Technology
From cultural criticism of the machine age to technical guides from the platform era. The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory proposes a single test, the originating-act test, that cuts through both science and art and produces a more honest classification of who has done what across two centuries of cases from the 1839 photographic disputes through the artificial-intelligence application that gives the test its present-day urgency. UNDERWRITTEN is the first full institutional history of federated American public broadcasting, tracing the system across fifty-eight years from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act through the January 2026 dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Carceral Nation traces three centuries of American surveillance from colonial lantern laws through Bentham's panopticon, the post-9/11 mass surveillance state, and the neighborhood platforms where citizens now watch one another, documenting how the logic of the prison escaped its walls and became the organizing principle of civic life. Selling Saturday Morning reconstructs the twelve-year period in which American broadcast television built and politically ratified a commercial pedagogy of childhood, tracing the Grammar of Want from the closed room of 1970s Saturday morning cartoons into its cable, digital, and algorithmic afterlives. The Counterfeit Bargain constructs a nine-category taxonomy of fakery and pressure-tests it against twelve domains where the line between real and fabricated determines what we pay, what we believe, and how we govern ourselves. The Failed City is an autopsy of urban collapse across five taxonomies of failure and twenty case studies spanning two millennia. What the Light Carries is a work of literary fiction about what happens to meaning when it crosses time. The God in the Wire asks what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines. The earlier guides helped readers master the tools of their time, from Windows 95 through Mac OS X Leopard and Google Apps. Historical documents now, but representative of a body of work that met readers where they were.
