This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 18th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

How Technology Can Affect Us as Individuals Has Broad Implications for Public Policy

and our beliefs about the future of technological progress is

expressed in and shaped by our culture.

Kimberly Heard Hale is author of The Politics of Perfection, Technology and

Creation in Literature and Film. We discussed what art has to tell us about where technology might lead society.

I wrote this book because I think that popular culture is very important to academics, yet it often is, I would

say, unfairly maligned that not enough attention is paid to it.

That there tends to be a focus on elite culture culture, high culture.

And in a democracy, I think that's kind of dangerous.

That a democracy is driven by public perceptions and public moods and public beliefs and popular culture reflects that going

back to ancient Athens and you can see that

Socrates and Plato they went to the theater they attempted to understand

what the people liked why they liked it what the mood of the public was as a way

of informing political institutions and political behavior a way of informing political institutions and political behavior, a way of

understanding the life of the city and I think that that's very important in any

democracy to understand what the public is talking about, why they're talking about it,

you know, why we're suddenly seeing a kind of surge in dystopian tales in popular culture. What does that mean? I mean there are easy answers of

course that the popularity of one franchise means that ten franchises will come

after it, but I think it is still worth examining what these artifacts of popular culture are actually saying in terms of serious political and philosophical discourse.

So the first thing we're going to talk about is Fritz Lang's metropolis.

Now were there, what stories was that based on?

...