We use “Luddite” to mean technophobe. The real Luddites were skilled workers fighting over who controls technology and who profits from it — the exact fight we’re having about AI right now.
The Luddites are history’s favorite punchline for anyone who fears progress. But they never opposed machines — and the people who actually killed good technology were rarely holding a hammer. A deep dive into the smearing of a movement and the far quieter sabotage that followed.
We recoil at AI-generated content while happily consuming whatever an algorithm serves us. This deep dive examines the hypocrisy in our performed disgust, why “human or machine?” is the wrong question, and what a more honest relationship with content actually looks like.
Scientists, poets, and teachers were once public heroes. Now they’re invisible. A deep dive into what actually changed — and what to honestly tell a young person.
There was a moment when who you are started mattering more than how good you are. Here’s what changed, what we gained, and the quiet bill now coming due.
Fame isn’t random luck or a shadowy conspiracy — it’s a business model. A deep dive into superstar economics, the algorithm, and the dopamine lottery that keeps us all playing.
You don’t need to quit everything to be a writer. A warm, dryly funny journal entry on the day job, the starving artist myth, and why “give up all else” is the worst advice in the arts.
Five thousand years of history bring us to the hardest questions: what policies actually protect people, what evidence says about different approaches, and what it would mean to organize our response to commercial sex around the genuine interests of the most vulnerable people involved.
The internet transformed commercial sex as radically as anything since the industrial revolution — enabling greater autonomy for some, creating new vectors for exploitation for others, and producing a legislative and ethical landscape that nobody has figured out how to navigate. This episode examines FOSTA-SESTA, OnlyFans, the trafficking-platform debate, and where we actually stand.
Beneath the historical narrative is an economic structure — one characterized by specific mechanisms of recruitment, control, and profit extraction that have remained remarkably consistent across centuries and continents. This episode examines the business of commercial sex as a business: how it actually operates, how exploitation is maintained, and where the money actually goes.
The twentieth century saw two world wars that massively expanded military commercial sex economies, massive migration patterns that created new trafficking vulnerabilities, and a wave of criminalization campaigns that often made things worse for the people they claimed to help. This episode traces how the modern policy landscape was created.
Victorian Britain preached sexual purity while building one of the most extensive commercial sex economies in European history. This episode examines the extraordinary contradiction between Victorian public morality and private practice, the Contagious Diseases Acts, the underground networks of London’s streets, and the investigative journalism that exposed child exploitation and changed the law.
