Fall 2026
Readings go up here as we get to them. If something you need is missing, tell me and I will post it.
Unit I — What Is Technology?
- Ray Bradbury— "There Will Come Soft Rains"
- Val Dusek— "What Is Technology?"
- Martin Heidegger— "The Question Concerning Technology"
- Hölderlin, The Rhine
- The Rhine at Record Low Water Levels, NY Times, August 6, 2026
- Hölderlin, Patmos (Scott Horton, trans.)
- Hölderlin, Patmos (James Mitchell, trans.)
- Soper— “What is Nature Ch2”
Unit II
- Richard Seymour- The Twittering Machine, Ch. 2. "We are All Addicts"
- Natasha D. Schüll- Addiction by Design, Intro and Ch. 6.
- Shen and Yoon, "The Dark Addiction Patterns of Current AI Chatbot Interfaces" (CHI EA 2025)
- Charles Bukowski, "so you want to be a writer?"
- Sigmund Freud- Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 6–17, 30–33
- Todd McGowan- Capitalism and Desire, Ch. 1, "Losing What Was Already Gone," pp. 26–36
- Xiao et al., "The Addictive Intimacy of AI" (arXiv 2026)
- Harry Frankfurt- "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person"
- Kurt Vonnegut- "Harrison Bergeron"
- Kashmir Hill- "She Is in Love With ChatGPT," New York Times, Jan. 15, 2025
- Weathergirl- "What my AI boyfriend is, and what he is not" (Medium, 2026)
- C. Thi Nguyen- "'Value capture': Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen on what games are doing to us" (interview)
- Herbert Marcuse- One-Dimensional Man, Ch. 1, "The New Forms of Control," pp. 3–14, and Ch. 3, "The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation," pp. 74–86
- Theodor W. Adorno- "Free Time," in The Culture Industry, pp. 187–197
- Gilles Deleuze- "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59 (1992)
- Myra Cheng, et.al., "AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence," 26 March 2026
Unit III
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels- The Communist Manifesto, Sections I and II
- Karl Marx- Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 15, "Machinery and Modern Industry," Sections 1–4
- David Harvey- A Companion to Marx's Capital, Ch. 7, "What Technology Reveals," pp. 189–212
- David Harvey- Reading Marx's Capital Vol. 1, Class 8, Chapter 15, Part 1 (video, 2019; optional)
- David Harvey- Reading Marx's Capital Vol. 1, Class 9, Chapter 15, Part 2 (video, 2019; optional)
- Herbert Marcuse- "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology" (1941), pp. 63–79
- Jürgen Habermas- "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'" (1968), in Toward a Rational Society, pp. 81–122
- Andrew Feenberg- Critical Theory of Technology, Ch. 4, "The Bias of Technology," pp. 65–90