Episode 30: Danny Caine - “Fight the Real Enemy: On Data Centers and Book Bans”
We talk with writer, bookseller, podcaster, and activist Danny Caine about data centers, book bans, and the recent local and national waves of organizing against them. Danny is a pal from Cleveland (now based in Columbus) and steadfast friend of the show, whose writing on Amazon and bookselling in the age of the algo has long figured into our syllabi and conversations, so it’s about time. Occasioned by his recent podcast series The Data Centers Are Coming, hosted through the Institute for Self-Reliance, and his latest work of nonfiction How to Defend Books and Why, just released in June 2026 from Microcosm Publishing, we cover the ways these issues and resistances to them are fundamentally, ideologically entwined via the dubious value and obvious cost of GenAI, declining literacy and surging bookbans, mounting anti-humanism and assaults on academic freedom.
To borrow a rhetorical device: How big money and big tech undermine democracy and what we can do about it; How to build a broad coalition, or How to talk to your neighbors, or How to go to the bar; How anti-intellectualism and enshittification enable the rise of fascism; How to fight the real enemy (s/o Sinead); How not to engage with nihilist political opps; How small press publishing matters; How bookstores matter; How libraries matter; How to embrace difficulty; How to be cool. And why.
We talk about book ban attacks on the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. In episode 18, Joe Hall thoroughly documents the problems of PEN America's response to the Gaza genocide, if you'd like to follow up on this episode's discussion. Hall also has a new essay on that here. More here on South Florida State College professor Vinita Prabhakar getting fired for teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh story. We mention Muhlenberg College's firing of tenured professor Maura Finkelstein—more here from The Intercept.
Finally, this episode is brought to you by the Social Room (who have not given us money but without whom we’d be spiritually destitute), a bar in Cleveland where we hope you are now. You could pick up Danny’s latest chapbook Jewish American Dream and read it there. Maybe you’ll make a friend.