NEWS & UPDATES
Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1)
Reading Backwards to Understand the Future
There's a particular kind of book list that shows up every summer — the one that seems designed mostly to signal how serious and well-read its author is. This isn't that. In the first part of our annual Summer Reading List, the guiding instinct was the opposite: lasers, space ships, escapism, the kind of book you genuinely can't put down. What we discovered while recording is that the most escapist reads on the list turned out to be some of the most useful lenses on the present.
The cyberpunk classics anchored the conversation. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined "metaverse" and imagined a digital overlay on the physical world years before anyone could plausibly build one. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did the same for "cyberspace." Both have been mined relentlessly by the technology industry — and both, the hosts argue, are routinely stripped of their context. Snow Crash is a satire and a warning; it's frequently read as a roadmap. That gap, between fiction written as caution and fiction adopted as ambition, is one of the more revealing dynamics in how Silicon Valley tells its own story.
The deeper thread is about cognition. Snow Crash turns on a virus that crosses from the digital realm into the human mind. In an era of AI systems that engage directly with how we reason and feel, that premise reads less like science fiction and more like a description. Iain M. Banks extends the inquiry in Surface Detail, imagining civilizations that construct virtual heavens and hells so immersive that the line between real and simulated experience dissolves — and asking who, if anyone, has the right to govern what happens inside them. His The Player of Games offers a gentler entry point to the same Culture universe, and a sly meditation on whether a frictionless utopia is something humans actually want. We also dive into some of the amazing and seemingly timeless work of Douglas Adams, whose original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts Andrew counts among his prized possessions and whose wit, he insists, anticipated our anxieties about AI with personality long before the chatbots arrived.
The list closes on firmer ground with Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction account of how convenient, delightful platforms decay once users are locked in. It opened onto a question that runs through the whole episode: what do we actually own in a digital age? A printed book from 1980 still works, unconditionally. A digital one comes with terms that can change beneath you. And when the historical record itself becomes editable without a trace, reliability becomes something we can no longer take for granted.
None of these tensions get resolved here — they aren't meant to. The takeaway is quieter and more durable: stories written decades ago remain among our best instruments for thinking clearly about technologies their authors never lived to see. Part 2 continues the list next week.
Subscribe and Connect!
Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/444V3ws
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5TXSx0QgY4CxUhWsJSF5wm?si=lHeVVcWHS5qE3wd5lFJl5w
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/KN8iEA5tfiQ
🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/
The Metaverse - A Stack of Reality Layers – Episode 57
Layers of Reality: Exploring the Metaverse Stack
When the headset comes off, does the world you were just in disappear—or does it linger somewhere between your senses and memory?
n our latest episode of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I explore the metaverse as more than a corporate buzzword or sci-fi dream. We approach it as a continuum of realities — a multi-layered “stack” that spans the physical and digital, each tier more immersive than the last.
From our own immersive sessions with the Apple Vision Pro, we reflect on that strange moment of re-entry—when the headset comes off and the world feels slightly less real. It’s a feeling that raises existential questions about presence, identity, and how AI-generated worlds are shaping the boundaries of human experience.
In this episode, we trace the metaverse’s origins from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash to today’s spatial computing revolutions. We ask what happens when digital spaces become persistent and indistinguishable from physical ones—and why futures thinking is essential for guiding that transition responsibly. From procedurally generated AI environments to the idea of “digital sustainability,” we discuss how these technologies will reshape privacy, ethics, and our collective sense of reality.
Ultimately, this conversation is about our tethers to truth. In an age of deeply immersive AI systems and blended realities, how do we find our totem—our anchor that keeps us grounded in what matters most? We believe that intentional design, transparency, and care must guide how we build these new worlds before they begin to build us.
Subscribe and Connect!
Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts and connect with us on LinkedIn. Drop a comment, pose a question, or challenge an idea—because the future isn’t something we watch happen, it’s something we build together. The medium may still be the massage, but we all have a hand in shaping how it touches tomorrow.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4p7ZZcr
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2C5LiGRYCdZgr5JijtK7LI?si=0FbAEihfTD6QXX5FN-2nag
📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/iCAtutBmN5w
🌐 Website: https://www.modemfutura.com/
The Metaverse, Implantable Tech, and AI with Katina Michael
Learning Futures Podcast - Season 6 is off to a stunner of a start! I am always thrilled when the chance arises to talk with Dr. Katina Michael, and our conversation around the metaverse, implantable technologies, and AI did not disappoint. Have a listen!
Sean and Katina explore a wide range of emergent technologies from the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education to Biological and Digital Convergence, the Metaverse and XR, and much more. With each topic we discuss the sometimes hidden impacts, and the potential for societal change.