Jon and Scoop conclude their postmortem for the year 2022. We look at the drama within the Republican party that managed to last into 2023. We also examine the GOP's extremist desire to tear down the government and replace it with something straight out of dystopian sci-fi. We also look at pathological liars, Georg Santos, whatever happened to the old, no-crazy Republicans, how the old Southern Democrats became Southern Republicans, and much more!

Jon: There's a handful of Republicans that are far-right MAGA tea party whatever you want to call it folks, who are opposed to the idea of government - not just opposed to a different party, but opposed to government itself. And they are also not very experienced, most of them, in politics.

Scoop: You're being kind. Well, it seems to me these guys have watched too many Kung Fu movies, and they think they're going to be like the Five Fingers of Death. The Five Thumbs, maybe - they're all trying to write themselves in as characters in the Matrix, going against the evil programs from the Biden Administration...

Also note: Jon is cofounder and cohost, with Bruce Sterling, of the annual State of the World conversation. You can find it via https://tinyurl.com/state-world-2023.

In this, the first Plutopia podcast of 2023, the Plutopian brain trust offers you their postmortem report on the late, and not quite lamented year, 2022.

Jon: So the point, I guess, is that we would have to - and that we should - be finding a way to live that doesn't depend on extracting resources to the extent that we do now, and it's possible to do that. But it's a big re-education, and really, it contradicts the basic tenets of capitalism. Because capitalism is based on exploiting resources.

Scoop: Well, I've heard conservative folks say that it's our fault, for helping out all those other countries that were doing so poorly compared to us, supposedly. That we shouldn't have helped them out, because their getting better just contributed to the changes in the climate, and pollution...

Suzy: And I think that's one of the things I have such a hard time with, explaining to certain Republicans that the people you've elected don't represent you anymore, you know, and I heard one older woman say the other day, just flat out, that she doesn't believe in CLIMATE.

Jon L.'s review of 2022:

January:

War in Ukraine persisted throughout the year. Russia demanded that NATO agree never to admit Ukraine and accused Washington of installing Nazis to lead Ukraine (Zelenskyy is Jewish.)

Omicron surged worldwide early in the year.

February:

Winter Olympics in February - limited attendance mainly because of China's "zero Covid" policy. Government officials from UK and USA among others boycott because of China's human rights abuses.

Putin says the Ukraine was created by Russia but has become a colony of the West. His invasion of the Ukraine is therefore retaliatory.

March:

Ron DeSantis signed the "Don't Say Gay" bill for Florida in March. Much yammering about "wokeness." The bill restricts what elementary schools can teach about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Comic relief?

April:

In April Macron won a second term in France, defeating far right Marine Le Pen. Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the Supreme Court's first black woman justice.

A Trump judge invalidated mask mandate for mass transit, ruling that blocking transmission of the virus is not "sanitation" under the law.

May:

In May the draft majority opinion overruling Roe v Wade leaked, pissing John roberts off. It later appears that Alito leaked his opinion, apparently this is something he does.

The house approved an aid package for Ukraine - ongoing support for Ukraine vs Russia.

A new Omicron subvariant resulted in a surge if Covid cases.

19 students and 2 teachers were slaughtered in Uvalde while police stood around for an hour or more. Why they didn't act more quickly is puzzling and controversial.

June:

A baby formula shortage, gasoline over $5 per gallon.

First major federal gun reform in 3 decades passed, expanding background checks for for gun buyers under 21, incentivizing states' red flag laws, and allocating 1.3 billion for mental health and security initiatives at schools.

The January 6 public hearings detailed Donald Trump's efforts to stoke insurrection.

26 states moved to ban or restrict terminating pregnancy.

July:

Historic heat in Europe, another effect of climate change. Brutal drought in China. Rivers dried up worldwide. A long hot summer with Biblical rainstorms in St. Louis, Illinois, and eastern Kentucky.

More gun violence: a rooftop sniper killed 7, injures 40 at a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.

Manchin screwed Biden's domestic agenda by blocking the two trillion dollar "Build Back Better...

Science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast. We discuss his latest book, Chokepoint Capitalism, and his definition of a chokepoint. We also explore the impact of mergers and consolidation on American society, the need for increasing enforcement by the FTC and SEC, antitrust law, and much more.

Cory Doctorow: It's a chokepoint, that's the kinds of structures that Rebecca and I identify in this book. That ou have these structural problems where two firms control all the mobile, and those firms have convergent policies that act to the detriment of both audiences and - importantly here - creative workers. And takes money out of their pockets, changes the distributional outcome. Even if you can claim, "Oh, look at how big the app marketplace is, look how many billions of dollars apps are generating," unless you also look at where those billions of dollars go, you don't know anything important about how it's affecting the material conditions of creative workers. So what we didn't want to do with this book is write one of those chapter 11 books, where there's ten chapters about how screwed up things are, and then in the eleventh chapter we say, "Hey, everybody, go vote harder, we'll get this!" Instead, we take the position that anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop, and that when it stops there will be a crisis. We've had lots of crises in arts policy and in copyright policy over the last couple of decades. There are far more to come. And that when those crises arrive, as my arch-enemy Milton Friedman used to say, "Ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center very quickly."

Cory's previous Plutopian encounters:

* Cory Doctorow: Covid-19, Dystopia, and Adversarial Interoperatibility

* Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface

Cory on Mastodon

Photo by Joi Ito. Licensed CC-BY

Author and activist Casey Walker talks about her early life in Nevada City, California, where she created and published the literary and environmental journal "Wild Duck Review." We also discuss biotechnology, media content vs. money, moving from anti-tech to useful tech, intellectual evolution, confronting the bullies, and changing the news.

She produced 20 book-length issues of the Review, and grew circulation to 48 US states and 13 countries. In 2000, Sierra Club Books published Issue 19 of "Wild Duck Review" as Made Not Born: The Troubling World of Biotechnology.

Unexpectedly, "Wild Duck Review" was perhaps one of the last, homemade print journals to go viral before the world migrated to online search/social. Was a hinge moment between those with natural tendencies toward being community-centered, back-to-landers, tech-suspicious, nature-lovers, independent bookstore lovers, social justice activists, etc., versus those who became idealistic about what worldwide internet connection could yield for humanity.

Casey gave interviews on national media, participated in conferences, and began speaking out on what she saw as a crisis in public news and discourse. In 2004, she founded the Institute for Inquiry to pursue high-stakes, bio-cultural issues, beginning with “A Wireless Age?”.

By 2009, Walker began a pursuit of a firm intuition: that the accepted idea of public news and discourse is itself paradigmatically "off."

She spent the next decade working out new theory (and architectural principles for online inquiry) via close observation, deep retreat, and writing.

Presentations of that work will soon go public.

Casey Walker: I mean, a lot of my thinking is really at core the question that an editor would ask, which is "what's the most important thing that I can print, and put out into the world?" And once you take that question seriously, it takes you on a path that is truly independent of what we have today, which is this negotiation between advertisers and markets. Demographics. And the polling and matching that goes between those two completely eclipses the question of "what do we need to be thinking about?"

Author, scholar, and translator Pablo Vazquez is our guest this time on the Plutopia podcast. We discuss their conversion from Catholicism to Zoroastrianism, and its influence on other religions. Pablo explains Zoroastrian beliefs, and Zoroastrianism in North America. We also explore Q-Anon as a possible religion.

Born in Panama and now living in Texas, Pablo is also a game writer, lecturer, consultant, and essayist. His has just published his translation of The Sacred Gathas of Zarathushtra & the Old Avestan Canon.

Currently working on their second graduate degree, Pablo's first degree was a MA in Religions of Asia and Africa from SOAS University of London. While there, they were affiliated with the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies where they learned Zoroastrian history, theology, and the Avestan language. Pablo is also unique as an officially accepted convert to Zoroastrianism while also personally embracing a multireligious approach.

Pablo Vazquez: When interviewed, most Americans actually share religious beliefs with one another on a frequent level. Of an interesting scale, a lot of Christians in the United States do not believe in hell, actually. If they do believe in any sort of divine punishment, they believe in immediate punishment. And that's sort of different from what's being told to us by the media, as to what the Christian landscape looks like. In the same way, the Zoroastrian landscape is kind of difficult to pinpoint down, because the main emphasis of Zoroastrianism is free will. So each individual - I joke that, if you get a roomful of Zoroastrians together, ten of them, you'll get twelve different opinions as to what Zoroastrianism is.

Author, media theorist, and fellow podcaster Douglas Rushkoff joins the Plutopia podcast as we discuss his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. We also explore technoutopians, capitalism, billionaire tech bros, psychedelic tech bros, The Mindset, going beta, the blockchain and crypto, Q Anon, and much more!

Douglas Rushkoff: But there's almost darker forms now, whether it's the Effective Altruism, which a lot of people are talking about now since the crash of FTX, which was a crypto exchange started by one of the main funders of the Effective Altruism movement, which is the idea that you don't do as much good doing good as you do by making money, and then donating some of it to do good. So stop worrying about treating people nicely, stop worrying about whether your business is destroying the planet or hurting other people. As long as you make a ton of money, you're going to more efficiently by some utilitarian algorithm that we've developed, we can justify - you take 5% of your income, and give it to charity, you're doing more good long-term than you are by actually being (laughter) a good person.

"Most simply stated, our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with the other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system. Our physical and mental health is contingent on nurturing those connections. Leaving others behind is futile and stupid. It’s as if we’ve come full circle—and sensibilities that the Western world with its empirical science and individual progress were meant to transcend are back in full force."

The Mindset: a belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods and transcend the calamities that befall everyone else. It’s a way of applying the “exit strategy” of a Silicon Valley startup to civilization itself.

"The Mindset is rooted in empirical science: the reduction of nature and complexity, the domination of others, and the extraction of substance and energy from the real world and its conversion into symbol systems, like money. Digital technologies catalyzed and amplified The Mindset, yielding tech billionaires who believe that they can lord over us and then leave us behind as they migrate to humanity’s next phase of existence."

From Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." ~ William Gibson, in The Economist, 12/4/2003

"This isn't the dystopia that I wrote about!" ~ Bruce Sterling

Artist, writer, and curator Patrick Lichty returns to the Plutopia podcast as we explore the future. We do a deep dive into Web3, crypto, bad actors on the Internet, Meta and the Metaverse, Second Life, science fiction and life on Mars.

Patrick Lichty: "It's kind of funny... I wound up doing a lot of study on the whole Martian thing, because a friend of mine over in the UAE and I, we were actually proposing a VR habitat for people in Mars colonies. Because you're going to wind up in these relatively cramped quarters, or you're going to be on a ship for two years, and that sort of thing, and you need a way to feel like you're not in a can. So this is one really good psychological use for VR."

* Patrick also manages Plutopia News Network's "Reality Augmented" Twitter account.

* Patrick Lichty on Twitter

* Patrick Lichty on Wikipedia

* Patrick Lichty on Instagram

* Techspressionism

The mid-term election is over, ballots are still being counted, and the dreaded red wave turned out to be a red ripple. Our friend Roy Casagranda joins Plutopians as we dissect election 2022.

Roy Casagranda: If you look at the 2018 election, 95% of blacks voted Democrat, which is, like, unbelievable. 67% of Hispanics voted Democrat, and 75% of Asians voted Democrat. In 2020, the black number didn't really move much, maybe a little bit. The Hispanic number went from 67% to 60%, and then the Asian number went from 75% to 70%. So there was a little bit of loss of reliability in the 2020 election. But the voter turnout was so massive it didn't really matter, because the big problem that Democrats have is not the unreliability of people of color, it's that 60% of white people are voting Republican. That's the real problem. And then the other part that have that's a problem is that Democrats are really awful at showing up and voting.

Plutopians enjoy a free-form fiesta of facts and fictions! Jon, Suzy and Scoop discuss voting, Austin politics, Twitter, politics on Tik Tok, cannabis politics, Trump in 2024, and other nightmares.

Suzy: I'm off Twitter. I'll never Twit again.

Jon: Oh, really?

Suzy: No, I'm done. Did you see what happened, the spike in the use of racial slurs, most particularly the "n" word? 500% up.

Jon: After that, he [Elon] said that, "Well, we're not really going to change moderation policies right now...." I don't know whether they kicked any of those people off or what they did about it. He's in a bit of a quandary, because he made all of this noise about how he was going to have this great free speech thing going, but he's going to lose all of his advertisers.

Scoop: Yeah, that's who's being lobbied to get out of Elon's business, because they are going to look bad if they stick around, and it becomes the hellscape that people are thinking it's going to be.

From Jon L.: Almost down to the wire with 2022 midterms, we decided a discussion of voting was in order. However Elon Musk was shitting on all the news cycles, so we had to go there, too. Our stream of consciousness flowed pretty well on this show, considering that apocalyptic nature of the subjects we were discussing. Help us row the boat, navigate the stream!

Daniel Hope is a Spiritual Director and Enneagram Coach who runs spirituality programming in the healthcare industry. In this Plutopia podcast, Daniel and Jon discuss spirituality, meditation, spiritual direction, artificial intelligence vs. humanity, finding common ground, and much more.

Daniel Hope: Darwin was - I don't think he was the first to propose this, but he put forward that collaboration outperforms competition at the group level. Sometimes at the individual level, individuals can be more competitive, and they may outperform the other individuals. And so it may give them some short-term gain, it may give them some benefit. But if that is brought up to the group level, the collaborative groups are always going to win. Look at the Wall Street data, the analysis of companies with women in leadership. They outperform all the others hands down in every area.

* On Medium

* On Twitter

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

"We are not the victims, we are the collaborators and, if we accept this role, we can be the co-creators of something transformative." - Daniel Hope