A reflective look at how social media bent the future people were promised.
The episode traces how social media bent the future people were promised, moving from childhood expectations of tomorrow toward Orwellian doublespeak.

The future, questioned before it hardens.
Geeks & Beats is a brisk tech-and-culture show that asks what happened to the future people were promised. Its conversations move from social media and surveillance to holograms, blockchain, sex robots, AI sustainability, and the politics buried inside everyday gadgets.
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Geeks & Beats is a tech-culture show with a skeptical streak and a taste for the absurd. It keeps returning to one central question: what happened to the shiny future people were promised? Sometimes the answer is funny. Often it is not. The show uses science-fiction expectations as a doorway into the less glamorous machinery underneath modern life: platforms, data brokers, energy markets, money systems, intimacy, and corporate ambition. A social media episode with Stuart Reynolds, also known as Brittle Star, turns from online dad humor toward COVID denial, political hostility, and the consequences of services run by figures such as Elon Musk and Trump. A blockchain primer separates the database idea from the speculative noise around Bitcoin, Ethereum, miners, transaction fees, and claims of decentralization. A hologram conversation with David Nussbaum follows Proto’s full-size projection boxes into awards stages, Wall Street settings, and medical uses. The privacy episodes with Cory Doctorow are sharper and more troubling. They connect phones, car telemetry, private data brokers, government access, surveillance capitalism, and the practical problem of staying aware without becoming fatalistic. The show is also willing to handle stranger and more intimate technology. Its sex robot episode with Annette Masterson discusses Westworld fantasies, stigma, regulation, consent, sentience, and why the early code and culture around a technology matter before it becomes normal. Elsewhere, Real AI for Sustainability looks at Microsoft, Ontario Power Generation, clean electricity, regional emissions, and the unromantic work of using AI to avoid bad energy decisions. Even consumer tech spectacle gets a harder look, as in the CES episode on Laura Haddock of Laura DiCarlo and the revoked award for the Ose. The interviews can get technical, but the framing keeps pulling them back to plain consequences. It is not a polished futurist showcase. It is more like a newsroom conversation that wandered into a gadget lab, found the exit blocked, and started asking better questions.
Made for: For listeners who like technology coverage with skepticism, jokes, and practical consequences attached. It fits people who want technology, platforms, AI, privacy, and futurism discussed as culture and power, not just product news.
What sets it apart: Geeks & Beats stands out by measuring new technology against old promises from science fiction and pop culture. Its best moments turn shiny inventions into arguments about who benefits, who gets tracked, and what society quietly accepts next.
The World's Most Popular Podcast with Alan Cross and Michael Hainsworth
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Geeks & Beats makes emerging technology legible by pairing accessible explanations with pointed questions about power, privacy, and social consequences.
Geeks & Beats treats future-facing technology as a prompt for pointed, accessible conversation. Michael Hainsworth regularly builds interviews around a clear question, while the appearance of Alan Cross brings a looser co-host exchange, with dry humor folded into the technical…
The jetpack never arrived, but your pocket spy did; Michael Hainsworth has questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A reflective look at how social media bent the future people were promised.
The episode traces how social media bent the future people were promised, moving from childhood expectations of tomorrow toward Orwellian doublespeak.
A clear blockchain primer that explains the pitch well while keeping the big promise unresolved.
The piece uses blockchain to ask a bigger question about how new technologies go from novelty to something ordinary. It starts with familiar comparisons to electricity and Wi-Fi, then walks through decentralization, mining, gas fees, and the logic of a 51% attack in plain…
A grounded take on holograms moving from Star Wars fantasy toward medical uses and live remote presence.
Proto founder and inventor David Nussbaum gives this single-episode review its clean hook: whether the hologram communication long associated with Star Wars can become an everyday tool.
Westworld jokes and sex-bot research frame a broad but pointed look at what gets coded first.
The piece treats the sex-bot debate as more than a novelty, using Westworld, robot jokes, and Annette Masterson's research to widen the frame.
Cory Doctorow turns privacy into a story about surveillance, data-sharing, and the narrow futures technology keeps promising.
Where's My Jetpack returns to the blunt fact that the glowing rectangles people carry everywhere were promised as portable knowledge and have also become spy devices.
A pointed privacy episode that makes surveillance capitalism feel alarmingly concrete: $11 for a year of car locations.
Privacy lands hardest here when Cory Doctorow turns surveillance into something specific: law enforcement can buy a year of Michael Hainsworth's car-location data from brokers for about $11 in a CSV, rather than seek a warrant.
A grounded discussion of AI's role in managing surplus clean power and reducing emissions across business systems.
Real AI for Sustainability frames AI as a practical tool for cleaner power, anchored by Ontario Power Generation's Nick Pender on how a system with 95% clean electricity can decide when to produce power and when to sell surplus to neighboring regions.
A CES award fight, a robotics pitch, and enough banter to keep it human.
Geeks & Beats follows Laura Haddock of Laura DiCarlo through the CES 2019 award controversy, where the honor was revoked and later restored after public outcry, while also giving room to the Osei and its robotics pitch for women.






The hosts discuss microphone types and a radio colleague's lack of mic knowledge, blending tech talk with humor.
This episode explores the current state and future of sex robots, including their technological development and societal implications.
Alan Cross and Michael Hainsworth discuss the mental toll of consuming US news, criticizing Trump and American handling of COVID-19.
Alan Cross and Michael Hainsworth introduce their podcast with technical banter and preview an episode featuring musical guest Sting and a discussion on the history of music television.
Host Michael Hainsworth interviews David Nussbaum, founder of hologram company Proto, exploring the gap between sci-fi promises and current technology.
Geeks & Beats hosts Alan Cross and Michael Hainsworth explore the controversy around Laura Haddock's CES award for the Osei, a robotic sex device for women, which was revoked and reinstated after public outcry over gender bias.
On Geeks & Beats' 'Where's My Jetpack,' host Michael Hainsworth interviews Stuart Reynolds, known online as Brittlestar, from Stratford, Ontario, about the future of social media.
On the 'Where's My Jetpack' segment from Geeks & Beats, host Michael Hainsworth introduces a blockchain primer, comparing the technology's current state to the 'Victorian stage' of electricity.
On Geeks & Beats spinoff Where's My Jetpack, host Michael Hainsworth interviews David Nussbaum, founder of Proto, about the current state of hologram technology.
This Geeks & Beats 'Where's My Jetpack' segment, hosted by Michael Haysworth, interviews Temple University PhD student Annette Masterson about the history and future of sex robots.
Michael Hainsworth and Cory Doctorow connect Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro, the Nokia 6303, and the Galaxy S7 to a new habit of checking a glowing screen for notifications.
Geeks & Beats centers on Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface, a Toronto-born Burbank-based author’s novel about Masha Maximoff, a hacker facing a “digital mercenary spy agency.” Michael Hainsworth and Doctorow connect the book’s countermeasures, like “clear nail polish on the screws” and blocked USB ports, to real surveillance practices.
Geeks & Beats uses Real AI for Sustainability to connect Ontario Power Generation’s 95% renewable electricity system with Microsoft’s carbon-negative goals and supply-chain reporting.
At CES 2022, Rick Kowalski says augmented-reality glasses could eventually replace smartphones over the next decade.