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

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

Date Recorded: April 30, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

Coalition Against Campus Debt, “Debt Audit Toolkit”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Event Copy

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

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

Date Recorded: April 30, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

Coalition Against Campus Debt, “Debt Audit Toolkit”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Event Copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Vandal Pod | New Republic | The Guardian

American Vandal Pod | Wired | Project Syndicate

The Guardian | American Vandal Pod

American Vandal Pod | New York Review of Books

MIT Tech Review | LRB | American Vandal

The Guardian | LRB | The New Yorker Pod

American Vandal Pod | e-flux

American Vandal Pod | The Baffler | Public Books

Los Angeles Review of Books

American Vandal Pod | MIT Media Studies

Los Angeles Review of Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ii. internal fears about the unreality of daily life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iii. gratuitous reminiscences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iv. successful manipulation and containment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: June 11, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

Featured Speakers

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

Isaac Asimov, “The Fun We Had” (1951)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pierre Levy, “Artificial Reading” SubStance (1997)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Stanford UP, 2009)

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

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

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

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

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

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

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

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

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

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)

NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory (Viking, 2022)

Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)

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

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

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

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

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

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)

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

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

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

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

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

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

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

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

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

Featured Guests

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

Wilfred Bion, Learning From Experience (1962)

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

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

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

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

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

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

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

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: June 1, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

Ron Chernow, Mark Twain (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)

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

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

Percival Everett, James (Doubleday, 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: May 6, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

Featured Guests

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: April 29, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: April 1, 2026

Music: Redd Holt & The Heptet

Featured Guests

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: March 3, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

Featured Guests

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead (HBO, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Whitmer, The Other Brian Whitmer [blog]

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

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

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

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

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

Honore de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy (Algonquin, 2022)

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

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

bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress (Routledge, 1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005)

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

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

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

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

Rudolf Arnheim, Film (1933)

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

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edouard Manet, Argenteuil (1875)

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2005)

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

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

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)

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

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

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

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

Date Recorded: November 7, 2025

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

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

Featured Speakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Bibliography

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

W. H. Auden, “The Dream” (1936)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946)

James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption (2011)

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

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

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

Edward Denby, Dance Writings (Knopf, 1986)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth & Method (1960)

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

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

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

Martin Heidegger, Being & Time (1927)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)

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

Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Salt, 2001)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987)

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

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

I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929)

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

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

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

Walter Pater, Appreciations (1889)

Namwali Serpell, On Morrison (PenguinRandomHouse, 2026)

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

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

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

Keston Sutherland, Meditations (Last Books, 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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)

Event Copy

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.