Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse. Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke—and isolated—place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age (University of Chicago Press, 2026) shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy. A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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Kevin Van Meter and Robert Ovetz eds. "Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism: the Collected Writings of Harry Cleaver" (Common Notions, 2026)

“The general thrust of capitalist policy in this period aims at the intensified imposition of work in response to ongoing struggle against it.” —Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the Central Issue: New W...

7 Syys 1h 9min

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025)

I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic l...

5 Syys 1h 2min

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying cli...

4 Syys 55min

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a ...

4 Syys 58min

Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in polit...

3 Syys 1h 1min

Michael Diniscia and Ellyn M Toscano eds. "Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value" (NYU Press, 2026)

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expec...

3 Syys 1h 2min

Duty, Banality, and Hopefulness with Alex Cain

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Alex Cain. Dr Alex Cain researches in the fields of political theory and ethical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt, among other figures i...

1 Syys 31min

Gastronomy as Sensory Engineering

One year after the publication of Gastronomica’s special feature on food and philosophy, Robert T. Valgenti of the Editorial Collective revisits the question of what a philosophical perspective could ...

31 Elo 36min