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Episode Description
Orit Halpern on Knowledge, Data and Democracy
Shownotes Orit Halpern
Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern at TU Dresden:
https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/germanistik/digitalcultures/die-professur/inhaber-in
Orit Halpern’s website:
Halpern, O. (2015). Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Duke University Press.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/beautiful-data
Halpern, O., & Mitchell, R. (2023). The smartness mandate. MIT Press.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544511/the-smartness-mandate/
Hayek, F. A. (2013). The use of knowledge in society. In Modern understandings of liberty and property (pp. 27-38). Routledge.
https://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ200/spring01/hayek.pdf
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The atlantic monthly, 176(1), 101-108.
https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/005/11/0094-0103
on CERN:
https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/
on the Event Horizon Telescope:
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
on the IPCC:
on critiques of the Enlightenment:
https://polsci.institute/modern-political-philosophy/critiques-enlightenment-modernity/
Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., & Noeri, G. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/dialectic-enlightenment
on Keynesianism:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesianismus
on MAGA:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again
on the Frankfurt School:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frankfurt-School
on high modernism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_modernism
on totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
Friedrich Hayek:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_August_von_Hayek
on strict constitutionalism/constructionism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_constructionism
on the Electoral College:
https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/about
on Stafford Beer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
https://www.kybernetik.ch/en/fs_beer.html
on post-sovereign planning:
Mohammed, S. Z. (2025). Post-sovereign planning? Nature, culture and care in the new socialist calculation debate. In Creative Construction (pp. 265-278). Bristol University Press.
https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap/book/9781529235142/ch014.xml
Latour, B. (2012). We have never been modern. Harvard university press.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674948396
on the cultural revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
on the Belt and Road initiative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
on Mao Zedong:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
on Planetary Experiments:
https://orithalpern.net/planetaryexperiments
Halpern, O. (2019). The Planetary Test. Zeitschrift für Medien and Kulturforschung, Vol 10.
Halpern, O. (2020). Planetary intelligence. In The cultural life of machine learning: An incursion into critical AI studies (pp. 227-256). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-56286-1_8
on Large Language Models (LLMs):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Language_Model
on Victor Papanek:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek
Groos, J., & Sorg, C. (Eds.). (2025). Creative construction: Democratic planning in the 21st century and beyond. Bristol University Press.
https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction
on Terraforming:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming
on Geoengineering:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering
on NVIDIA Earth 2:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/high-performance-com
on Destination Earth:
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Destination_Earth
on Piketty’s inequality equation r > g:
https://equitablegrowth.org/pareto-distribution-r-g/
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674430006
the mentioned quote on the ‘weak cyborg dream’ in Orit Halpern (2019, p. 22):
https://publish.fid-media.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/73aba255-56d2-4595-83b5-bfdad3740ffb/content
Against Catastrophes:
https://againstcatastrophe.net/
Orit Halpern on resilience:
Halpern, O. (2025). The geo-politics of resilience: On the historical convergence between ecology, artificial intelligence, and corporate strategy. new media & society, 27(8), 4581-4605.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448251336420
on Ground Truth:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Truth
on benchmark data:
https://brilliantfuture.se/en/glossaries/benchmark-data
Related Episodes of Future Histories
S03E34 | Cecilia Rikap on Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism and Corporate Power in the Age of AI
S02E44 | Evgeny Morozov on Discovery Beyond Competition
S02E43 | Samia Mohammed zur Zukunft jenseits des Marktes
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Episode Keywords
#OritHalpern #JanGroos, #Interview, #TUDresden, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #FutureHistories, #Knowledge, #Data, #Democracy, #Technology, #Society, #ArtificialIntelligence, #AI, #Data, #Capitalism, #Neoliberalism, #PlanetaryExperiments, #PostSovereignPlanning, #DemocraticPlanning, #Alternatives