S04E09 - Orit Halpern on Knowledge, Data and Democracy

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:


https://orithalpern.net/


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:


https://www.ipcc.ch/


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.


https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e2c7ee53de3f756cfd6cbbc/t/65a808813c02ca697d90089a/1705511045522/planetarytestarticleZMK.pdf


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


https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e34-cecilia-rikap-on-intellectual-monopoly-capitalism-and-corporate-power-in-the-age-of-ai/


S02E44 | Evgeny Morozov on Discovery Beyond Competition


https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e44-evgeny-morozov-on-discovery-beyond-competition/


S02E43 | Samia Mohammed zur Zukunft jenseits des Marktes


https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e43-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