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Sean Leahy 6/30/26 Sean Leahy 6/30/26

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.

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Sean Leahy 2/17/26 Sean Leahy 2/17/26

Asimov's "The Fun They Had" and the Real Cost of AI-Driven Education

Illustration of Asimov's Fun They Had boy reading by mechanical teacher

The History of our Future

More than seventy years ago, Isaac Asimov imagined a future where children learn in isolation, guided by personalized mechanical tutors, and books are relics of a forgotten age. His 1951 short story, "The Fun They Had," is set in 2155, but its questions feel startlingly current.

In the story, a young girl named Margie discovers a paper book and learns about a time when children went to school together—sat in classrooms, were taught by human teachers, and shared the experience of learning with their peers. Her own education is efficient, personalized, and lonely. Her mechanical teacher can diagnose her struggles and recalibrate its approach, but it cannot inspire her, connect with her, or make her feel like she belongs to something larger than a lesson plan.

“Asimov didn’t predict AI as we know it. But he predicted the question that matters most: in our rush to optimize education, are we designing out the very things that make learning meaningful?
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This is precisely the tension at the heart of today's conversation about AI in education. The promise of AI-powered tutors is real and, in many cases, genuinely valuable: adaptive pacing, instant feedback, content tailored to individual needs. But when personalization becomes the dominant paradigm—when every learner is on a separate track, in a separate space, at a separate time—the communal dimensions of education begin to disappear.

Natural Human Impulses for Learning (not schooling)

John Dewey argued more than a century ago that learning is driven by four natural impulses: inquiry, communication, construction, and expression. Most of these are inherently social. They depend on friction, dialogue, surprise, and the presence of other people. No amount of algorithmic sophistication can fully replicate the moment a teacher's unexpected enthusiasm shifts a student's entire trajectory, or the experience of working through difficulty alongside peers who share the same struggle.

Asimov's story also raises a subtler question about what endures. The book Margie discovers has survived two centuries. The static words on the page—unchanging, tactile, physical—carry a kind of permanence that digital media cannot easily match. This resonates with the growing cultural appetite for analog experiences: vinyl records, film photography, even old iPods. These are not acts of technological rejection. They are expressions of a deeper need for embodied engagement, deliberate choice, and the kind of friction that gives experience its texture.

Where do we go next?

None of this means AI has no place in education. It does, and increasingly will. But Asimov's story is a quiet reminder that the most important things about learning—curiosity, connection, belonging, the joy of shared discovery—are not problems to be optimized. They are human experiences to be protected.

The question is not whether AI can teach us. It's whether, in building systems that teach us more efficiently, we are designing out the very things that made learning worth having in the first place.

*Episode 71 of Modem Futura explores these themes through Asimov's story and a wider conversation about technology, nostalgia, and what it means to learn as a human being.*

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Sean Leahy 1/27/26 Sean Leahy 1/27/26

Pluribus and the Philosophy of the Happy Apocalypse: What Apple TV's New Sci-Fi Asks About Individuality, Consent, and Being Human

What if happiness is the threat?

Most apocalypse stories share a common grammar: society collapses, resources become scarce, and survival demands violence. We've internalized this template so thoroughly that it shapes how we imagine catastrophe itself.

Apple TV's Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), disrupts that grammar entirely. Its apocalypse isn't marked by destruction or suffering. It's marked by peace. By synchronization. By happiness—at a planetary scale.

An alien signal arrives carrying an RNA sequence. Humanity, being humanity, synthesizes it. Within days, most of the global population transforms into a unified hive mind. Not zombies. Not drones. Just billions of people sharing consciousness, moving together, experiencing what appears to be genuine contentment.

About a dozen people remain unconverted. And the series follows one of them—Carol Sterka, played by Rhea Seehorn—as she grapples with being the most unhappy person on earth.

On a recent episode of the Modem Futura podcast, we explored what Pluribus surfaces about individuality, consent, collective identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about what makes a human life worth living. What follows are some of the tensions that emerged.

What is in a Name: Many Without the One

The title "Pluribus" comes from the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum—"out of many, one"—which appears on American currency as a motto of national unity.

But the show drops both the "E" (out of) and the "Unum" (one). What remains is simply "Pluribus": the many. It's a subtle signal that this isn't a story about diversity coming together into unity. It's a story about what happens when "the many" becomes literal—when individual minds merge into a single, collective consciousness.

That linguistic choice frames everything that follows.

Who Becomes the Monster?

One of the most productive lenses for understanding Pluribus is Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Not the Will Smith film adaptation, but the original text, which ends with a devastating realization: the protagonist, who has spent the story hunting the "monsters" who have replaced humanity, comes to understand that from their perspective, he is the monster. The one who kills in the night. The one who refuses to accept the new order.

Carol Sterka occupies similar territory. She's convinced she needs to "set things right"—to restore humanity to its pre-hive state. But the show keeps surfacing an uncomfortable question: right for whom? The hive mind has eliminated war, poverty, and suffering. Billions of people who lived in misery are now at peace.

If Carol succeeds in reversing the transformation, she's not saving people. She's condemning them to return to lives many of them would never have chosen.

The Consent Paradox

The hive mind in Pluribus operates under an interesting constraint: it cannot lie, and it will not assimilate anyone without their explicit permission.

This sounds like respect for autonomy. And in some sense, it is. But the hive mind also desperately wants everyone to join (even explaining that it’s a ‘biological’ imperative). So what emerges is a kind of relentless, patient persuasion—always honest, always gentle, and always oriented toward a predetermined outcome.

There's something uncomfortably familiar in this dynamic. We navigate versions of it constantly: platforms that "personalize" our experience toward their engagement metrics, systems that "recommend" content optimized for their retention goals, interfaces designed to make one choice frictionless and alternatives invisible.

The hive mind's honesty doesn't make its agenda less persistent. It just makes the agenda transparent.

The Sustainability Problem

Midway through the season, Pluribus introduces a complication: the hive mind will only consume things that have already died naturally. No killing. No harvesting. Just waiting for life to end on its own terms.

Which means, at planetary scale, they're slowly starving.

This creates a strange inversion. Carol, the last holdout, has skills and knowledge that could help solve the problem. But she's too consumed by her mission to "fix" things to collaborate with the very beings who need her help.

There's something painfully recognizable in that dynamic—the way ideological certainty can prevent us from engaging productively with people whose worldview differs from our own, even when collaboration would benefit everyone.

Is the Individual Still in There?

One of the more haunting threads in Pluribus involves the question of whether individual identities persist within the hive mind.

Carol's "chaperone"—a member of the hive who presents as an individual named Zosia—occasionally exhibits moments that feel less like collective consciousness and more like... a person surfacing. A memory that seems too specific. A reaction that seems too singular. (The Mango ice cream scene is a particular interesting one where for a moment - the real Zosia seems to surface).

Another character (Manousos) experiments with radio frequencies, attempting to extract individuals back out of the collective, seemingly trying to hack the near field electromagnetic connections the “others” have with one another.

The show doesn't resolve this, but rather leaves it as a season 1 cliffhanger as it seems some progress is made. But it raises the question: if you could pull someone out of a state of collective happiness and return them to individual consciousness, would that be rescue or harm? Liberation or trauma?

There's no easy answer. And Pluribus is wise enough not to pretend there is.

The AI Parallel (That Isn't Really About AI)

Vince Gilligan has stated that Pluribus isn't intended as an AI allegory. The original concept predates the current wave of generative AI by years.

And yet.

The show's exploration of collective intelligence, of optimization toward contentment, of systems that genuinely want to help but whose help involves transformation into something other than what you were—all of it resonates with questions we're already asking about artificial intelligence and its role in human flourishing.

The hive mind's impulse to "fix" things, to smooth over friction, to optimize for happiness—that's not so different from Silicon Valley's persistent faith that the right algorithm can solve human problems. The show doesn't moralize about this. It simply shows what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of that faith.

The hive mind might be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Or it might be the end of everything that made humanity worth preserving. The show suggests both readings are available, and neither is obviously wrong. In the end, this is my favorite part of the show - it catalyzes great conversations… it pushes us to examine very human elements by forcing us to entertain scenarios in which we question what it means to be human. Now we just have to wait a seemingly excruciating long time until Season 2 will be ready – until then, stay curious!