Politics Theory Other Archives

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial, gender, and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind “automated” services, to the data AI collects from us. […Learn More]

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

A reflection on “freedom” in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans.

For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. […Learn More]

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze’s controversial new book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler’s surprisingly prescient vision- ultimately hindered by Germany’s limited resources and his own racial ideology-was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America’s overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. […Learn More]

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self – Determination

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations–a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building–obscure just how radical this change was. […Learn More]