New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

From canoes on the beach at Dzidzilalich to steamships and piers, Seattle's waterfront was the center of the city's economy and culture for generations. Its tumultuous history reflects a broader story of immigration, labor battles, and technological change. The 2001 Nisqually Earthquake brought fresh urgency and opportunity to remake this contested space, sparking intense debates over history preservation, the environment, and Indigenous connections long ignored.Today, the revitalized Waterfront Park offers a new chapter in this ongoing story. The removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the reconstruction of the seawall have redefined how the city interacts with its shoreline. With its blend of historic structures and forward-looking public spaces, the waterfront will continue to shape Seattle's identity. Street signs now mark Dzidzilalich, acknowledging the presence of Coast Salish peoples, while restored piers recall the area's industrious past.In Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle's Waterfront (HistoryLink, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Ott details the waterfront's history, from its deep past to its complex present. Her book reveals how battles over control, identity, and space have forged one of the city's most iconic places, with a history that mirrors Seattle itself—rich, diverse, and constantly evolving. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft (Cornell UP, 2025), Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security, but not in ways one would expect. Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decision-makers to deploy military force. Yet, as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are, in fact, less likely to evolve into broader, more intense conflicts than similar operations involving traditionally crewed assets. Even as drones increase the frequency of conflict, the decreased costs of their operations reduce the likelihood of conflict escalation. Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of US and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. First, they enable states to gather more or better intelligence that may avert or reduce the chances of high-stakes conflict. Second, drone attacks are less likely to affront a target state's honor and therefore less likely to provoke aggressive responses. Lastly, leaders are less likely to take escalatory actions when drones are attacked than they are with incidents involving inhabited assets. Lin-Greenberg's findings prove conclusively that drones are far less destabilizing than commonly argued. Drones add rungs to the proverbial "escalation ladder" and, in doing so, have brought about a fundamental change—a revolution—in the character of statecraft. With the use of unmanned technologies set to grow in the coming years, The Remote Revolution is a critical examination of their possibilities and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford UP, 2025) explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures—a renewal of the "digital commons"—where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good. Mentioned in this episode: "Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds from Below" Project Website here Luis Felipe R. Murillo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center at the University of Notre Dame. His work is dedicated to the study of computing from an anthropological perspective. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used as tools for modeling and thinking about the world as a complex system. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations. Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts. Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity’s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and an opponent’s adaptations.How important is military innovation in determining outcomes during armed conflict? In Innovation and Adaptation in War, Matthew Tattar questions the conventional wisdom that, to succeed, military organizations must innovate early and often. Because successful methods of warfare are soon widely imitated or countered on the international stage, the advantages of a particular innovation quickly evaporate. Therefore, Tattar argues, large-scale innovations at the cost of organizational flexibility and the ability to adapt to an adversary’s innovations may not be the optimal path—not just because force readiness is vital but also because innovation does not provide as long-lasting and decisive an advantage as may have been previously thought.Although other scholars have analyzed the sources of military innovation, Tattar is the first to focus on the relationship between innovation and specific military outcomes. Looking at several different types of military organizations and many different types of battles, he draws on theoretical works, in-depth historical research, and case studies, and finds that the initial advantages that are generated by innovation disappear far too rapidly in wartime for militaries to depend on them for victory. Furthermore, as Tattar demonstrates, emphasizing innovation in defense planning at the expense of organizational flexibility can have significant negative consequences. The decisive factor in successful adaptation, more often than not, is a well-positioned and flexible organization. Providing both a new framework for studying military innovation and a comprehensive review of the current literature in this field, Innovation and Adaptation in War offers crucial policymaking insights into when and under what circumstances militaries should innovate and adapt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society