How do you know what's true? Is there a single truth? In this recording of Panoptic Conversations, Tapan and Ishan discuss the critically acclaimed movie, "Rashomon", directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1950. They talk about the confusing yet engaging story which gave birth to a number of "firsts" in the film industry. With an open ended plot, the only conclusion that can be drawn from the movie is about the fallibilities of human nature. They observe Rashomon's influence in modern cinema and compare it with various Hollywood as well as Bollywood releases. This also leads to a possible solution to finding truth as they cite sci-fi series, "Black Mirror"'s episodes.

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In the early 2000s UK hospitals gamed the very policy made to govern them, how did that happen? What could have caused the COVID figures misreporting in many Indian states? Do we really know if bio-fuels are carbon neutral? Tapan and Ishan discuss these questions in the context of the Hannah Fry's article "What data can't do". They don't find a lot of answers, but still uncover interesting insights about the shortcomings of data.

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In this phone call, Tapan and Ishan talk about the games they've played last year. They share some of their favourite indie games that they cherish and highly recommend to everybody.

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In this recording of Panoptic Conversations, Tapan and Ishan talk about their experience playing sandbox games like Minecraft and Roblox. Their conversations leads them to the idea of digital theme parks, which is incepted by Matthew Ball's excellent blog post on that topic. They discuss the nature of digital theme park platforms, from it's historical context in physical theme parks to its modern relevance for media businesses built around intellectual property, as a space where people can create anything and every experience is unique.

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Stay tuned for more spontaneous conversations every week!

In this episode of Panoptic Conversations, Tapan and Ishan share their fascination of internet culture, cryptocurrencies and people who have on rare occasions brought these two together. They talk about Zoë Roth who auctioned her photograph using NFTs, popularly recognized as the "Disaster Girl" meme template, for about $500,000 and about Alex Tew who sold every single pixel of a webpage for $1 million in 2006. This led them to an interesting conversation around the internet fame, ideas around virtual assets, NFTs with their problems, and the famous Winklevoss twins.

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Stay tuned for more spontaneous episodes every week!

In this episode of Panoptic Conversations, Tapan and Ishan discuss how Instagram and Discord got their first 1000 customers as covered in the "First 1000" newsletter by Ali Abouelatta. They also relate this with the "1000 True Fans" article by Kevin Kelly.

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Stay tuned for more spontaneous episodes every week!

During one of the phone calls, Tapan and Ishan decide to record their conversations and thoughts behind their wide-ranging discussions. "Panoptic Conversations" is born.