Show Notes
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County Highway, the newspaper whose July/August 2025 issue includes Duncan’s “Soylent Screens” essay
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Producerist, Duncan’s blog/newsletter
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A Producerist Manifesto, recently retitled “A Radical-Middle Manifesto” (July 4, 2025; originally published in July 2020)
• Books I’d recommend on these ideas:
The Technological Society by Ellul,
Technics and Civilization by Mumford, and
Tools for Conviviality by Illich.
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Ithaca Hours (no longer in use, though other cities launched their own versions of the program)
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Cory Doctorow on Charlie Stross (Dec 2017), the writer – whose name I couldn’t think of during the interview – suggesting that tech companies themselves, not AI, are the threat: “Stross is very interested in what it means that today’s tech billionaires are terrified of being slaughtered by psychotic runaway AIs. Like Ted Chiang and me, Stross thinks that corporations are ‘slow AIs’ that show what happens when we build ‘machines’ designed to optimize for one kind of growth above all moral or ethical considerations, and that these captains of industry are projecting their fears of the businesses they nominally command onto the computers around them.”
