Hotel Bar Sessions
Leigh M. Johnson, Jennifer Kling, Bob Vallier
Recent Episodes
Bad arguments are nothing new, so why does it appear as if they have become so pervasive in public discourse?
When we watch so-called "debate" videos with titles like "Conservative professor DESTROYS woke student" or "Liberal pundit OWNS Conservative Senator," are we actually watching a rational debate? Is anyone learning anything in these exchanges? Or, as is most likely, are we watching the performance of a well-reasoned debate, absent any concern for the truth whatsoever?
The ancient Greeks had a name for this: sophistry. It originally referred to the craft of paid expert-teaching-- especially training in rhetoric-- for success in public life. So, how did “expertise in persuasive argument” later become something more like “specious reasoning in service of persuasion rather than truth”?
Are we actually harmed-- as individuals and as a society-- by bad reasoning, logical fallacies, and the robust critical thinking that might correct them? Pour yourself a drink and join us for this conversation about the historical and current iterations of sophistry.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/sophistry
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SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions Podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.
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This week’s episode takes Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and uses it as a diagnostic for late-capitalist life, not just for tech platforms but for democracy, higher education, and work more broadly. Our co-hosts unpack Doctorow’s three-stage model—platforms start out good to users, then pivot to serving business customers, and finally squeeze both users and customers to extract maximum value for shareholders—and argue about whether this is really a new “platform logic” or just old-school Marxist exploitation and alienation under a punchier name.
We connect this logic to the attention economy and datafication (“we are the product”), then extend it to U.S. democracy, where voters are treated as performers in a hollowed-out system, and to universities, where administrative bloat, metrics, and “students as customers” have produced an enshittified version of higher education, while students are locked-in by massive student debt. What is left for us in terms of resistance?
We look at some real options: exiting platforms, Labor organizing and union drives, “quiet quitting” and malicious compliance (“Bartleby”-esque moves), creative sabotage, and maybe even “enshittification from below.”
Our co-hosts ultimately advocate for insisting on higher standards, rather than accepting the slow boil of lowered expectations. Join us for the shit-show!
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-everything/
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.
Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Many of us think of resistance as "protest," communicative acts aimed at fighting injustice, and done with others in public. But what happens when that kind of resistance isn’t possible or safe? When showing up, or waving a sign, or making a public speech might get you jailed, or silenced, or disappeared? Is it possible to resist oppression without following Western scripts surrounding protest? This week, we are joined by guest Dr. Tamara Fakhoury (University of Minnesota) to talk about her concept of "quiet resistance."
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/quiet-resistance
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.
Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
What does it mean to be “well-adjusted” in a society that might itself be profoundly unwell? And when we use therapy-speak to explain everything from bad relationships to bad politics, do we risk losing sight of moral responsibility for bad behavior altogether? Is self-knowledge even possible in a world built on historical and political denial?
Grab a drink, get comfortable, and join us for a little collective introspection — no copay required!
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/therapy
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.
Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right) into the bar to talk about the intellectuals cranking the rhetoric up to eleven while insisting they’re just “doing Great Books.” We follow the trail from Straussian seminar rooms and conservative think tanks to Trump rallies and “no kings” protests, asking what happens when a self-styled aristocracy of the mind decides liberal democracy is played out.
Field guides us through the angry energy behind this movement, the “furious minds” driving it, and why she turns to Aeschylus’ treatment of the ancient Furies (in his Oresteia trilogy) and Abraham Lincoln’s Dred Scott speech to think about justice, vengeance, and the dangers of sacralizing politics. Along the way we talk MAGA as quasi-religion, liberalism as a way of life, why so many young men are adopting Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, and what it means to refuse the invitation to become furious.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/furrious-minds
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.
Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★