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)

Event Copy

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]

Event Copy

Some of the above was explicitly described from the podiums and platforms at Davos. But much more often it was turned into euphemisms and knowing smirks, tittering in the auditorium. It was treated as background and subtext, if it was not eluded altogether. I can certainly understand feeling, amidst the deluge, that there is no good reason to pay attention to the WEF, particularly the dozens of sessions on AI. The WEF feels, in many ways, like a touring company of The Lion King musical. It was overrated to begin with, but now it’s an artifact from a different time, just shoddier and more transparently racist. Its cast is unable to marshal more than perfunctory, campy performances, unworthy of suspending one’s disbelief. And, above all, it is a tremendous waste of money.1

But, as I see it, just as the current collision between authoritarianism and democracy, whose epicenters include Minneapolis, Gaza, Caracas, Tehran, and Kyiv, is correlated to the Web 2.0 media revolution, the unfurling of that collision in the coming decade will be directly correlated with the cycle of speculative investment, consumer uptake, and government subsidization of AI which is already underway. As such, paying attention to the statements made by billionaires heading up tech companies and private equity funds, however performative they may be, is an essential part of clear-eyed confrontation with our present conditions.

I. “Not just economic growth driven by capital expenses…Right now, that’s what we’re seeing.”

The AI boosterism at Davos reeks of desperation, delusion, and dissembling.2 It ranges from burlesque (Jensen Huang) to ad hominem (Alex Karp) to psychedelia (too many to count). These are all coping mechanisms in a moment of tremendous anxiety. The AI buildout, driven largely by data center construction and captured to a degree in the chart above, is happening. A titanic downpayment has been made on AI infrastructure, presuming it will be a revolutionary technology, worthy of being compared to the computer or the smartphone, at least, if not the printing press. And it must be, for this buildout to generate returns.

But the jury is still out. AI skepticism is near an all-time high according to Huang’s uncharacteristically angry outburst on the No Priors podcast earlier this month. He railed against “well-respected…PhDs and CEOs” who “go to governments and explain and describe end-of-world scenarios, and extremely, extremely dystopian futures” with the intention, in Huang’s estimation, to “create regulations to suffocate start-ups.” He blames “AI doomerism” for “scaring people from making investments in AI.”

This seemed an odd complaint from the head of a $4.5 Trillion company which has ridden a spectacular wave of investment in AI. Many, perhaps wishfully, read it as another indication that all is not well within the AI unicorns, despite their enviable valuations. But to chasten the doomers and permabears and skeptics (like myself), I want to also note that it is too early to tell whether Claude Code or something like it won’t prove to be the “killer app” the industry has been grasping for since 2022.

In a sense, the AI boom which began in 2020-2021 has reached a point of suspended animation. Things are not going exactly as planned, but the bottom has not fallen out yet either. “AI bubble” discourse was plentiful in Davos. No attempt was made to suppress it. The general strategy was to treat bubble projections as natural, mundane, and ephemeral. It isn’t so much that the permabears are wrong, as they are overstating the case and failing to see the big picture. Preparing for a likely economic contraction was treated, counterintuitively, as imprudence.3

This strategy was exemplified by BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, who is the WEF’s interim co-chair, and acted as unofficial emcee, hosting many of the most heavily attended conversational sessions, including the one that generated the most headlines this week, with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella.

While in his sometimes leading questions, Fink promised, perhaps a little too emphatically, that “the companies or the countries that diffuse the fastest are ultimately going to be the ultimate winners,” his interlocutor showed slightly more reservation. As part of what Fortune called “Nadella’s biggest AI bubble warning yet,” the Microsoft CEO said, “A telltale sign if it’s a bubble is if all we’re talking about are the tech firms, right? If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side, then that’s, by definition, it’s just purely supply side.”

Those who are bearish about AI’s consumer uptake (as I am) understandably picked up on this as an accurate description of the current state of AI discourse. Just a day before the Nadella interview, Futurism published a survey of recent studies and interviews with experts which Frank Landymore summarized as, “Mountains of research as well as cases of workplace deployment of AI have suggested that the tech is far from being ready for primetime.” Nineteen months after a damning Goldman Sachs report, in which then Head of Global Equity Research, Jim Covello, claimed “not one truly transformative - let alone cost-effective - application [of Generative AI] has been found,” the demand-side problems it identified are basically unchanged (again, too soon to tell about Claude Code).

But what stood out to me as I listened to the recorded conversation between Nadella and Fink is that they have largely given up on organic adoption by consumers. They have moved on to a new dream of forced adoption mandated by government and managerial coercion.4

II. “Diffusion is Everything”

The quiet pivot to forced adoption is softened by the euphemism of diffusion, a term both Fink and Nadella use ad nauseum.

“It’s going to require real leadership from the private sector and the public sector,” Nadella says early on, “to ensure that diffusion happens.” Elsewhere, he reveals that that phrase, “ensure that diffusion happens,” he lifted verbatim from an exchange with Fink in advance of the public event. And they are not alone in hammering this vocabulary. Diffusion seems to have been part of the script of the 2026 WEF, as questions eerily similar to Fink’s - “How do we make sure that diffusion happens and is spread evenly?” - came from the mouths of Niall Ferguson, Jessica Lessin, and others.

Satya Nadella speaks in a pastiche of cliches derived from the financial press, orthodox economics, techno-libertarianism, and centrist punditry. So when he says it will “require real leadership” to “ensure that diffusion happens,” it would be easy to dismiss it as a vacuous paean to the popular business literature on leadership, but I contend that “to ensure that diffusion happens” is actually a description of and advocacy for coercion at best. One which does not rule out the need for state and class violence. The unveiled force of Nadella’s statement is: All those who have power over workers and consumers are going to need to use it to make them start accepting and using the Generative AI tools our industry has collectively invested trillions in.

As with many terms preferred by AI boosters, including artificial intelligence itself, diffusion has the discursive advantage of both technical and colloquial connotations. In machine learning (by way of acoustical engineering), for instance, diffusion is a process of introducing noise into models to the point of entropy, so as to train them to recognize and filter (denoise) what is relevant to a generative task.

This specialized vocabulary is only very tangentially related to the most common usage of diffusion as a synonym for dilution, dispersion, or deconcentration. There is also - highly relevant to a spoken dialogue like Fink and Nadella’s - a common homonymic conflation between diffuse (to dilute or disperse) and defuse (to disempower or deescalate). Many speakers use these terms interchangeably, sometimes confusing their intended meaning, but many times not!

But, in my opinion, what is most relevant for Fink and Nadella’s invocations is the most specialized connotation of diffusion, which very few auditors outside Silicon Valley executive suites or academia are likely familiar with. It originates in nineteenth-century anthropology and sociology, migrates into communications and media studies, is further popularized amongst what he calls an “invisible college” of social scientists by Everett M. Rogers in the 1960s, and, most importantly, is appropriated and disseminated by the Silicon Valley marketing consultancy Regis McKenna Inc. during the tech boom/bubble of the 1990s.

Diffusion, in these contexts, refers to patterns of acceptance and/or adoption of ideas, inventions, and innovations. Note that the colloquial and the machine-learning invocations of diffusion presume the process it describes always moves from more density to less density. Whether talking about population or water molecules or soundwaves or structured data, diffusion describes a spreading out across space and time, dissipating almost to a point of insignificance. But diffusion as Nadella and Fink use it implies, to the contrary, the potential, indeed the preference, for both dispersion and saturation. As the diffusion of AI happens across time and territory, they hope, adoption will also become more dense, even to the point of ubiquity.

In 1989, Regis McKenna consultants took the arguments (and models) from Diffusion of Innovations (1962), which Rogers had developed primarily from two decades of field studies on the adoption of agricultural techniques and technologies in the Midwest, and adapted them into a series of pamphlets and pitches for Silicon Valley tech startups and their venture investors.5 At McKenna Inc., The Rogers Curve (pictured above), with a few minor revisions (below, left) and one major revision (below, right), became the Technology Adoption Profile or the Technology Adoption Lifecycle.

One of the minor revisions, the equation of “early adopters” with “visionaries,” has already had a lasting effect on our nomenclature, as early adopter became a much more common term (see ngram below) thanks to McKenna Inc. and especially the English-professor-turned-Regis-consultant, Geoffrey Moore, who published “the bible of entrepreneurial marketing” based on the Regis McKenna playbook in 1991.

By the mid-2000s, early adopter had explicitly become a marker of status, especially amongst the loyal customers of one of McKenna Inc.’s longest-running clients, Apple Computer, Inc. Waiting in long lines to purchase the most expensive and buggy iteration of the iPod or iPhone on the day of its release is the price of being recognized, by virtue of your consumer habits, as a visionary.

But the more substantive revision by McKenna Inc., and the one which provides a crucial backstory to Nadella and Fink’s WEF convocation, was the introduction of the “marketing chasm.” The marketing chasm appears somewhere in the early adoption stage, when the consumer base of “visionary” technologists is nearing maximum saturation, but the equilibrium which will make production of that technology durably profitable has not yet been obtained. Naturally, the best way to cross the marketing chasm is to hire Regis McKenna Inc.

Inventing a problem to which your existing enterprise offers the solution is a pretty durable strategy in marketing and advertising. I didn’t even know I was overproducing cortisol until I heard Joe Rogan talking about his supplement stack, and that kind of thing. It’s pretty hard to argue that the “marketing chasm” is premised on something other than McKenna Inc.’s desire to grab more of the money flowing into Silicon Valley after the first wave of software hyperscalers. But Rogers version of diffusion theory does acknowledge that speed and scale of adoption of agriculture innovations by Iowa farmers was frequently impacted by “rate of awareness-knowledge,” “change agent credibility,” their misestimation of learning curves, and other factors that might be addressed by marketing to a degree that factors like cost sensitivity or maintenance capacity could not be.

One way of thinking about the most recent phase of AI development is as an aggressive campaign to cross the marketing chasm. OpenAI and Microsoft CoPilot have rolled out one cringey commercial after another over the past year, a strategy which I expect to reach new lows during next month’s Super Bowl. Meanwhile, AI developers of every stripe have filled our feeds with pleas to download their app and pressured us to not let the AI revolution leave us behind. Numerous companies who are otherwise unchanged have rebranded as AI developers, and “AI” has become as de rigueur in commercial copywriting as “digital” once was.

The market of early adopters for chatbots, image generators, and other prominent GenAI products has probably been fully saturated since at least early 2024, but a PEW poll from as recently as September of last year reported that more than half of Americans, a population which has been most aggressively targeted by AI marketing, still say their “awareness of AI” ranges from “a little” to “nothing at all.” Which might suggest either that there is still an opportunity for impact marketing, or that AI marketing simply has little impact.

In their conversation at the WEF, while they are clearly describing the current state of AI diffusion as somewhere between the early adoption and the majority phases, Fink and Nadella seem to have given up on traversing the associated marketing chasm with, well, marketing. Diffusion is not characterized as something achieved by persuasion and publicity directed at initiating grassroots adoption by individual consumers. It is a matter of top-down efforts to “ensure that diffusion happens,” or to “make sure that diffusion is spread,” or to “transform demand.”

To me, the most telling, and the most terrifying, portion of the conversation begins about twenty minutes into the recording, when Fink begins by treating it as a given that “as AI diffuses, obviously organizations, companies, governments are going to have to evolve,” then, following what he calls “getting to the demand side,” he asks Nadella, “How do you see this diffusion occur, and utilization at a corporate level or at a government level, which ultimately then creates that demand, which eliminates any fears of bubbles?”

Nadella’s long, halting, sometimes non-sequitur (sometimes nonsense) answer gave me the distinct impression he was trying not to say what he really wanted to say. But it winds towards an imperative, prefaced by a series of commands, some of which are parroted back to him by Fink: “You gotta use it. You have to trust it. You have to use it. You have to learn even how to put the guardrails to trust it. You can’t just be afraid of it. It’s going to be diffused.”

Fundamental to Rogers’s theory of diffusion, one might even call it his premise for writing Diffusion of Innovations, is that it is never a foregone conclusion that innovations will be adopted, even when they are undeniable social goods. The book begins, in fact, with failures. The failure to persuade a Peruvian village to boil potable water to reduce disease. The failure of sailors to integrate citrus into their diet to prevent scurvy. The failure of typists to accept the far more intuitive and efficient Dvorak keyboard for word processing over the QWERTY that had been designed to slow them down.

The insistence that diffusion is going to happen as a matter of course when a technology is still in the early adoption phase is either wishful thinking or authoritarian hubris. Perhaps both.

What Fink and Nadella describe as the present impediment to “long-term scalable” diffusion is not a marketing chasm so much as a control chasm. They are no longer strategizing for voluntary adoption by those who come to recognize the technology’s utility by electively applying it to the problems they face. They are planning how to cross the chasm by forced adoption. People will use it because they are told they “have to” by their employer, by their school, by their president, or by the police state.

III. “David Ricardo was not wrong. There’s comparative advantage in countries. There’s comparative advantage in firms. That needs to be preserved in the AI era.”

Early last year, I wrote that “authoritarianism is the bailout.” My thesis was that the tense alliance between the Trump campaign and Silicon Valley, led by the so-called Paypal Mafia, many of whom are now (or have been) directly embedded in the administration, was sustained by a quid pro quo.6 In exchange for campaign financing and crypto grifting, Trump would allow tech entrepreneurs and investors to not only self-regulate, but to craft a federal agenda for AI and Crypto which might keep them solvent, largely by making government agencies and public institutions the wholesale customers of last resort for AI products which the general public had not yet embraced.

In 2025, many U.S. educators got the first look at what forced adoption backstopped by state coercion is like, as state legislatures, school boards, boards of trustees, and school administrators, emboldened by a series of executive orders asserting federal power to mandate AI integration in public education, took control of curriculum and pedagogy away from faculty, creating “requirements” for “AI literacy” or “AI working competency” which either explicitly or de facto compelled schools to form private-public partnerships with AI developers, and then compelled students and employees of those schools to create accounts and share information with said developers. Republican education policy in 2025 looks like the worst nightmarish dystopia of libertarian fantasists, which I guess makes sense, since they are precisely who is authoring it.

As recently as last Summer, I believed this variation on Ponzi austerity extraction was like a round of publicly-subsidized venture funding. Developers would get a stream of revenue from schools which would not make them going concerns, but would keep them liquid enough for a year or two, as they continued to pursue the “killer app,” the hyperscalable consumer use case. Maybe this will still prove to be the case, and the enshittification of public education will be the price we collectively pay so Silicon Valley’s Magnificent 7 can become a Magnificent 8 or 9.

But I increasingly wonder whether imposition of forced adoption onto U.S. education isn’t just the field test - or, in the parlance of the WEF, a “proof of concept” - for global diffusion. Authoritarians may be the core marketing demographic for commercial AI now. And using AI as a means of control over populations may begin by persuading state powers to force populations to engage with AI, not necessarily as consumers, but so as to have their labor and their lives absorbed into LLM, LVM, and LAM corpuses (what I have elsewhere called capta).

Whether or not AI developers can deliver the surveillance, censorship, indoctrination, and behavioral modification machines which authoritarian regimes and movements crave is, I think, still an open question, but that will not keep them from pitching, and overpromising (see, for instance, DOGE). They understand the authoritarian political imagination.

The extremist wing of AI development, centered around the Paypal Mafia, is the most desperate. They have all already demonstrated their willingness to feed the darkest fantasies of authoritarians on multiple continents in exchange for government contracts, subsidies, and regulatory capture. Their extremism is arguably a consequence of their desperation.

But, while all of Silicon Valley has been drifting rightwards in the 2020s, founders and executives at many of the largest market cap companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have lagged behind the Paypal Mafia in their overt embrace of authoritarianism. Though all are speculating rabidly in AI - Nadella’s Microsoft, for instance, spent almost a third of its annualized revenue in 2025 on AI development - they are all also better positioned to survive the bursting of a speculative bubble. Even without government largesse each could weather a half-trillion dollar writedown. The risks associated with allying with authoritarian superpowers might be so great as to make even such a large sunk cost preferable.

The U.S., China, and, to a lesser extent, Europe have been the primary territories of AI diffusion so far. But what distinguishes Nadella, in my reading, from many of the other WEF speakers, is that his vision is not so fixated on European and North American economies and governments, nor on large corporations headquartered in the Global North.

Nadella demonstrates far greater interest in the Global South, start-ups and small firms. Fink carefully helps Nadella to frame these concerns as evidence of his egalitarianism. But I think that Nadella rightly recognizes that the authoritarian political imagination is not less powerful in developing nations, and marketing to their leaders, as well as to middle managers, small business owners, police chiefs, real estate developers and university presidents, is, in the aggregate, no less viable, and potentially much less volatile, than marketing to mad king regimes atop Global North nuclear states.

Nadella is, of course, one of what Yanis Varoufakis calls the “technolords.” Make no mistake, he understands the authoritarian political imagination because he relishes his own authority. When Fink asks him how AI has diffused within Microsoft itself, Nadella describes a reduction of his direct interactions with other Microsoft employees and a perceived reduction of his reliance upon them. Rather than communicate with subordinates, he uses CoPilot to sort, schedule, summarize, and to “capture information unlike anything else,” to make briefs, to update him on projects, to give him “360s” of clients. “What I do,” Nadella says, unselfconsciously, “is I take that and share that back with all my colleagues across all the functions.”

Nadella describes this as “a complete inversion of how information is flowing within the organization.” Previously, as he puts it, “information trickles up” to him, but now?…he catches himself here. He doesn’t want to say “trickledown,” for obvious reasons, but, of course, that is what “a complete inversion” of information trickling up would imply. Rather than depending on people, and therefore having to come face to face with their humanity and their intellectual labor, Nadella can use CoPilot to access the anonymized products of their labor and “share it back” to them. That is, guiltlessly treat it as his own property.

Nadella opts instead to say, “it flattens the entire information flow.” What he is describing, but also performing, during this manic monologue, is dehumanization, which is one of the core tenets of the authoritarian personality. The marvel of AI, for him, is that it has removed the necessity for interpersonal communication which would remind him periodically of his belonging to a corporation, which is a community of human beings, one premised explicitly on the pursuit of their collective flourishing. It has also, through that alienation, allowed him to transfigure their captured labor into a process of automation which he controls and can claim as both his property and the substance of his leadership over them.

Of course, corporate executives have never been immune to insulating themselves from rank-and-file employees, undervaluing their labor, nor stealing their ideas. But what’s novel about Nadella’s narrative is that it positions AI as essentially a machine for enabling bad leadership. It’s no wonder AI entrepreneurs and investors are flirting with authoritarianism. The technology they are developing creates the same kinds of bubbles of sycophancy and narcissism which are inevitably constructed around tyrants.

Hosted by the University of Illinois-Chicago United Faculty, a roundtable discussion about confronting the challenges facing higher education labor organizing. Topics included education technology, faculty autonomy, power mapping, board composition, lobbying state legislators, artificial intelligence, surveillance and data-mining, Ponzi austerity, and more.

Cast (in order of appearance): Jeff Kessler, Matt Seybold, Anna Kornbluh, Dominique Baker, Peter Coviello, Nassar Mufti, Jeff Edwards

Date Recorded: December 4, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

Featured Guests

Dominique Baker is Associate Professor of Education & Public Policy with a joint appointment in the College of Education & Human Development and the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy & Administration at the University of Delaware. She has published extensively on intersections of race, political economy, and education policy.

Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at University of Illinois, Chicago and the author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024) and a member the national coordinating committee of Higher Ed Labor United.

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

Dominique Baker, “Censorship Arrives On Campus” Inside Higher Ed (January 13, 2026)

Dominique Baker et al, “Race Below The Fold: The Absence of Race in The New Media’s Coverage of Student Loans” Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis (April 23, 2025)

Dominique Baker, “The US Department of Education is Far Behind On Producing Key Statistics” Brookings Institution (June 25, 2025)

Dominique Baker et al, “Expanding The Student Persistence Puzzle to Minority Serving Institutions: The Residential Historically Black College & University Context” Journal of College Student Retention (February 2021)

Dominique Baker, “A Case Study of Undergraduate Debt, Repayment Plans, & Postbaccalaureate Decision-Making Among Black Students at HBCUs” Journal of Student Financial Aid (June 2019)

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

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

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)

Anna Kornbluh, “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 12, 2020)

Annie McClanahan & Louise McCune, “Ed-Tech” in University Keywords (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Isabel McMullen, “Portraying Governance: Demographic Misalignment in University Board Representation” EdWorkingPapers (June 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Jason Wingard’s EdTech Griftopia” Los Angeles Review of Books (February 23, 2023)

Matt Seybold, “The Ellisons Are Beta-Testing Big Brother” The American Vandal (October 10, 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, “Gordon Gee’s Draw Check Scheme” The American Vandal (August 13, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “Ponzi Austerity in The Age of Cultural Abundance” The American Vandal Podcast (August 21, 2023)

Matt Seybold et al, “What is Technofeudalism?” The American Vandal (September 9, 2025)

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

Michael Sisak & Larry Neumeister, “Charlie Javice Convicted of Defrauding JPMorgan During $175 Million Sale of Financial Aid Startup” Associated Press (March 28, 2025)

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

Yanis Varoufakis, Adults In The Room (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2017)

Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis, & The Future of The World Economy (Zed Books, 2011)

Event Copy

The event launching the 2025 Quarry Farm Symposium on Energy Studies begins with opening address by co-organizer Jeffrey Insko, then discussion of the theory of Everyday Ecofascism with collaborators from University of Connecticut [8:00], then questions from the live audience of Energy Humanities scholars [50:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Jeffrey Insko, Matt Seybold, Alexander Menrisky, April Anson, Caroline Levine, Brent Bellamy, Thomas S. Davis

Date Recorded: October 10, 2025

Music: Redd Holt & The Heptet

Featured Guests

April Anson is Assistant Professor of English and Social & Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, as well as the co-author of “Green Walls: Everyday Ecofascism & The Politics of Proximity” (boundary 2, 2023) and Against The Ecofascist Creep (2022)

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English & Coordinator of American Studies at Oakland University and the author of The Current newsletter and The Line 6B Citizens Blog. In 2025, he receive the Burton V. Barnes Award for outstanding academic contributions in support of the environment from the Sierra Club.

Alexander Menrisky is Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis & Consumption in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and co-author of Against The Ecofascist Creep (2022)

Episode Bibliography

Xtn Alexander & Matthew N. Lyons (Ed.) Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politcs & Antifascism (PM Press, 2024)

Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, Against The Ecofascist Creep (2022)

April Anson & Anindita Banerjee, “Green Walls: Everyday Ecofascism & The Politics of Proximity” boundary 2 (February 2023)

Stewart Brand (Ed.) Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1971)

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks & Reports of William Weston (Bantam, 1977)

Paul Collier, The Plundered Planet (Oxford UP, 2010)

Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine, 1968)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1848)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

Jack Forbes, “Fascism: A Review of Its History & Its Present Cultural Reality In The Americas” Exporations in Ethnic Studies (January 1982)

Amitov Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change & The Unthinkable (U Chicago P, 2016)

Madison Grant, The Passing of The Great Race (1916)

Jeffrey Insko, History, Abolition, & the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford UP, 2019)

Constantin Iordachi, Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2009)

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World (Macmillan, 2023)

Ariel Levy, “The Secret Life of Plants” New Yorker (September 12, 2016)

John Locke, “Of Property” in The Second Treatise of Government (1689)

Andreas Mahm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power & The Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016)

Andreas Mahm & Wim Carton, Overshoot: How The World Surrendered To Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024)

Alexander Menrisky, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis & Consumption in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2025)

Alexander Menrisky, “Hallucinogenic Ecology & Psychoanalytic Prehistory in Margaret Atwood” Mosaic (September 2019)

Sam Moore & Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change & The Far Right (Polity, 2022)

George Mosse, Toward The Final Solution: A History of European Racism (U Wisconsin P, 1978)

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Knopf, 2004)

Roland Robinson, “Fascism & Antifascism: A Decolonial Perspective” in Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politcs & Antifascism (PM Press, 2024)

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1851)

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) [2006 Modern Library Edition]

Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier is American History” (1893)

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12th Quarry Farm Symposium: Energy Studies Full Program with Video of Panel Papers

This live recording of The American Vandal Podcast will feature two scholars from the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative who are both researching ecofascism and challenging its dominant myths via public humanities work. Central to our discussion will by the critical category of “everyday ecofascism” which encompasses both the crisis narratives that incite political violence and moreover the often mundane and/or middlebrow representations of geopolitics, energy production, population growth, resource allocation, and climate science which serve, intentionally or unintentionally, to validate eschatology and extremism.

However successful Mamdani might be in making public transportation and childcare cheaper for New Yorkers, levying city taxes on oligarchs, and improving access to housing, 94% of the U.S. population will only experience those successes vicariously, or maybe diffusely over a long term, through multiplier effects and shifting norms.

However, I would like to propose that Mamdani could, in the span of a single term, dynamically change the entirety of U.S. higher education for the better. The City of New York, which is already the second-largest funder of the public City University of New York (CUNY), should infuse funds into CUNY expressly for the development of core education technology platforms like Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Relationship Management (SRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system.

CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.

Data security practices will, I believe, increasingly be a factor in student recruitment, but even if the monetization of data by corporatized institutions becomes a broadly-accepted social norm, the corporatized university should reserve this advantage for itself. For instance, they could scrape their own LMSs to train Large Language Models (LLMs), also internally-owned and operated (as Ted Underwood proposed earlier this week), or deploy cross-platform aggregation for retention programs, alumni fundraising campaigns, and upselling services, all things which many institution currently pay EdTech and consulting firms to do (with their access to private equity controlled troves of student data).

And here’s where the broad public benefit accrues. Once these platforms are in place on CUNY campuses, they can license them at cost to SUNY, to NYC Public Schools, potentially to any educational institution who chooses them over the always overpriced, often enshittified, ever-extractive for-profit EdTech platforms which, unfortunately, become de rigueur across U.S. higher eduction precisely because we failed to have the foresight to develop and retain control over educational technology when the best developers were already employed by universities, because universities had the best computing infrastructure.

CUNY is, conveniently, better positioned to become a public education software developer than almost any university in the country, having developed the Commons In A Box (CBOX) community-learning platform which it freely available to any school who wishes to install it.

A month ago, Christopher Newfield called for academics to “seize the means of knowledge production” by working “step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.” As I noted in my recent podcast with Newfield, I think the most imperative, but also the most apparent pressure point for academics looking to act upon his call is education technology.

This will look different from campus to campus, but I believe on every campus instructional faculty can organize around some combination of better data hygiene, better solidarity with students and staff on issues of data security, greater transparency of budgeting and decision trees on EdTech, more faculty governance over institutional technology in collaboration with IT departments, and increased faculty autonomy over technology in their classrooms.

In New York City, with a new mayor who ran on both expanding investment in public education and reducing the power of rent-seeking enterprises, there is an immediate opportunity to reduce Ponzi austerity extraction by for-profit EdTech from New York City schools, and potentially to make a significant move towards socializing educational technology by providing platforms and models that can be exported and imitated anywhere.

A spirited discussion of the state of higher education, the history of criticism, and the future of literary knowledge production, recorded with a live audience at University of Pennsylvania’s English Faculty Lounge as part of the annual Penn English Department Lecture, delivered this year by Christopher Newfield.

Full Cast (in order of appearance): James English, Christopher Newfield, Matt Seybold, Whitney Trettien, Jenny, Zachary Lesser, Mark Algee Hewitt, Kerry McAuliffe, Eilis Lombard, Laura McGrath, Qing (Ruby) Liao

Date Recorded: October 22, 2025

Music: Redd Holt & The Heptet

Sound Engineering: Brian J. Kirk

Featured Guests

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).

Whitney Trettien is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments From The History of Bookwork (U. Minnesota, 2021) and a contributor to many collaborative projects in digital book history.

Episode Bibliography

Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype & Create The Future We Want (HarperCollins, 2025)

Jed Esty, The Future of Decline (Stanford UP, 2022) [Chinese Edition trans. Qing (Ruby) Liao]

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams & Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin, 2025)

Khadija T. Khan, “PhD Cuts Are the Beginning of the End for Academia” Harvard Crimson (October 30, 2025)

Steven Levy, “Fei-Fei Li Started an AI Revolution by Seeing Like an Algorithm” Wired (November 10, 2023)

William C. Mao & Veronica H. Paulus, “Harvard To ‘Significantly’ Reduce Graduate Program Admissions Amid Budget Tightening” Harvard Crimson (October 2, 2025)

Laura B. Mcgrath, Middlemen: Literary Agents & the Making of American Fiction (Princeton UP, 2026)

Christopher Newfield, “Criticism After The Crisis: Toward A National Strategy For Literary & Cultural Study” Representations (Fall 2023)

Christopher Newfield, “Chicago’s Gift To Trump” Remaking The University (August 24, 2025)

Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities, and How We Can Fix Them (Hopkins UP, 2016)

Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, (Harvard UP, 2008)

Christopher Newfield, Ivy & Industry: The Business & Making of The American University, 1880-1980 (Duke UP, 2004)

Christopher Newfield, Anna Kornbluh, & Matt Seybold, “Working Conditions” The American Vandal (January 4, 2023)

Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in The Age of Neoliberalism (U. Nebraska, 2022)

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

Matt Seybold, “The Financial World & The Magical Elixir of Confidence” Aeon (February 19, 2018)

Matt Seybold, “Destroyer of Confidence: James Gordon Bennett, Jacksonian Paranoia, & The Original Confidence Man” American Studies (Fall 2018)

Matt Seybold et al, “Ed Tech, AI, & The Unbundling of Research & Teaching” The American Vandal (November 2, 2023)

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

Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments From The History of Bookwork (U. Minnesota, 2021)

Whitney Trettien, “Tracked Reading” in Further Reading (Oxford UP, 2020)

Anna L. Tsing, “On Nonscalability” Common Knowledge (Fall 2012)

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One thing Christopher Newfield’s work has enduringly shown is that external defunding of humanities disciplines is inevitably misrepresented as internal crises. Humanities scholars are accused of failing to adequately assert their relevance, agree upon their methods, market themselves to students, or create competitive graduates. Newfield inevitably shows that such arguments fail to hold water even on their own terms, while disguising and revisioning decisions actually made by academic administrators, government officials, and private partners. The most recent wave of humanities cuts have been justified by the imminent automation of language and literature education by artificial intelligence and the allegedly “out of touch” radicalisms of associated faculty. In this conversation, which will be recorded as part of the forthcoming “Vandal Live” series of The American Vandal Podcast, Newfield, Whitney Trettien, and Matt Seybold discuss the incursions of “technofeudal education,” the distinction between technical tools and speculative capital, both subsumed under the title of “A.I.,” and the tactics available to scholars, teachers, and writers when, as Paul Krugman puts it, “the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with smog and brownouts.”

During his first term, Donald Trump openly fantasized about using federal antitrust provisions to break up media conglomerates and tech companies he felt threatened by. While perhaps effectual to some degree as intimidation, Trump always backed off, perhaps recognizing that prolonged antitrust battles against giant multinationals were risky, both in terms of messaging and execution.

As Trump returns to power, his team now realizes that it is not the punishment provisions of U.S. antitrust law, but rather its implicit permission powers which the executive branch can wield far more effectively, and without the inconvenience of due process. Rather than trying to break up corporate monopolies they can’t control, why not create or expand ones they believe they can?

Those permission powers have been on full display since July, when the Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger was announced, after which followed a series of widely-covered programming changes allegedly tailored to presidential tastes, and then an FCC approval conditioned on further censorious changes, to which Paramount Skydance happily conceded.1 Those conditions were the pretext for the $150 million acquisition of The Free Press announced this week, simultaneous with the installing of its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

While I see The Free Press and CBS News as among the least consequential subsidiaries of the emergent Ellison Family Media Empire, their combination makes transparent the overall design. What the Trump administration’s antitrust agenda has underwritten is not so much a media conglomerate as a surveillance agency, and it is one which will likely persist, after the near-term political turmoil, whether as a parallel media infrastructure serving the jilted broligarchy or as the paragovernmental arm of a post-democratic dynasty.

I.

The Paramount Skydance merger was bankrolled mostly by Larry Ellison, whose son became CEO of the new company, the first in a series of related acquisitions by Ellison, his companies, and his co-investors. Most notably, besides The Free Press, Paramount is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (their closest competitor) and Ellison’s Oracle Corporation is taking the largest stake in the TikTok USA deal being brokered by Trump himself. Assuming these deals are completed as reported and rubber-stamped, it will have taken Ellison less than six months to construct the second-largest media conglomerate in the U.S.

This unique feat of blitzscaling, in the language of Silicon Valley, would not have been possible without a friendly kleptocratic federal government, but also not without ready access to hundreds of billions of dollars in credit and co-investment, capital which maybe a dozen individuals in the world beside Ellison could’ve raised. Depending on how you see it, these creditors and co-investors either now exert influence on the newly-formed Ellison Family Media Empire by expecting returns on their investments, or (as I am more inclined to believe) they now find themselves locked into Ellison’s circle of influence, the businesses they run regarded by Ellison and his fellow kleptocrats, in and out of government (an increasingly facile distinction), as de facto extensions of that empire.

The “move fast and break things” entrepreneurial ethos of venture capitalists (who Catherine Bracy dubs “world eaters”) has been the perfect complement to the totalitarian sprint past democratic safeguards plotted by reactionary strategists like Curtis Yarvin, Russ Vought, and the Heritage Foundation. Speed is imperative for both projects, as is the conflation of the two. A legion of libertarian technocrats who currently believe they are dismantling the “nanny state” will someday realize they have actually been supporting the most ambitious attempt at central planning, civilian surveillance, and behavioral control since the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

That attempt may yet fail. Fascism is moving too slow, the fascists keep saying.2 And they may be right. The time it takes to stage the theater of illiberal democracy is also time during which more and more people are liable to recognize (and maybe object to) what comes next.

Ellison, like the rest of the ideologues in Trump’s orbit, has not been shy about sharing his vision of totalitarian control through networked information technology. During the Q&A of an Oracle Corporation event last year, Ellison rambled on about multi-level global tracking systems recording and digitizing every aspect of human behavior and analyzing it with artificial intelligence in real time to deliver a diner menu of dystopian tropes: crime prediction, eugenic mapping, locked-down schools, automated quarantines, bathroom cameras, etc. “Citizens will be on the their best behavior,” Ellison enthuses, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on. And its unimpeachable…because AI is monitoring the video.”

Tim Fries, a private equity principle and analyst, doesn’t regard what Ellison is building as a media conglomerate at all, but rather an “emerging AI-powered military industrial complex.” If you believe, as Ellison does, that Americans will be better off when they are subjected to “supervision at all times,” then buying microvideo and microblogging platforms, enterprise software, streaming services, cable networks, mobile and console gaming developers, and internet publishers is just buying supervision capacity. The Ellison Family Media Empire is poised to have access, aggregation, and analysis powers over titanic swaths of time which people spend consuming networked media. This is not precisely Big Brother as George Orwell imagined it, but it’s the infrastructure out of which Big Brother might be scaled.

II.

Students at Northwestern University got a peek at a Big Brother Beta upon returning to campus this Fall. As Nineth Kanieski Koso has been covering for The Daily Northwestern, the university changed the Student Code of Conduct over the summer to require a series of “bias training” videos allegedly aimed at combating Antisemitism and Islamophobia. However, as one Jewish student told Koso, the Antisemitism Here/Now video produced by the Jewish United Fund “is absolutely one of the most antisemitic things I’ve seen on campus.” While Beyond The Headlines: Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, & Anti-Palestinian Bias, as Len Gutkin put it in The Chronicle Review, is “an almost perfectly meaningless soup of evasive abstractions.”

A relatively small group of Northwestern students objected, boycotting the training and holding protests on campus, upon which “the University doubled down on the mandatory completion of the training, escalating consequences to include potential loss of student status, financial aid and on-campus housing.” While Koso and Gutkin have thus far, with good reason and incisive reporting, focused on the producers of the training videos and the intransigence of the Northwestern administration, I want to draw attention to the platform via which the videos are being delivered: Qualtrics XM.

Qualtrics XM is a Software As A Service (SaaS) platform (mayday, mayday) which markets heavily to colleges and universities. According to their website, Qualtrics XM is “trusted by over 1,200 Higher Education partners.” Qualtrics started primarily as a digital survey tool, utilized by both non-academic staff and social science researchers, but in 2018, at the same time Qualtrics XM was launched, Qualtrics rebranded themselves as an “experience management company” (that’s what the XM stands for). In other words, they became a technofeudal surveillance operation. Qualtrics still provides survey tools, but the XM platform also delivers dynamic multimedia that measures and metricizes user engagement.

Qualtrics XM quickly became the company’s signature product, and Qualtrics became a trendy tech brand, with investors circling. Among them was a private equity firm focused on technology, Silver Lake Partners, who took a $500 million stake in Qualtrics upon its IPO in 2021. That purchase qualified for a seat on Qualtrics’ board of directors, which would be occupied by Silver Lake’s current co-CEO, Egon Durban. Within two years, Durban would help convince his fellow board members to accept a leveraged buyout led by Silver Lake to take Qualtrics private again. By the Summer of 2023, Silver Lake owned outright what was then probably the largest and most powerful privately-owned platform for aggregating HigherEd data.

At $12.5 billion, the Qualtrics buyout was, briefly, the largest deal in Silver Lake’s history, but it was a lower valuation than the 2021 IPO and part of a trend of Silver Lake directors, particularly Durban, converting board seats at public companies into leveraged buyouts by Silver Lake, a “complex deal dance,” as the Financial Times called it, which other board members and competing firms sometimes objected to. Less than a year earlier, Durban had been booted from Twitter’s board under suspicion his allegiance to Elon Musk (who has a history of investing with Silver Lake) was in conflict with his fiduciary duty as a board member considering Musk’s purchase offer.

In addition to being a “longtime business associate and backer of Elon Musk,” as CNBC put it, Durban has a reputation for working closely with one of Musk’s most prominent co-investors in the Twitter deal, Larry Ellison.

With Durban as face of the firm, Silver Lake has become the most extensive co-signer of the emergent Ellison Family Media Empire.3 Alongside Oracle, Silver Lake has substantial equity in the government-assisted sale of TikTok USA. The firm likely has significant equity in Paramount as well. A Silver Lake Managing Director was added to Paramount’s Board of Directors after the Skydance merger. Immediately therafter, Paramount signed an $8 Billion deal to carry the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which is owned by a company which Silver Lake purchased for $25 Billion earlier this year.4

The connections between Ellison and Silver Lake go all the way back to the firm’s founding, by a former Oracle executive, David Roux, who once described Ellison as “a silver-backed gorilla alpha male.” Ellison was one of the first large investors in Silver Lake and permitted Roux and his partners to use his name when raising their first fund. Ellison has continued to be a cheerleader for many of Silver Lake’s deals, including the leveraged buyout of Dell Technologies via which control of the company was returned to its founder, Michael Dell. Soon thereafter, Dell and Ellison became, as Arik Hesseldahl put it, “the best of friends,” and Dell Technologies started specializing in hardware tailored to Oracle’s enterprise software. Dell happens to be joining Oracle and Silver Lake as a co-investor in the TikTok USA deal.

Though it’s hard to know how much money Ellison has under management by Silver Lake, industry analysts presume he continues to exercise considerable influence over the firm, both as an investor and an advisor to members of the management team, including Durban. After Silver Lake announced the leveraged buyout of video game developer, Electronic Arts (EA), early this month - what will be the largest private equity deal ever, with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner acting as handmaiden5 - Fries wrote in the The Tokenist, “In broader terms, EA’s acquisition should be understood as another step in media consolidation, spearheaded by Israeli-aligned Larry Ellison.”

EA is best known for its football simulations, first-person shooters, and fantasy role-playing games, but more than any of EA’s wildly popular gaming franchises, Silver Lake and its co-investors likely covet its data-mining operations. Since 2013, EA has been building one of gaming’s largest and most advanced infrastructures for collecting, warehousing, and analyzing user data. “Once the game is installed on a user’s machine,” Bernard Marr writes in Big Data In Practice (2016), “be that a console, phone or PC, it can gather information about that device. If the user connects their social media accounts (to make it easier to play games with friends), it can learn everything they share on there.”

EA holds on to enormous repositories of information about their customers, mined from device logs, as well as from financial micro-transactions, closed-circuit chatrooms and telecoms, and every aspect of gameplay itself, which in some cases can be personalized, micro-targeted, and/or customized by machine-learning.6 Most importantly, EA can quickly develop data profiles which follow gamers to whatever games they play and whichever devices they play on, potentially even beyond the EA ecosystem. As EA’s Global Chief Technology Officer, Rajat Taneja, puts it, “The secret to all of this was changing fundamentally how we thought about identity…capturing all of the events from their phone, from their console or PC, into a single persona - this allows all the data around them to be actioned properly.”

As a fellow portfolio company of Silver Lake, EA is now, just like Qualtrics, best understood as a surveillance operation. As an owner of both companies, Silver Lake is now positioned to synergize these surveillance operations, potentially to connect the unique identifiers of EA gamers to their student records. Not only whether they signed the loyalty oath, but how fast, and how deliberately they engaged the propaganda, can now be “actioned properly” by the Ellison Family Media Empire and its partners.

III.

Fellow Oracle founder and venture capitalist, Kathryn Gould, reported in 2014 that she remembers Larry Ellison telling her, during the period they were working together in the early 1980s, that his favorite book was Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons (1934). Published in the midst of the Great Depression, Josephson intended his book be an explainer of “how we, as a nation, had got into such a mess.” It was not intended as a roadmap for reviving industrial oligarchy. But, after generations of Cold War historians took to sanding down the rough edges of the Gilded Age business practices to fit the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics, I can appreciate why Ellison would prefer Josephson to Allan Nevins or Francis Fukuyama. What good is studying the robber barons if you cannot learn their dirty tricks?

Josephson traces “how they got their money,” including “a candid description of their most ruthless actions, their conspiracies and their plunderings; for they accepted no ethics of business conduct.” The Robber Barons is unflinching in its depiction of the federal spoils system, the municipal political machines, and the selective enforcement of labor and property law, financial regulation, and, at the turn of the century, antitrust.

Josephson concludes his history with a biting critique of Theodore Roosevelt’s idiosyncratic application of the Sherman Antitrust Act. While Roosevelt coveted the reputation of “trust-buster” in public feuds with J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, the magnates who he tussled with in the press always managed to come away from their antitrust persecutions wealthier and more powerful. Josephson regards Roosevelt’s antitrust agenda as actually designed to defang labor organizing and progressive factions in his own party, and simultaneously “conciliate the great industrialists.”

Josephson refines the critique which Mark Twain leveled when he said that Roosevelt “persisted in attacking the symptoms and in letting the disease carefully alone.” And Josephson’s critique was itself further refined by John Kenneth Galbraith, who saw the legacy of Sherman as the creation of a “useful futility” for political theatrics and “a cul-de-sac in which reform can safely be contained.” As economic inequality increases, so does political corruption by the “malefactors of great wealth,” as Roosevelt famously called them, and unfortunately U.S. antitrust has as often been a weapon wielded on behalf of such malefaction as against it.

This sad history is something which should always be front of mind when antitrust is invoked by politicians, as it was earlier this week. Right in the midst of the Ellison-led consolidation spree made possible by kleptocratic weaponization of antitrust’s permission powers, a quartet of GOP senators launched an oversight investigation on the basis of those thorny punishment powers. Were this investigation to lead to actual litigation, its purpose would ostensibly be to break the monopoly of private universities. According to these senators, a cabal of universities may be using “algorithmic collusion” to “maximize their profits or coordinate their pricing, financial aid, and admissions practices.”

There may be more to say about this investigation as it progresses, or it may prove to be little more than a minor and ineffectual incursion in the broader war on Higher Education. Its most substantial revelation, at present, is that these Congressmen regard the aggregation, monetization, and instrumentalization of data across private equity portfolios as a foregone conclusion, as standard practice. It is not the data harvesters they are after. To revive Twain’s metaphor, they are quite content to harass the symptoms - university admissions - while leaving the disease carefully alone.7

Congress is not is not blind to how tech companies and investment funds are creating dark markets of private data for “algorithmic collusion.” Our government takes technofeudalism for granted. The robber barons of the New Gilded Age will built their fiefdoms by extracting attention, enabling addiction, scraping, stealing, and enclosing the data that addiction produces, then selling it back to the individuals and institutions they took to from in the first place as software subscriptions, customized “experiences,” gamified labor, and artificial intelligence. There appears to no broad objection to this from either U.S. political party. What they are currently competing for is the power to appropriate this technofeudal architecture for suppression, indoctrination, and thought policing.

IV.

In her column for the New York Times earlier this week, Tressie McMillan Cottom synthesized so much of what has been happening in the weeks since the Paramount Skydance merger laid the foundation for the Ellison Family Media Empire. It has been tempting for many to compare the Ellisons to the Murdochs, and to presume the result of their spending spree will be another flock of partisan news organizations. Cottom recognizes this as a comparably pleasant, lulling illusion. While partisan news in the Murdoch mold has certainly done plenty of harm, it is also a remnant of a media ecosystem which is fast fading. (The average age of a Fox News viewer in 2024, according to Pew Research, was 69.) Partisan news can be metabolized by an American demos. Our news organizations have never really been otherwise.

What has emerged more recently is not simply partisan journalism, but parallel journalism. Entire outlets which exist not, as Fox News or the New York Post does, to market news with an ideological framing that appeals to one cross-section of enthusiastic consumers. For parallel journalism, consumer appeal ceases to matter altogether. The outlet imitates existing new organizations, but operates exclusively as a polished publicity machine for the moneyed interests which support it. Any revenue generated by subscriptions or advertising is incidental, and has no impact on framing or editorial positions, which are determined by their service to the political-economic interests of the core businesses of the ownership group.

The Free Press was an archetypal parallel journalism publication. But what Cottom recognizes is that the Ellisons are positioning themselves to move not only past partisanship, but also potentially past parallel media, to paragovernmentality, providing a president who already possesses the “direct coercive power of the state” with, as she puts it, “indirect power over communication institutions” in every digital mass media form: television networks, film studios, streaming services, microvideo platforms, console games, enterprise software systems, AI chatbots, news aggregators, and podcast networks.

The U.S. version of paragovernmental media will need to maintain a thin veneer of independence, at least initially, for fear of activating deeply ingrained Sinophobia and Russophobia, but the models for the Ellison Family Media Empire are not so much Fox News or The Free Press, but Russia’s MIA Rossiya Segodnya or the China Media Group.

Both are relatively new operations, at least in their present structure, produced by combinations and consolidations of communist-era state media and globalist-era private media over the course of the 2010s. Whether or not they have yet been successful, these paragovernmental media monoliths are constructed with the ambition of controlling digital A/V content, not only by limiting what residents can access, but also by monitoring, archiving, and analyzing their media habits both for the purpose of identifying potential political dissidents and customizing propaganda.8

The Ellisons’ Frankensteinian Big Brother is stitched together from legacy brands, tech unicorns, shady start-ups, and glorified holding companies. Like the Chinese and Russian precursors, it sits atop a fusion (sometimes confusion) of cable television, Web 2.0, and Generative AI infrastructures. However, unlike the Chinese and Russian models, statist media is not an acculturated fact of American life.

This is a crucial thread of Cottom’s essay. “The merging of state power and economic power around one man who accepts that power as his due,” Cottom contends, “would not be possible without the algorithmic grift that has so all-consumingly captured our attention.” At least as yet, most of us have not been formally conscripted to the data mines, we are there of our own volition, or, at least, we still have some power to break our addictions, or to reject, as the Northwestern protestors have, the indirect coercive powers, to force the monopoly of violence to reveal its true self.

Cottom viscerally captures the creeping Orwellian totalitarianism in her diagnosis, but also, implicitly, nudges us towards one of the pressure points in its technofeudal design. It has not yet fully extricated itself from the sole inalienable right of neoliberalism: the freedom of consumer choice. American kleptocracy is built atop a system of extraction which requires nearly universal and largely voluntary participation in an attention economy activated by mountains of debt. If even a relatively small proportion of American consumer-citizens start canceling their subscriptions, deactivating their accounts, deleting their apps, turning off their screens, not only does the Ellison Family Media Empire find itself hurdling toward insolvency, authoritarianism wilts.

Cottom cautions us against seeing Jimmy Kimmel as the canary in the coal mine, as, for instance, Robert Reich has argued. The failure to get Kimmel’s show canceled, despite a direct threat from the FCC Chairman, shows, once again, that antitrust punishment powers are unreliable, while the organized cancellation of Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions shows how sensitive heavily leveraged media conglomerates are to even moderate declines in revenue. But, while Reich celebrates this as “the great sleeping giant of America awakening,” Cottom chastens us: “We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks.”

I agree. The dollar is no longer the reserve currency of American capitalism. Digital data is. Data strikes are not our only power, but they are an absolutely imperative one. A broad, targeted movement of New Luddism can and will disrupt the conspiracies of capital which are, at present, held together by shrinking margins, nigh-unlimited leverage, speculative euphoria, corporate welfare, algorithmic collusion, broligarchic handshakes of mutually-assured destruction, and octogenarian charisma. Big Brother is still in its Beta phase. We can opt out.

A chance to reflect, with journalism professor Jeff Sharlet, on his book, The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War (Norton, 2023), the looming threat of acceleration, the methods and media of lingering, documentary modernism, and monsters within.

Jeff Sharlet is Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth University and the author of the Scenes From A Slow Civil War newsletter.

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:

-, “Speak Your Piece” The Mountain Eagle (September 17, 2025)

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

Geoff Bennett & Sam Lane, “Why The U.S. Is Experiencing Heightened Political Violence” PBS NewsHour (September 11, 2025)

Chip Brownlee, “Narratives About the Killing of Charlie Kirk May Be More Powerful Than The Facts” The Trace (September 12, 2025)

Eric Francis, “Another Day, Another Overdose” Daybreak (September 5, 2025)

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules & Men (1935)

Clare Malone, “Is The Media Prepared For An Extinction-Level Event” The New Yorker (February 10, 2024)

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

Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War (Norton, 2023)

Jeff Sharlet, “The Mourning Suit” (with Ann Neumann) Scenes From A Slow Civil War (September 15, 2025)

Jeff Sharlet, “Radioactive” Scenes From A Slow Civil War (September 12, 2025)

Jeff Sharlet, “The Struggle is Long” Scenes From A Slow Civil War (September 10, 2025)

Jeff Sharlet, “The Longform of Lingering in a Place Just To See How It Is…” Scenes From A Slow Civil War (August 22, 2025)

Jeff Sharlet, Johanna Roth, & Xifan Yang, “The Real Danger Always Comes From The Military” Die Ziet (September 16, 2025)

Jeff Sharlet, Amy Goodman, & Nermeen Shaikh, “Moment of Great Peril” Democracy Now! (September 11, 2025)

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto For An Accelerationist Politics” Critical Legal Thinking (May 14, 2013)

Even as late as when I began releasing episodes (and made my first mentions of technofeudalism) in September of 2024, the term had very minimal circulation, especially in North America. That clearly changed over the course of the year “A Tale of Today” was being distributed.

As far as I could tell, technofeudalism entered mainstream discourse when Steve Bannon started using the term in his attacks on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in the early weeks of 2025, and thus the term started appearing in legacy media outlets which remain enduringly fascinated by Bannon.

However, there is a case to be made that the American Vandal episodes played a role in bringing Varoufakis’s specific version of technofeudalism into greater circulation.

With the help of James Livingston, whose curiosity about technofeudalism parallels my own, I was able to arrange to record with Varoufakis himself in March, and that interview, as well as one with Livingston recorded a week earlier, makes up the spine of the “Technofeudal Trilogy” within “A Tale of Today” (episodes 15-17, released in April and May).

But my interest in technofeudalism (and deployment of the term) is evident from the beginning of the series, and continues after the trilogy episodes were released. In two supplementary essays - “Against Technofeudal Education” and “The Technofedual Text” - both of which I wrote in June of 2025, I attempt to build on the work of Varoufakis and McKenzie Wark to explicate technofeudalism specifically in the context of U.S. higher education and the discipline of literary studies.

I was clearly not alone in finding the technofeudal thesis compelling. “Against Technofeudal Education” is the most popular installment of this newsletter to date, with “The Technofeudal Text” not terribly far behind. The first appearance of Varoufakis on the podcast is the second most-downloaded episode in both this season and the entire history of The American Vandal.

My perception is that the arguments associated with technofeudalism are growing more urgent, not less, especially as we approach the end of a business cycle after which the attention economy may need to be propped up by force.

So, on this landing page, I have collected together “The Technofeudal Trilogy,” as well as both prequel and afterward episodes from “A Tale of Today” which engage technofeudalism. As with the “HBCUs & The Philanthropcapitalist Swindle” landing page I created earlier in the season, my hope here is to assist both listeners who might consume this arc of the series independently, and teachers who might want to plan curriculum around it.

To the latter end, I have paired with each episode some “recommended readings” which are both easy to access digitally, relatively digestible, and appropriate for (advanced) students.

The Technofeudal Trilogy:

Featured Scholars: Samuel Freedman, Matt Seybold, Jeff Horwitz, Gil Duran, Andie Tucher, Jeff Jarvis, Yanis Varoufakis, Tressie McMillan Cottom

Recommended Reading:

Keach Hagey & Jeff Horwitz, “Facebook Tried To Make Its Platform A Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.” Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2021)

Gil Duran, “The Tech Baron Seeking To Purge San Francisco of ‘Blues’” New Republic (April 25, 2024)

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

Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Yanis Varoufakis, James Livingston, Astra Taylor

Recommended Reading:

Yanis Varoufakis, “Overthrowing Our Tech Overlords” Noema (June 25, 2024)

Morgan Meaker & Yanis Varoufakis, “Welcome To The Age of Technofeudalism” Wired (April 9, 2024)

James Livingston, "What Was Capitalism?" Project Syndicate (February 16, 2024)

James Livingston, "Steve Bannon Reads Christopher Lasch" Politics, Letters, Persons (July 4, 2025)

Tim Barker, "Dealignment" New Left Review (November 11, 2024)

Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Yanis Varoufakis, Jordan S. Carroll, James Livingston, Astra Taylor, Leigh Claire La Berge

Recommended Reading:

Yanis Varoufakis, "Trump & The Triumph of The Technolords" Project Syndicate (April 30, 2025)

John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Prophets & Promise of Classical Capitalism” from The Age of Uncertainty (PBS, 1977)

John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Manners & Morals of High Capitalism” from The Age of Uncertainty (PBS, 1977)

Matt Seybold, "Authoritarianism Is The Bailout" The American Vandal (February 21, 2025)

The Prequels:

Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Jordan S. Carroll, Douglas Dowland, Jeff Jarvis

Recommended Reading:

Jodi Dean, “Feudalism By Design: On Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism” Los Angeles Review of Books (April 10, 2023)

Gil Duran, “The People of Solano County Versus The Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia” The New Republic (January 4, 2024)

Nicholas Kusnetz & Katie Surma, “A Lawsuit From Backers of a ‘Startup City’ Could Bankrupt Honduras” Wired (September 28, 2024)

Featured Scholars: Gil Duran, Matt Seybold, Jeff Horwitz, Andie Tucher, Jacob Silverman, Jeff Jarvis

Recommended Reading:

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Prepare For The Textpocalypse” The Atlantic (March 8, 2023)

Jeff Horwitz, “The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants To Fix The Company, Not Harm It” Wall Street Journal (October 3, 2021)

Jeff Horwitz et al, “Facebook’s Pushback: Stem The Leaks, Spin The Politics, Don’t Say Sorry” Wall Street Journal (December 29, 2021)

Featured Scholars: Astra Taylor, Matt Seybold, Nathan Wolff

Recommended Reading:

Astra Taylor, “Barons or Commoners” Massey Lectures (2024)

Nathan Wolff, “First As Farce: Structures of Feeling in The Gilded Age” Quarry Farm Symposium (October 11, 2024)

Slavoj Zizek, “Against The Populist Temptation” Critical Inquiry (Spring 2006)

The Afterwards:

Featured Scholars: Fredric Jameson, Matt Seybold, Jordan S. Carroll, Jacob Silverman

Recommended Reading:

Jordan S. Carroll, “Reactionary Futurism 2025” Los Angeles Review of Books (June 16, 2025)

Jacob Silverman, "Elon Musk Eyes A Shadow Presidency" The Nation (October 30, 2024)

Jacob Silverman, “Future Fail” Baffler (September 2017)

Jacob Silverman, “From Trump Convictions to Assassination Attempts: How Prediction Markets Have Turned American Politics Into A Casino” Vanity Fair (September 26, 2024)

Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Nathan Wolff

Recommended Reading:

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes” New York Times (March 29, 2025)

Jelani Favors, "The Second Curriculum" The Point (August 15, 2021)

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

Matt Seybold, “The Klepto-Keynesian Showdown” The American Vandal (November 15, 2024)

McCloskey’s was not a favorable review. She was trying to pull off what to that point no one else had, acknowledging the undeniable rigor and empirical achievement of meticulously aggregating over a century of tax records from several of the wealthiest nations in the world, while also questioning the conclusion Piketty draws from that work, that it was not only populist, but economically sound policy, to tax the everloving shit out of the rich.

For Piketty to be making this argument, with such surprising general interest, in the midst of a galloping global financial crisis, was inconvenient, to say the least, for an economic establishment which had spent most of the last half century amassing resources, prestige, and political influence by advocating the exact opposite thing.

On the back of this review, McCloskey temporarily ascended to what I, at the time, called Aunt Deidre’s throne.2 She was, for at least a few years, if not the most admired member of the economics profession, certainly the most feared. Her talent for methodological critique, which had been quite inconvenient for her peers when it was directed at things like regression analysis and existence theorems, now made her the darling of the orthodoxy. The Koch Brothers favorite economist was a trans woman. Wonder of wonders.

While I do not agree with McCloskey on many issues, including progressive taxation, I do consider her the greatest economic thinker the Chicago School has ever produced, and her Piketty review is something to be reckoned with, especially the correlation she posits between rising economic inequality in the Global North and rising living standards in the Global South.3

But the review begins with a cheap shot. One of McCloskey’s collaborators, Jordan Ellenberg, persuaded Amazon to release to him a cache of anonymized user data for all the customers who purchased the Kindle edition of Capital In The 21st Century. Armed with this proprietary data, McCloskey was able to reveal that the average Kindle reader did not quite make it through Piketty’s introduction, much less the remaining 629 pages.

For McCloskey, the Kindle data analysis was a creative way to establish why she thought her review was necessary. Piketty’s book was a popular phenomenon, but it was not an easy read. There was cause for careful parsing of its arguments. But in the ensuing celebration of McCloskey’s review, the Kindle analysis got cited more than any other part of her argument, as though neoclassical economy theory could go on being safely wrong, so long as people who had access to the truth were keeping it safely tucked away in the cloud or behind an unbroken spine on their coffee table.

When I read McCloskey’s review, more than a decade ago, I remember thinking both that this type of data would be of enormous interest to computational literary scholars, but also that I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

Even though McCloskey was talking about tens of thousands of Kindle readers in the aggregate, there was something mildly voyeuristic and intrusive about spying on them this way. My personal ideal of reading is contemplative, intimate, intensely private. If a meticulous account of its operation were to be publicized, I would be mortified.

Moreover, as somebody who has long studied the logical fallacies of quantification, I suspected it was dangerously reductive to evaluate reading this way. What did it really prove? I ask you, esteemed scholars of literary studies, how many of you have claimed to have read a book, when, in fact, you only read the introduction? I was sure that readers of McCloskey’s review, myself included, did not know enough about the cognitive science of reading to draw any conclusions from the Kindle analysis, certainly not enough to invalidate a book’s arguments because of the selective ways people chose to read it.

I did not know it at the time, but this was my first encounter with what today I’m calling the technofeudal text, a piece of writing which exists as digital information stored in a networked cloud architecture and therefore has a kind of magnetic, even parasitical relationship to its readers, where information about them is affixed to it, accruing value, independent of whether and how much they pay to access it.

The mixed economic and gastronomic metaphors which have long been associated with the practice of reading, foremost among them consumption, no longer apply. Or at least, if we are still devouring digital books, they are also, ouroboros-like, simultaneously devouring us, our attention to them being automatically measured and archived in increasingly granular ways.

Sometimes such monetizable data is simply used to sell us more books, or to sell us other things. But it is increasingly likely to be used to teach machines to make more attention-grabbing books. Or maybe, at least in the aspirations of anti-labor AI entrepreneurs, machines can be trained to read like literature professors, or periodical editors, or literary critics, or booktubers, so that those professional classes can be eliminated, and their incomes confiscated.

At this point, it’s probably necessary to define what technofeudalism is. If you listened to the most recent season of The American Vandal Podcast you already have some idea.4 The term itself was coined by a French Marxian political economist, Cedric Durand, and popularized by the Greek political economist, Yanis Varoufakis. But it derives in part from preceding work by the American media theorist, McKenzie Wark, who calls it vectoralism, and is closely related to what the American Marxian political scientist, Jodi Dean, refers to as neofeudalism.

For today, I’m going to forego what have been most heated debates about this emerging body of scholarship: whether or not technofeudalism is actually a feudalism and whether technofeudalism is just another instantiation of capitalism. I suppose there are important arguments to be made about what to call it and about whether it amounts to a transformation of our economic system (as all the above scholars claim), or is just a new phase of capitalism, maybe somehow related to what Anna Kornbluh calls “Too Late Capitalism.” But I care more today about what makes technofeudalism new, whether as phase or system. As Anna puts it, I’m more interested in its “descriptive value” than its “analytic value.”

There is some conflict between Dean, Durand, Varoufakis, and Wark on what precisely are technofeudalism’s distinguishing characteristics, but they all agree that one of them is the asymmetric monetization of data, or what I’ll call, later on, the capta economy.

In short, as many have observed, data is a new currency, maybe the new currency. More precisely user data or personal data, data associated with markers of identity that can be cross-referenced and aggregated across multiple environments and use cases, the kind of data out of which you can build a consumer profile or a voter profile, and thereafter dabble in behavioral prediction and modification. This currency, much more so than, say, crypto, is increasingly stable and liquid.

It holds its value across borders and can be exchanged for almost anything: fiat currencies, commodity goods, technical services. During nearly every moment of everyday, so long as we’re carrying mobile devices around, we are mining this currency in tiny increments. But we don’t own it, and even if we did, we couldn’t use it.

It only becomes currency when it is extracted by a monopolistic technofeudal architecture like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. Those are some of the obvious ones, but there are lots of others which you might not immediately think of: Wark discusses at length Walmart’s internal logistics platform. Varoufakis talks about Tesla’s satellite tracking systems. Durand mentions the development of the augmented reality game, Pokémon Go, for Google.

We are sometimes required to use technofeudal platforms for work, school, and citizenship, and heavily incentivized to use them for social and civic engagement, as well as leisure activities. We are producing value for these companies as workers and consumers, certainly, but also just when we drive to pick up our kids from school, tell our friends about a recipe we liked, or read a PDF of Deirdre McCloskey’s review of Thomas Piketty.

In the years since McCloskey’s review was published, the data Amazon produces with its Kindle readers has gotten much vaster and more granular, better able to measure reading speeds and annotation styles, but also, at least on some devices, track eye movements, facial expressions, and auditory responses. I don’t think they would any longer give this data away to curious scholars who shared their anti-egalitarian politics. It’s way too valuable in a business cycle driven by the AGI dream.

Any data associated with language acts, whether reading, writing, or speaking, creates LLM corpuses, trains machine-learning algorithms, sharpens dynamic interfaces.

Language acts have become the reserve currency of technofeudalism.

And yet, AI evangelists are forecasting the end of reading. In a TedTalk earlier this year, Victor Riparbelli, founder of the multi-billion dollar GenAI startup, Synthesia, backed by Amazon and Adobe, said, “One day we’ll look back at human texts as mere historical artifacts, like cave paintings.” Writing for the business magazine, Fast Company, the professional AI thought leader (we used to call them industry shills), Alex Goryachev, says, already students “no longer need to read in the traditional sense.”

These are just two examples of something which is already becoming received wisdom in Silicon Valley. Professional educators’ long emphasis on literacy is increasingly just a prejudice of specist moralizers, who also believe in things like sympathy, due process, and civil society.

But the trivialization of reading by AI hype merchants is a fable of obsolescence in support of a practice of enclosure. On one level, this is already obvious and well underway. Alphabet, Amazon, and other technofeudal enterprises have been enshittifying and sunsetting free services (Alexa Traffic, Chartable, Google Books, etc.) that generate salable data because, I expect, they would prefer the information contained within them reside behind a firewall, accessible only with a subscription chatbot. Not only does the chatbot become more marketable if it has access to corpuses which are not on the open web, but the technofeudalists are then free to manipulate those corpuses as they see fit.

Some of the danger which lies ahead was indicated recently when the X-owned AI chatbot, Grok, told on itself, reporting that information about the holocaust had been manually removed from its corpus.5 The very same week, federal lawmakers tried to invalidate a California law which required LLMs to report of what their textual corpuses consisted of.6

It is dystopian enough to imagine a near future in which the contents of our libraries and archives have a new set of technofeudal gatekeepers. We may have to pay for access to many of things which were once free, at least for the relatively educated and relatively privileged citizens of the Global North. But also, upon enclosure, the technofeudalists, who have apparent authoritarian tendencies, will be free to edit and erase history as they see fit.

But I actually don’t think that’s the most dystopian part.

During the “Criticism LTD” series I produced a couple years ago, Ted Underwood described the AI boom as a vindication for linguists, structural theorists, and literary studies generally. It is now conventional wisdom amongst AI developers that the foundational building blocks of intelligence are language acts: reading, writing, speaking, translating, transcoding.

The imaginary for technofeudal LLM developers is a comprehensive taxonomy of the relationship between words and human reaction to words. Alas, upon recognizing the value of language work - the kind of work already done by linguists, critical theorists, narratologists, comparativists, literary translators, rhetoricians, and writing professors; work which has been aggressively deskilled and defunded for decades - the technofeudal response has been to pursue elimination of the competition and monopolization of the resource. If AI is going to fuel the next tech boom, and literacy is a building block of AI, they better stop letting people have literacy for free, or at all.

What if the future of reading is much like the present of energy? Yes, we could have an abundance of it - cheap, renewable, generative energy - but then it wouldn’t so useful for consolidating power and reinforcing class hierarchies. Better to economize it.

And what if we could also do that with the textual and verbal histories of human knowledge?

In her review of Piketty, McCloskey points out that the Latin root of data is “things given,” but that the documentation Piketty is working with, primarily tax records, is more accurately a reflection of “things seized.” That is, not data, but capta.

I want to détourné McCloskey’s point to argue that capta is the appropriate title for the currencies of technofeudalism.7 It is an economy which is growing increasingly inefficient, coercive, and authoritarian because the economic process it glorifies is not one of mutual consent to market exchange, but of non-consensual seizure of attention, identity, and future potential.

A process which aspires to not only enclose literature, but literacy itself.

The above paper was originally composed for a symposium on “The History & Future of Reading Inside & Beyond the University,” hosted by University of Notre Dame - London and co-sponsored by University of London. You can hear that presentation as the opening to the “Cruel Futurism” finale of “A Tale of Today.” But while I believe our circumstances are dire, I am reticent to describe them without also discussing strategies for building alternative and better futures, so I concluded this talk with the following…

Addendum

We are not entirely without recourse. In “Against Technofeudal Education,” I offered six strategies for protecting the core infrastructure of schools. One of those, which I have talked about on the podcast before, is directly related to the topic of this symposium, so I’ll close with some infrapolitics, and some sloganeering.

Print is a rent strike.

Yanis Varoufakis does not refer to the asymmetric monetization output as capta, but as rent. We are paying technofeudalists rent in the currencies they make of our identity and attention, sometimes for platforms that we already pay for in conventional currencies - for instance, Netflix - and sometimes for platforms which we occupy due to some form of compulsion: an employer required Gmail address (owned by Alphabet), for instance, or an institutional mandate to distribute course materials through Canvas (owned by KKR/Dragoneer, partnered with OpenAI).

Sometimes technofeudal rent is a pre-condition to selling our labor. Say, you have to have an Interfolio account (owned by Elsevier, previously by Quad Partners/Blu Venture) just to apply for a job. Or a pre-condition to accessing public goods or a pre-condition to simply living a life other than monastic self-denial and misanthropic hermitage. Pretty much any time we use the internet for work, citizenship, sociality, or leisure, we are paying rent, whether we understand ourselves to be on the clock or not. And the technofeudalists are not required to share these proceeds with any state or collective. They alone can use them to assert market power wherever and howsoever they so choose.

As I hope I’ve shown, the rise of technofeudalism has relied extensively on appropriations and enclosures of texts. The decommodifications of journalism by Twitter-cum-X, the parasitic aggregation of news by Facebook, the scaling of bookselling on Amazon, archival digitization of scholarship by EBSCO, the proliferation of e-readers and networked word processors by Adobe and Microsoft, and the avaricious crawling, copying, and wholesale purchasing of text corpuses by all of the companies I just mentioned to build Large Language Models.

Text is not the only resource being enclosed by technofeudalists, but its the foundational one.

It’s not easy, but we can boycott the technofeudal text. In fact, I bet some of you love boycotting the technofeudal text already. You boycott the technofeudal text because you like holding a book in your hands, or its easier on your eyes, or you just like the way a pencil feels on paper.

Returning to, or remaining with, print objects denies technofeudalists opportunities to extract and monetize capta, which would be available to them if you read or wrote the same material in your browser, on your phone or tablet, or in your learning management system.

Print charges no capta rent. Therefore, print is a rent strike.

We put it on a t-shirt.

The finale of "A Tale of Today," the eleventh season of The American Vandal Podcast. Matt Seybold offers his journey of curiosity from the end of "Criticism LTD" to "The Technofeudal Text."

If you’re looking for Print is a rent strike. t-shirts, please visit All Grim Prints.

All music for this season of The American Vandal Podcast comes from the Tennessee-based roots ensemble DownRiver Collective. Most of the tracks come from their most recent EP, Off The Shelf. You can purchase it direct from the band here. It's also available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Excerpts from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age come from the audiobook edition produced by SNR Audio and narrated by Nathan Osgood. Available at Audible, as well as other audiobook retailers. SNR has an extensive catalog of professionally-narrated adaptations of 19th-century Anglophone fiction, including The Complete Mark Twain Collection.

Nathan Osgood is an actor and voice artist who has being appearing in films, scripted television, video games, podcasts, and audiobooks since the mid-'90s. In 2018, he played Mark Twain in the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly vehicle, Holmes and Watson.

Episode Bibliography:

Sam Altman & Cleo Abram, “Altman Show Me GPT-5…And What’s Next” Huge Coversations (August 7, 2025)

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011)

Wendy Brown, Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2017)

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

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes” New York Times (March 29, 2025)

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy” New York Times (November 6, 2024)

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

Jacques Derrida, “The Madness of Economic Reason” in Given Time (U Chicago P, 1992)

Gil Duran, "Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarians Idea" The New Republic (July 22, 2024)

Gil Duran, "The People of Solano County Versus The Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia" The New Republic (January 4, 2024)

Gil Duran, "The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of A Right-Wing San Francisco" The New Republic (February 12, 2024)

Cedric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism (Verso, 2020) [French Edition, 2020]

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

Jelani Favors, "The Second Curriculum" The Point (August 15, 2021)

Bryant Morey French, Mark Twain & The Gilded Age: The Book That Named An Era (Southern Methodist UP, 1965)

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

Alex Goryachev, “AI is Changing Reading, Writing, & Learning” Fast Company (April 11, 2025)

David Harvey, Marx, Capital, & The Madness of Economic Reason (Oxford UP, 2017)

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As A Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1981)

Fredric Jameson, “Models of Ideological Analysis” 1977 Institute On Culture & Society

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

John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment" Quarterly Journal of Economics (February, 1937)

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)

James Livingston, "What Was Capitalism?" Project Syndicate (February 16, 2024)

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)

Deirdre McCloskey, The Vices of Economists, The Virtuies of the Bourgeosie (Amsterdam UP, 1996)

Elon Musk & Tucker Carlson, “Potential Dangers of Hyper-Intelligent AI” Fox News (April 17, 2023)

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard UP, 2014)

Victor Riparbelli, “Will AI Make Us The Last Generation To Read & Write?” TED Talks (October 19, 2024)

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

Matt Seybold, “The Klepto-Keynesian Showdown” The American Vandal (November 15, 2024)

Matt Seybold, "Authoritarianism Is The Bailout" The American Vandal (February 21, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Neoliberal Rationality in The Old Gilded Age: Introductory Address at 2018 Quarry Farm Symposium” MarkTwainStudies.com (October 5, 2018)

Matt Seybold et al, "Cruel Optimism & The Enclosure of the Commons" The American Vandal (September 12, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, “Solidarity & Speculation” The American Vandal (May 14, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, "The First Curriculum is Work Without Wages" The American Vandal (December 31, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, "Half Castle 'Gainst The Scott Walkers" The American Vandal Podcast (December 17, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, "The Education Gospel, Enshittify.edu, & The Expansion of Lower Ed" The American Vandal Podcast (November 25, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, "Philanthrocapitalism U" The American Vandal Podcast (November 12, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, "The Black University Concept & The Second Curriculum" The American Vandal Podcast (October 31, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, “Always Historicize?” The American Vandal Podcast (October 1, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Jameson Tapes, Side A” The American Vandal Podcast (August 4, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, "Newspapers Worse Than Dead (Bur Print Is A Rent Strike)" The American Vandal (April 4, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, "The Age of Insecurity" The American Vandal (Septermber 9, 2024)

Matt Seybold et al, “Ed Tech, AI, & The Unbundling of Research & Teaching” The American Vandal Podcast (November 2, 2023)

Matt Seybold et al, "The Facebook Files & The Gutenberg Parenthesis" The American Vandal (March 31, 2025)

Jacob Silverman, "Silicon Valley's Selfish Embrace of Trump" The New Republic (September 13, 2024)

Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (AK Press, 2023)

Astra Taylor, “The Age of Insecurity: 2023 CBC Massey Lectures” (CBC, 2023)

Astra Taylor & Naomi Klein, “The Rise of End Times Fascism” The Guardian (April 13, 2025)

Peter Thiel & Ross Douthat, “Peter Thiel & The Antichrist” New York Times (June 26, 2025)

Andie Tucher, Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, & the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (UNC Press, 1994)

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) [2006 Modern Library Edition]

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

Yanis Varoufakis, "Trump & The Triumph of The Technolords" Project Syndicate (April 30, 2025)

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

Raymond Williams, Marxism & Literature (Oxford UP, 1977)

Nathan Wolff, Not Quite Hope & Other Political Emotions In The Gilded Age (Oxford UP, 2019)

Nathan Woolf, "First As Farce: Structures of Feeling in The Gilded Age" Quarry Farm Symposium Keynote (2024)

Remastered audio of Fredric Jameson's second lecture at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society sponsored by the Marxist Literary Group and hosted by St. Cloud State University.

For further context, consider listening to "The Jameson Tapes" Side A and Side B, as well as the first lecture in the series, "Models of Ideological Analysis.”

Cast:

Fredric Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute of Critical Theory at Duke University.

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.

All music for this season of The American Vandal Podcast comes from the Tennessee-based roots ensemble DownRiver Collective. Most of the tracks come from their most recent EP, Off The Shelf. You can purchase it direct from the band here. It's also available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Tracks featured in this episode are “Days Don’t Stop” & “As It Was”

Episode Bibliography:

Luis Althusser, “Ideology & Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) in Lenin & Philosophy (Verso, 1971)

Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, et al, Reading Capital (1965) [2009 Verso Edition] [2016 Verso Complete Edition]

Franz Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man (Macmillan, 1938)

Bruce Boone, Century of Clouds (Hoddypoll Press, 1980) [2009 Nightboat Books Edition]

Bertold Brecht, A Short Organum For The Theatre (1949)

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967) [Hopkins UP 40th Anniversary Edition]

Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)

Terry Eagleton, Criticism & Ideology (New Left Books, 1976) [2006 Verso Edition]

Terry Eagleton, Marxism & Literary Criticism (U California P, 1976)

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God (1964) [2016 Verso Edition]

Lucien Goldmann, Towards A Sociology of The Novel (1963) [1975 Tavistock Edition]

Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation In Modern Society (1971) [1977 Basil Blackwell Edition]

Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences & Philosophy (Jonathan Cape, 1969)

Antonio Gramsci, Selections From The Prison Notebooks (International Publishers, 1971)

Stephen Heath, “Lessons From Brecht” Screen (Summer 1974)

G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (1816)

G. W. F. Hegel, Reason In History (1837)

G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of The Philosophy of Right (1820) [1991 Cambridge Edition]

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

G. W. F. Hegel, “Letter to F. I. Niethammer” in Hegel: The Letters (Indiana UP, 1984)

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As A Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1981)

Fredric Jameson, “The Case For George Lukacs” Salmagundi (Summer 1970)

Fredric Jameson, Marxism & Form (Princeton UP, 1974)

Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism & Russian Formalism (Princeton UP, 1975)

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

Fredric Jameson, “Marxism & Historicism” New Literary History (Autumn 1979)

Fredric Jameson, “Models of Ideological Analysis” 1977 Institute On Culture & Society

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1992)

Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or The Persistence of The Dialectic (Verso, 1990)

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism & The Consumer Society” [Original Version, 1983], revised and extended version published as first chapter of The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998)

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left Review (July/Aug 1984)

Fredric Jameson, “Class & Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon As A Political Film” College English (April 1977)

Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of Style (1961) [1984 Columbia UP Edition]

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Routledge, 1977)

Gaylord C. Leroy, “The Marxism of The Marxist Literary Group” Minnesota Review (Spring 1978)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought [The Savage Mind] (1962) [2021 U. Chicago Edition]

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw & The Cooked (1964) [1983 U. Chicago Edition]

George Lichtheim, “The Concept of Ideology” History & Theory (No. 2 1965)

Sylvère Lotringer & David Morris, Schizo-Culture (Semiotext(e), 2014)

George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)

György Lukács, History & Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) [1972 MIT Press Edition]

György Lukács, Theory of The Novel (1915) [1974 MIT Press Edition]

György Lukács, Soul & Form (1910) [2010 Columbia UP Edition]

György Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) [1983 University of Nebraska Edition with Introduction by Fredric Jameson]

Colin MacCabe, “Realism & The Cinema: Notes On Some Brechtian Theses” Screen (Summer 1974)

Karl Mannheim, Ideology & Utopia (1929)

Herbert Marcuse, Reason & Revolution: Hegel & The Rise of Social Theory (1940) [2023 Routledge Edition]

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (1867)

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1932)

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) [2003 Gingko Press Edition]

François Picavet, Les Idéologues (1891)

Leopold von Ranke, “Uber die Epochen der neueren Geschicte” (1854)

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Search For A Method” (1957) in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 (1960) [2004 Verso Edition]

Matt Seybold et al, “The Jameson Tapes, Side A” The American Vandal Podcast (August 4, 2025)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Jameson Tapes, Side B” The American Vandal Podcast (August 7, 2025)

Patrick Story, “The Spirit of St. Cloud: A Report” Minnesota Review (Spring 1978)

Raymond Williams, Marxism & Literature (Oxford UP, 1977)

Raymond Williams, “Base & Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” New Left Review (Nov-Dec, 1973)

Erik Olin Wright, “Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies” New Left Review (July/Aug 1976)