The Gilded Network (A Tale of Today, Episode #13)
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Our 150th anniversary celebration of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” turns to political economies of mass media, then and now, beginning with a close reading of the novel’s title. We are then introduced to the tech fascist fantasy of the Network State [21:00], theories of post-capitalism [47:00], ways of reading from the right [58:00], and a more optimistic technofuturism [77:00].
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English & American Studies at Oakland University and the author of History, Abolition, & The Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford UP, 2019)
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at University of Illinois, Chicago and the author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
Gil Duran is a freelance journalist who has written extensively about tech fascism for The New Republic, among others. He also has a newsletter and a new podcast: The Nerd Reich.
Eleanor Courtemanche is Associate Professor of English at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of “Beyond Urgency” (2019)
Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction & The Alt-Right (U. Minnesota, 2024), as well as Reading The Obscene: Transgressive Editors & The Class Politics of U.S. Literature (Stanford UP, 2021), which won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars.
Douglas Dowland is Professor and Chair of English at Ohio Northern University and the author of We, Us, & Them: Affect & American Nonfiction From Vietnam To Trump (U. Virginia, 2024).
Jeff Jarvis is Visiting Professor at the Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism and the author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print & Its Lessons For The Age of The Internet (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
Soundtrack:
All music for this season of The American Vandal Podcast comes from the Tennessee-based roots ensemble DownRiver Collective. Most of the tracks come from their most recent EP, Off The Shelf. You can purchase it direct from the band here. It’s also available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Tracks featured in this episode include “Steam Whistle,” “Daylight Breaks,” “Dead To Me,” “As It Was,” “Wasted Time,” & “Walls.”
Narration:
Excerpts from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age come from the audiobook edition produced by SNR Audio and narrated by Nathan Osgood. Available at Audible, as well as other audiobook retailers. SNR has an extensive catalog of professionally-narrated adaptations of 19th-century Anglophone fiction, including The Complete Mark Twain Collection.
Nathan Osgood is an actor and voice artist who has being appearing in films, scripted television, video games, podcasts, and audiobooks since the mid-’90s. In 2018, he played Mark Twain in the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly vehicle, Holmes and Watson.
Excerpts in this episode come from chapter 50.
Episode Bibliography:
Elisabeth R. Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022)
Elisabeth S. Anker & Rita Felski, Critique & Postcritique (Duke UP, 2017)
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (Holt, 1985)
Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes” Kenyon Review (Autumn 1941)
Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction & The Alt-Right (U. Minnesota, 2024)
Eleanor Courtemanche, “Beyond Urgency: Shadow Presentisms, Hinge Points, & Victorian Historicisms” Criticism (Fall 2019)
James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age (Touchstone, 1999) [Peter Thiel 2020 Edition]
Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism & The New Class Struggle (Verso, 2025)
Douglas Dowland, We, Us, & Them: Affect & American Nonfiction From Vietnam To Trump (U. Virginia, 2024)
Douglas Dowland, Weak Nationalisms: Affect & Nonfiction in Postwar America (U. Nebraska, 2019)
Gil Duran, “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarians Idea” The New Republic (July 22, 2024)
Gil Duran, “The Tech Baron Seeking To Purge San Francisco of ‘Blues'” The New Republic (April 26, 2024)
Gil Duran, “The People of Solano County Versus The Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia” The New Republic (January 4, 2024)
Gil Duran, “The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs” The New Republic (October 1, 2024)
Gil Duran, “The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of A Right-Wing San Francisco” The New Republic (February 12, 2024)
Cedric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism (Verso, 2020) [French Edition, 2020]
Charles Ferguson, Inside Job (Sony, 2010)
Bryant Morey French, Mark Twain & The Gilded Age: The Book That Named An Era (Southern Methodist UP, 1965)
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press As An Agent of Change (Cambridge UP, 1980)
Jeffrey Insko, History, Abolition, & The Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford UP, 2019)
Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print & Its Lessons For The Age of The Internet (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Jeff Jarvis, The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim The Internet From Moguls, Misanthropes, & Moral Panic (Basic Books, 2024)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
Anna Kornbluh, “Present Tense Futures of The Past” Victorian Studies (Autumn 2016)
Nicholas Kusnetz & Katie Surma, “A Lawsuit From Backers of a ‘Startup City’ Could Bankrupt Honduras” Wired (September 28, 2024)
Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work: How I Began To Suspect Capitalism Is A Joke (Haymarket, 2025)
Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)
Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction & The Reshaping of The American Canon (Columbia UP, 2023)
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard UP, 2007)
Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther (Penguin, 2015)
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard UP, 2014)
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)
Praxis, “The Sovereign Network: Crypto’s End Game” (September 18, 2024)
Matt Seybold, “Authoritarianism Is The Bailout” The American Vandal (February 21, 2025)
Matt Seybold et al, “Half Castle ‘Gainst The Scott Walkers” The American Vandal Podcast (December 17, 2024)
Matt Seybold et al, “The Historical Novel” The American Vandal Podcast (October 15, 2024)
Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals & The Dream of A World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023)
Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972)
Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) [2006 Modern Library Edition]
Mark Twain, Fables of Man (U. California, 1972)
J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016)
Yanis Varoufakis, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024)
McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)
Raymond Williams, Marxism & Literature (Oxford UP, 1977)