The Technology, Culture and Power Speaker Series is a monthly gathering that explores critical insights on the intersections of technology and society. Our monthly gatherings feature leading experts and scholars examining the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality. Join the TCP mailing list here. 

Please join us on March 12, 2026 for a lecture and Q&A with John Durham Peters, the Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel (all published by the University of Chicago Press). 

TCP Lecture: On the Mortality of Minds

As far as we know the most complex thing the universe has brought forth, besides itself, is the human mind.  Among many other things, minds know things.  But what should we make of the fundamental fact that knowledge is housed in such fragile, forgetful, and short-lived vessels as human beings?  Why do minds die--or do they?  Since the origin of writing, and likely long before that, humans found ways to externalize mind.  In complex societies, the library is the key symbol of mind embedded in matter.  At least since Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, thinkers have been anxious about this externalization.  Was he right to criticize writing?  How should we criticize other mind-storage technologies? And how might we think about the would-be total library of the internet, and of its oft-remarked administration by tech Caesars with the ambition often to by-pass death altogether?  This talk tries to address very basic matters in light of recent reformulations of mind.