Higher ed's second Gilded Age with Matt Seybold

Matt Seybold takes us back to Knobs University, a fictional HBCU imagined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Drawing parallels from the novel and its HBCU, Matt helps us see how we're living through our own second Gilded Age, a post-capitalist era of technofeudalism.

References mentioned this episode:

• The American Vandal Podcast
• The American Vandal Substack
• MattSeybold.com
• Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. 1873. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
• Ron Chernow. 2025. Mark Twain. Penguin Random House. 
• Willy Theyer. 2024. The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University. Translated by D. Bret Leraul. Northwestern University Press.
• Yanis Varoufakis. 2024. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Penguin Random House.
• Jodi Dean. 2025. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso.
• McKenzie Wark. 2021. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?  Verso.
• Cédric Durand. 2024. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Translated by David Broder. Verso.

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

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