The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism & Why it Matters with CHRISTINE WEBB

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism & Why it Matters with CHRISTINE WEBB

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A Conversation with Primatologist CHRISTINE WEBB

There are many ways in which I think human exceptionalism has seeped into the sciences, but one of the many ways is through the methodologies we use when we compare the intelligence of humans and other species. In particular, in my field, I’m a primatologist by training, comparing the cognitive abilities of humans with the abilities of our closest living relatives, the great apes. Many times, those studies compare the intelligence of captive chimpanzees who are living in highly restricted, manmade environments. Often, these chimpanzees have been separated from their biological mothers at birth. They're often separated from the group during testing. They're subjected to very human-centric experimental paradigms, like playing with plastic puzzle boxes or computer touchscreens, and we're measuring how they perform on these tasks.

How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave with Poet MAYA SALAMEH

How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave with Poet MAYA SALAMEH

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Poetry is like one of the great loves of my life, and I think it's probably the longest relationship I'll ever have. I read a lot of poetry. I also wrote these short stories even when I was pretty young, like in second grade, and the stories kept getting shorter and shorter. My family used to go to Damascus in Syria and Lebanon every summer for three months until 2011, when the Civil War broke out in Syria. In 2015, we made our first return after that gap, and my father and I went to Lebanon for two weeks. It's the first time I felt that I belong. To the extent that was true or not, I'm obviously irrevocably American. I speak broken Arabic. I don't think I could ever live in Lebanon or Syria. But for what it was worth at 15 years old, it was a life-changing trip. I wrote my first official poem on the plane back to San Diego from that trip, and I feel that was a formative moment for me. I felt that I had a story to tell and wanted to put it to paper in the form of poetry.

In 2015, we made our first return after that gap, and my father and I went to Lebanon for two weeks. Being back in one of my two homelands as a more fully formed person and not like a young child, I thought, "Wow, this is the first time I've been in an Arabic-speaking Arab place as a teenager." 

 Empire of AI: Dreams & Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI with KAREN HAO

 Empire of AI: Dreams & Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI with KAREN HAO

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My book is called Empire of AI because I'm trying to articulate this argument and illustrate that these companies operate exactly like empires of old. I highlight four features that essentially encapsulate the three things you read. However, I started talking about it in a different way after writing the book.

The four features are: they lay claim to resources that are not their own, which is the centralization of resources; they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor, both in the development of the technology and the fact that they're producing labor-automating technologies that then suppress workers' ability to bargain for better rights; they monopolize knowledge production, which comes when they centralize talent.

Arabic Literature, Palestine & The Art of Translation with HUDA FAKHREDDINE

Arabic Literature, Palestine & The Art of Translation with HUDA FAKHREDDINE

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A Conversation with HUDA FAKHREDDINE
Writer · Translator · Associate Professor of Arabic Literature · University of Pennsylvania

I'm Lebanese. I grew up in Lebanon during the Civil War, and I came to the United States as a graduate student with the intention of going back. I never wanted to stay here. I really thought that my life would happen in Beirut, in a city that I loved and hated in the healthiest of ways. My investments, both literary and intellectual, were rooted there. I came here as a graduate student and joined the PhD program, and then the events continued to unfold there, making life more and more of a risk, building a life in a place like Lebanon. The most important counterpoint in my life was meeting my partner, Ahmad Almallah, who is Palestinian. So immediately, my life became the life of a Palestinian by association. Of course, the past two years—almost two years—have been surreal. I sometimes don't believe that we're going through what we're going through because, as security concerns have become something we think about at home, when we walk from home to campus or my office, I'm constantly anxious to open my mail because often there are things that will require a lot of energy, time, emotion, and are emotionally taxing. There’s a lot of rage now in many aspects of my life, but all that aside, my personal experience—both professional and personal, and at home, familial—are not exceptional. Many other people are experiencing intimidation, silencing, and feeling cornered, censored, and oppressed just because they took a stand—a very decent, normal, basic human stand against genocide.

What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis with MALCOLM HARRIS

What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis with MALCOLM HARRIS

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A Conversation with Author MALCOLM HARRIS

One day, I woke up with this concept of oil being tied up in our lives in ways that we don't talk about. It’s sort of a value-theoretical approach to climate change and the climate crisis. Something that's impersonal and goes to the root of our entire social metabolic structure.

The Poetics & Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde &Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College w/ DANICA SAVONICK

The Poetics & Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde &Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College w/ DANICA SAVONICK

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A Conversation with DANICA SAVONICK about her book Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College

As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open admissions, learning that she taught alongside June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. Eventually, that essay led me to their archival teaching materials. I was really excited because I found in those materials concrete teaching methods, things they were doing in their own classrooms that I then started trying in my classrooms as well. I also really liked their educational philosophies, thinking about what it means for college to be free and the fact that they were teaching during this revolutionary era. What would that look like today? What would it mean? What could free college bring to our society? What does free college make possible? All of those things coming together led me to the project.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ & the Capitalism of the Far Right with QUINN SLOBODIAN

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ & the Capitalism of the Far Right with QUINN SLOBODIAN

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Race, Gold, IQ & the Capitalism of the Far Right
A Conversation with QUINN SLOBODIAN

The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.

Every Monument Will Fall - DAN HICKS Explores Remembering & Forgetting

Every Monument Will Fall - DAN HICKS Explores Remembering & Forgetting

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A Conversation with DAN HICKS on Remembering & Forgetting

I work in between archeology and anthropology in this field called either historical archeology or contemporary archeology. At the heart of that is the relationship between objects and humans. How do we write about the past or the present in terms of listening to human voices or evidence from things where maybe human voices have been erased or haven't left as much of a mark on the written records as others? Wrapped up with that, though, is always the risk of dehumanization, of the treatment of human lives as if the boundary between a subject and an object is one that is permeable, not in a sort of positive way, but in a more sinister way. There is a long history of people being treated as things. 

Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

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A Conversation with WENDY LIU

Abolishing Silicon Valley means freeing the development of technology from a system that will always relegate it to a subordinate role, that of entrenching existing power relations. It means designing a new system that isn't deluged in the logic of the bucket. It means liberating our worlds from the illegitimate ring of capital. Perhaps this sounds unfair to capital. Perhaps I sound like I'm not grateful enough for everything that capital has given us, but we don't owe capital anything; the things we attribute to capital were built by workers. People can labor and sometimes die in a process. Their contributions are unrecognized in death as in life. So don't thank capital. It doesn't deserve our gratitude, and it doesn't need it. Thank the people who created everything that capital always takes credit for. Capital is a means of accounting for wealth ownership, not its creation. And that means it's perpetually shrouded in a fundamental untruth; we can leap the swamp of capital behind and start over with something new. 

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Wendy Liu. Ever since its publication, Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism has proven to be more urgent and insightful. Today, he talks with author Wendy Liu about how developments like AI and LLM, further erosions of intellectual property, and increased invasions of privacy make the case for abolishing Silicon Valley even more important. They talk about how abolition is critical at a time when more and more the private sector has come to eviscerate the public good. Turning to the genocide in Gaza, they discuss the ways Capital has enlisted technology in deadly and horrific manners. They end with a meditation on the commons and how one can live with fewer commodities and find value in common projects to make life more valuable and worthwhile outside of the logic of the market.

The Theory of Water with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

The Theory of Water with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

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World-Making, Life-Giving & Indigenous Internationalism with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

So I think that part of colonialism for Indigenous peoples has been this idea that Indigenous peoples aren't thinking peoples and that we don't have thought on a kind of systemic level. One of the things that I was interested in doing is intervening in that because I think Indigenous people have a lot of beautiful, very intellectual, theoretical contributions to make to the world. A lot of our theory is encoded in story, but a lot of our theory is also encoded in land-based practice. You can't learn about it from reading books or from going to lectures. You have to really be out on the land with elders for long periods of time. 

The Theory of Water with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

The Theory of Water with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

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World-Making, Life-Giving & Indigenous Internationalism with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

So I think that part of colonialism for Indigenous peoples has been this idea that Indigenous peoples aren't thinking peoples and that we don't have thought on a kind of systemic level. One of the things that I was interested in doing is intervening in that because I think Indigenous people have a lot of beautiful, very intellectual, theoretical contributions to make to the world. A lot of our theory is encoded in story, but a lot of our theory is also encoded in land-based practice. You can't learn about it from reading books or from going to lectures. You have to really be out on the land with elders for long periods of time. 

Bombs Will Never Liberate Iran: PERSIS KARIM & MANIJEH MORADIAN in Conversation

Bombs Will Never Liberate Iran: PERSIS KARIM & MANIJEH MORADIAN in Conversation

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A Conversation with MANIJEH MORADIAN & PERSIS KARIM

 I think one must frame what happened in Iran recently in the context of what is happening in the larger Middle East, which is that Israel and the United States principally are orchestrating a kind of regional shift in their power that can only be seen in light of what happened, and it continues to happen in Gaza and the wider Palestinian Territories, which is that Israel is, by virtue of signaling an aggressive move towards Iran, suggesting that it will continue unabated to exercise its will throughout the region, and that it also is interested in destroying Iranian support for Palestinian rights in the region.

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072

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A Conversation with M. E. O’BRIEN & EMAN ABDELHADI

The book is a speculative fiction novel that imagines a transition out of capitalism in the nation-state in the next few decades, but it is composed of a series of fictional oral history interviews. We imagine ourselves in the future, and we are writing a book to celebrate the 20th anniversary of a food riot that launches the New York version of this kind of revolutionary transition. We are conducting various oral histories with different actors, some who participated in the revolution and some who grew up in the new social form, which is the commune. The book consists of a series of 12 interviews that we trade off as interviewers. It was actually Michelle’s idea to write the book. She had written a fictional oral history interview for an online magazine and invited me to create a whole novel of these interviews. We both have a relationship with oral history as a form of research and engagement with the world. I conduct life history interviews for my sociological research, and Michelle ran a New York Trans Oral History project, which is a great archive that people should check out. It has 200 interviews, so we both have experience in this field. We are both science fiction fans, friends, and comrades. I have spent many years discussing politics, the future, and the left. The book is a culmination of all these elements, representing an intersection of various facets of our lives as scholars, as well as our friendship and comradeship. We pitched the book to Common Notions, presenting a general outline of the world and brief paragraphs about each character we thought we might write about. They encouraged us to proceed, and the rest is history.

Constitutional Collapse & the Possibilities of a New Democracy w/ AZIZ RANA

Constitutional Collapse & the Possibilities of a New Democracy w/ AZIZ RANA

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A Conversation with AZIZ RANA

In the US, we have this idea that exists as a kind of popular cultural sense. The country has basically had the same constitution—a document ratified in the 1780s, and it has really been in effect since then. However, one of the things that's distinctive about the US Constitution is that it is perhaps the hardest in the world to formally amend. It is incredibly difficult to change the actual terms of the text, even during times when we've had pretty profound changes to the language. Here, we can think about the Reconstruction period with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

AI, Universities & Student Surveillance in the Digital Age - LINDSAY WEINBERG & ROBERT OVETZ

AI, Universities & Student Surveillance in the Digital Age - LINDSAY WEINBERG & ROBERT OVETZ

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A Conversaton with LINDSAY WEINBERG & ROBERT OVETZ

Under the guise of “personalizing” education and increasing efficiency, universities are increasingly sold on AI as a cure to their financial ills as public funds dry up and college applications drop. Rather than maintain that education is an essential public good that needs broad support, universities are looking to technology in ways that are changing the nature of education in dangerous and destructive ways.  As Lindsay writes in the book, Smart University: “Higher education is becoming increasingly synonymous with digital surveillance in the United States. Advanced network infrastructure, internet- connected devices and sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are being celebrated as a means of ushering in the age of “smart universities,” one where institutions canrun their services more efficiently and strengthen the quality of higher education using digital tools. However, as this book demonstrates,  these tools have a darker side. They allow public universities to respond to and perpetuate corporate logics of austerity, use student data to reduce risk of financial investment in the face of dwindling public resources, and track student behavior to encourage compliance with institutional metrics of success. Surveillance of student behavior forms the foundation of the smart university, often in ways that prove harmful to students— particularly  those who are already marginalized within the academy.

THE DREAM HOTEL with LAILA LALAMI

THE DREAM HOTEL with LAILA LALAMI

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A Conversation with Author LAILA LALAMI
on Dreaming Beyond the Algorithmic State

What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime?  Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools and formulae for making one’s unconscious a witness to one’s possible waking life, this novel touches on a myriad of political, philosophical, and moral concerns as they particularly connect to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, privacy, and the security state.

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education with JESSE HAGOPIAN

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education with JESSE HAGOPIAN

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JESSE HAGOPIAN on The Radical Healing of Organized Remembering

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about his new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. They talk about the assault on public education that takes the form of criminalizing the truth itself. They note both the powerful corporate forces behind this movement and what they are afraid of, and also discuss the many instances of people fighting back to name, amplify, and mobilize the truth together.

The Hidden Humans Behind Artificial Intelligence & the Sociopathology of Elon Musk

The Hidden Humans Behind Artificial Intelligence & the Sociopathology of Elon Musk

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& the Sociopathology of ELON MUSK with SARAH T. ROBERTS

AI is reliant on executives and business managers to direct machine learning to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. They talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. They end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.

On the Significance of the Recent Elections in Germany: ADRIAN DAUB on Rushing to the Right

On the Significance of the Recent Elections in Germany: ADRIAN DAUB on Rushing to the Right

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ADRIAN DAUB on Rushing to the Right

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second most powerful party in the country.  They discuss the significance of this rise in popularity and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics as the various parties stake out positions that align with not just a center-right orientation but, more dangerously, a far-right one. They speak of the parallels to the recent election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and what it says about the entrenchment of both neoliberalism and a faux populism based on xenophobia and not serving the actual material interests of everyday people.

TAO LEIGH GOFFE on Poetics, Poesis & Un-making the Climate Crisis

TAO LEIGH GOFFE on Poetics, Poesis & Un-making the Climate Crisis

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with TAO LEIGH GOFFE · Author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

We manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet. How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is.  Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.