (Winter 2026)

Oliver Wilde, “Mr. Pater’s Appreciations” (1890) in A Critic In Pall Mall (1919)

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1938) [PennSound]

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