Plutopia News Network

Author and philosopher Richard Smoley joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss Kabbalah: Treasure House of Secret Wisdom, drawing on five decades of study to explore this mystical tradition rooted in Judaism as a framework for understanding consciousness and spiritual awakening. He explains the Tree of Life, offers a symbolic interpretation of Genesis, and describes the divine as ultimately beyond human images and concepts, emphasizing humility over dogmatism. The conversation explores connections among Kabbalah, Buddhism, Gurdjieff’s teachings, and A Course in Miracles, particularly their approaches to self-observation and the limitations of ordinary perception. Smoley also reflects on his experiences with supervised psychedelic therapy, acknowledging both its value for him and its potential risks. Throughout, he presents spiritual development as a gradual process of recognizing how our minds shape experience and opening ourselves to possibilities beyond familiar assumptions.

Richard Smoley:

There are three pillars in the Kabbalah, the Kabbalistic tree: Pillar Mercy, the Pillar Severity, and the Pillar of Consciousness. So, when the severe aspect of God is being invoked, it tends to use those God names. When the merciful aspect of God is invoked, it tends to use another set of names. And when the central principle is involved, it uses yet another set. So, actually, a Kabbalist will say the names of God are the garments with which He clothes Himself. So that is, I hope, some explanation of how Kabbalists conceptually envisage God.

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Civitech co-founder and CEO Jeremy Smith joins Plutopia to discuss how technology, personal trust, and grassroots organizing can expand political participation in Texas and beyond. He explains how Civitech helps voters navigate registration, ballot access, and rejected ballots while equipping Democratic and progressive campaigns with data, tools, and practical support. The conversation explores misinformation, voting barriers, mail delays, and the ways election reporting can undermine public confidence. Jeremy argues that campaigns overlook enormous opportunities when they focus only on registered voters, emphasizing outreach to people who feel excluded or disengaged. His central message: technology can remove obstacles and strengthen organizing, but earning votes requires authentic relationships and sustained effort.

Jeremy Smith:

Our approach is a lot more expertise-involved. We sell data and tools and we jump in to help. We have guides on how to run for office. We do training. We do office hours, put out reports, we do scientific studies, we trial programs ourselves with one of our PACs or nonprofits that we’re close with. And all of that is designed to learn, and to essentially bring expertise. So to the opening question, technology that other people don’t understand is not very helpful, even if they’ll buy it from us because they’re hoping—you know, our view is we’re a nonprofit and worker-owned B Corp, so we have a very different model. We’re not trying to be extractive, we are trying to have an impact. So we invest a lot more in the usage, what makes this technology easy to use and how can we help people deploy it. And that’s a little bit different kind of style that we have.

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Nicole Ozer, the new Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss protecting privacy, free expression, and digital rights, and civil liberties as AI expands the power of governments and corporations. She explains how interconnected surveillance systems threaten vulnerable communities and argues that AI should be evaluated by the problems it addresses and its effects on people, rather than sweeping promises or fears. The conversation explores age verification and social media bans, the environmental costs of data centers, and lessons from earlier struggles over internet freedom. Ozer outlines an advocacy strategy combining litigation, local and state legislation, international work, and broad coalitions across political and social movements. Emphasizing public education, grassroots organizing, and renewed in-person connections, she calls for collective action to ensure technology empowers people and supports a safer, more open internet.

Nicole Ozer:

You know, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a much different organization than it was when it was first founded. It means that we actually have a lot of different strategies at our disposal to be able to move work forward. Like the U. S. Supreme Court, we actually were able to win an important privacy issue there this past year in the Chatrie v. United States case on the privacy of location information. But it’s very hard to win in the U. S. Supreme Court right now. So we are also able to pivot to be doing really important work in state courts. We have a case right now about license plate reader surveillance that we’re moving through California state court with a state constitutional right to privacy claim. So looking at state courts, things we can move through state agencies, things we can move through local and state legislation, things we can move internationally—we can kind of combine all those strategies and come back federally in the U. S. with it, with potentially a different administration.

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Filmmaker J. M. (Josh) Logan joins Plutopia to discuss how his experience in special effects, sound, and post-production shapes his approach to directing. Exploring his feature “The Relic: Dragon,” he describes combining Texas history, Norse mythology, and cosmic horror in a story about estranged sisters, buried treasure, and the destructive power of greed. Josh explains his preference for practical effects that give actors something tangible to respond to, while embracing digital tools and YouTube’s opportunities for emerging filmmakers. He also considers the changing roles of Hollywood, distribution, and film festivals in helping independent films reach audiences. Throughout the conversation, he champions filmmaking as a collective effort, arguing that even low-budget productions can thrive by prioritizing crew well-being, creative ownership, and shared financial success.

J.M. Logan:

I’m putting together a series of short videos right now for “Dragon” promotion to talk about the myths of low-budget filmmaking. And one of those myths that I think really needs to be busted is that making a low-budget film has to suck. It does not. And I feel like, after having worked on as many movies as I have over the decades, and having worked with many, many different crews and people, different producers, different directors… if you are working on a movie set and it sucks, it’s because the people at the top built it that way. That’s the only reason. It’s either because they didn’t have enough experience to know how to do things, or they’re prioritizing their budget over their crew… you know, we all have limited resources, no matter how much resources you have. Even the biggest Marvel movie has limited resources. So, where you assign those resources is the most important value of making movies.

(Find more teasers on YouTube.)

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On the Plutopia News Network podcast, former Republican strategist Jen Thompson discusses her memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, and the near-fatal car crash that prompted her to question her beliefs, ambitions, and identity. Raised in a conservative Christian household that prized conventional success, Jen describes how her pursuit of power and approval led her into politics before she left for Australia and gradually embraced progressive values and a career in higher education. She reflects on her responsibility for policies she promoted, the sexism she endured in Washington, and the years of therapy, meditation, and personal reflection that helped her confront trauma and a punishing inner critic. Written as nonlinear vignettes, her memoir explores the difficult, ongoing work of transformation, encouraging readers to examine inherited convictions, take responsibility for their choices, and recognize vulnerability as a source of strength.

Jen Thompson:

I remember thinking , who am I? What do I believe? I was raised in a very Christian conservative household, with a very successful and driven father who wanted that for me, and so I landed in law school and after that became a lawyer in the House and then in the Senate, and was really promoting Christian conservative values on that campaign. So when I was in the ambulance, that moment changed the course of my entire life. It took days and weeks and months and years. Decades, really. But that’s what I remember feeling. I was pulled from the jaws of death, and who am I? I remember thinking I was a fraud and not living an authentic life to what I really was, even though those were the values I was promoting.

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Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and the struggle over who controls technology in the workplace. He distinguishes between “centaurs,” workers who use machines to enhance their skills, and “reverse centaurs,” people forced to serve automated systems while absorbing the blame for their failures. Cory argues that AI’s immediate dangers lie in corporate efforts to cut jobs, intensify workloads, and weaken bargaining power, alongside environmental costs and financial instability. He makes the case for unions, collective action, and antitrust enforcement, explaining why individual shopping choices and expanded copyright protections cannot substitute for organized resistance. The conversation also explores building movements across political divides, the limits of property rights, and the intertwined growth of corporate and government surveillance, with an emphasis on protecting human agency, privacy, and workers’ rights.

Cory Doctorow:

In automation theory, a person who is assisted by a machine, we call them a centaur. The metaphor here is you’ve got a human head and the horse’s body. So the discernment, the judgment, that’s all coming from the person. But the strength, the endurance, the speed, that’s coming from the horse’s body, from the machine. And so, you know, whether you’re using a spell checker or riding a bicycle, You might be a centaur. And the corollary of that, of course, is that when you are being bossed around by the machine, when you’re recruited to be a peripheral for the machine, when you’re an assistant whose schedule is being set by the machine, you’re a reverse centaur. You are the horse’s head on the human’s body. That’s not a good place to be.

Portrait by Jonathan Worth

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Technology journalist Paulina Borsook returns to Plutopia to discuss the republication of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, her 2000 critique of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture and its failure to acknowledge dependence on public investment and social cooperation. She reflects on the industry’s shift from collaborative engineering toward financial speculation, the growing power of technology billionaires, and the personal and professional fallout from publishing her criticism. The conversation explores technology journalism, worker power, surveillance, AI hype, and the limits of viewing human intelligence apart from bodies, emotions, and lived experience. While distinguishing executives from ordinary technology workers and acknowledging continuing resistance, Borsook and the hosts consider how the attitudes she documented have intensified—and why preserving the original book offers a useful historical perspective on today’s technology industry.

There was plenty, I don’t want to say pushback, but there was plenty of critical thinking about all this stuff. And there was a lot of common cause with “how do we preserve civil liberties in cyberspace, but how do we be decent members of human society, too?” I mean, there were a lot of different ways to approach this, and that all went away. Those people died, retired, those entities are gone. So, the kind of pushback that I would have expected kind of disappeared. And I sort of feel like (let’s use a biological metaphor) these bad ideas sort of got—it’s kind of like Giardia in a watershed. You know, they kind of got out there and then you can’t bring them back. So, these ideas sort of crept along and became more and more widespread, and there wasn’t anybody, in the institutional way for sure, to push back against these ideas.

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Journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, exploring how the Linotype transformed printing and helped launch mass media. Through stories of inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler, printers’ unions, and Twain’s disastrous investment in a competing machine, Jarvis traces the connections among technological innovation, labor, and the advertising business model. The conversation follows printing’s evolution into desktop publishing and considers parallels with generative AI, including opportunities for creativity and concerns about homogenized writing and human control. Jarvis challenges the idea that mass media ever represented a unified public, arguing that its decline offers an opportunity to build more conversational, collaborative media grounded in communities and individual agency.

Jeff Jarvis:

In this [next, after Hot Type]book, about the Death of Mass, I want to look at the fact that mass was an invention. Mass media was an invention. It wasn’t forever. It wasn’t a natural state of things. And as it disappears, I want to look at how we got here to recognize that there were choices that were made that could have turned out differently, so that today, as mass disappears and there’s a void left, we can recognize the choices we have going forward. I can’t predict what’s going to happen. There will definitely be chaos, but I think we have a huge opportunity now to replace this, what I see as an insult to people—to put them in this gigantic bucket of the mass and make presumptions about them, and to shift back to a more conversational, community-based, collaborative society, if we do it right.

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Broadcaster Richard Wolinsky joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss Spaceships, Ray Guns, Martian Octopods, his oral history weaving decades of interviews with science fiction writers, editors, and fans into a portrait of the genre’s formative years. He describes the financial struggles of pulp writers, the influence and contentious politics of editors, and the friendships, rivalries, and correspondence that sustained the field. Sharing memories of figures including Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick, Wolinsky reflects on assembling the book and regrets missing opportunities to interview pioneering women writers. The conversation also explores science fiction’s relationship with Hollywood, with Wolinsky criticizing its neglect of classic stories and arguing that the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 transformed the genre’s commercial prospects, fandom, and place in mainstream culture.

Richard Wolinsky:

Film, forget it. Forget it. It wasn’t until Star Wars and Close Encounters that Hollywood woke up to the fact that there was actually money in science fiction.

The other thing that I want to point out here, because it does have a little to do with my book, is that in 1977 the world of science fiction changed—not a little, but everything changed. Absolutely everything.

Writers who were struggling became bestsellers. The mainstream suddenly merged with science fiction, and everything in this book leading up to ’77 just in a way vanished because suddenly the world changed.

The conventions changed. The fandom changed. The kinds of stories being written and adapted changed.

Everything changed. And I don’t think people are aware of how much those two movies, in particular, but probably Star Wars more than anything else, changed the face of our national culture.

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The Plutopia team examines the rapid expansion of AI and cryptocurrency data centers, focusing on growing bipartisan opposition in Texas to their enormous demands for electricity, water, land, tax subsidies, and transmission infrastructure, as well as the threat of eminent domain to rural communities. They question whether the AI boom can justify this costly construction—or will leave behind abandoned industrial sites if the bubble bursts—before widening the conversation to political and institutional disorder under Trump, public-health failures, strained relations with Canada, the Epstein controversy, executive power, and uncertainty surrounding the midterm elections. Throughout, they return to a broader concern: an attention-driven media environment that encourages sensational headlines, misinformation, influencers, and speculation at the expense of context, accuracy, and informed public judgment.

Jon Lebkowsky:

And one of the things that I picked up from going to the State Democratic Convention here. There were people from West Texas there, and they’re saying that like Republicans are showing up at the meetings of Democrats there and not necessarily because they’re ready to. Jump from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, but at least they understand that the Democrats are more likely to have their back in opposition to data centers.

Scoop Sweeney:

Governor Abbott, for once, has finally done something. That is somewhat helpful. He set up a moratorium on new data center construction, and they’re supposed to address that in a more serious way. Way during a special section, a special session of the legislature.

Wendy Grossman:

Data centers are kind of the physical manifestation of everyone’s discontents with the entire technology industry, with billionaires, with, you know. Having their own local interests overridden, and they all come together in this one monstrous building that is a terrible, terrible neighbor.

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