Dr. Roy Casagranda, Professor of Government at Austin Community College, and wise observer of politics, returns to the Plutopia podcast. Roy is also a political philosopher, aspiring feminist, author, internationalist, struggling revolutionary. We discuss the January 6th hearings, the Supreme Court vs. abortion, gerrymandering, angry and frightened voters, dog whistles, and 2024 presidential hopefuls.

Basically the United States has turned into an oligarchy, and it's run by nine and a half people. Because the President still has some influence through executive orders, but for the most part, even Biden can't rule. So it's basically these nine people, with Biden occasionally doing an executive order. And that's not what Madison intended. The Republicans are always like "we need to follow the Consitution," and I'm at the point where I'm like, "It's not a great document, but it's a hell of a lot better than the garbage we have now."

Roy on Twitter

Roy is also author of The Blood Throne of Caria, a historical fiction.

Media Studies professor and "The Modem World" author Kevin Driscoll joins Jon and Scoop in taking a nostalgic and informative look back at the early days of online and Internet communication. Kevin explains the impact of early bulletin board systems, newsgroups, online services, and the coming of the web.

This conversation is a followup to our February conversation https://plutopia.io/kevin-driscoll-the-modem-world/ about Kevin's work and his book, "The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media," which has since been released by Yale University Press.

Kevin is also participating in a two week asynchronous conversation about "Modem World" and related subjects on the online community, The WELL, which was originally an online BBS that connected early on to the Internet.

You have these two pretty parallel stories, and some people that I talk to from the BBS side would say "Yeah, we knew about ARPANet, this isn't a secret, but it's not accessible to the everyday folks unless you've had a connection." And so some people would have these kind of informal relationships, it's like "Basically, I know a guy who gets me an account at the university," or something like that, or you had an account at a job, or something, and you're able to access it or carry it on. So there's a lot of informal kinds of connections between them. The real moment of convergence is generally around the early to mid 1990s, which coincides, of course, with privatization of NSFNet and big components of what we would think of as the Internet. That's a really good reason why we use the word Internet to talk about this big mess of communications systems.

Kevin Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. His research explores popular culture, political communication, and networked personal computing. Some of his recent work explores everyday and emerging uses of social media such as live-tweeting, joking about politics, and spreading rumors. In 2017, he published a technical and cultural history of the French Minitel with Julien Mailland from Indiana University titled Minitel: Welcome to the Internet. His latest book, "The Modem World," traces the pre-history of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ufology: the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may have extraordinary (e.g. extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional) origins. Often derided by skeptics and science educators as an example of pseudoscience, ufology has can represent a field of legitimate scientific investigation, as practiced by Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallée, Allen Hynek, et al. A ufologist is one who investigates UFO phenomena.

The late Stanton Friedman was an American nuclear physicist and professional ufologist who resided in New Brunswick, NJ and Canada. He was the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident. As a nuclear physicist, he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications. He left full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of unidentified flying objects.

His many books and public presentations were criticized by some of this fellow scientists and government officials. In May of this year, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Ronald Moultrie, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray testified before a House subcommittee. They revealed that the Defense Department is organizing reports of UAPs or "unidentified aerial phenomena" after a congressionally mandated report released last year found most of the incidents analyzed remain unidentified. The government's seeming admission that UFOs may be real appears to vindicate Dr. Friedman.

In 1975, Scoop interviewed Dr. Friedman prior to his lecture at the University of California in Berkeley.

The major reason why no government in the world wants its people to know the whole story about flying saucers — aside from the primary concern of 'how do you duplicate the flight propulsion system,' which you aren't going to tell your enemies about — is a very simple- minded one, that no government wants its people to start thinking of themselves as earthlings, instead of as Americans, or Russians, or as Chinese, or whatever. The whole way that this world is structured is predicated on a system of nationalistic competitions. I don't care whether it's the Olympics or the battlefield. The problem is the same. Or the development of nuclear weapons systems. So from an alien viewpoint, it's clear we're a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. It's further clear that despite all the jokes about "Take me to your leader," that there is no leader to be taken to.

Photo by Gianluca Carenza on Unsplash

Jim Rutt, host of "The Jim Rutt Show" podcast, joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging discussion about business and technology. Jim details his start in business and tech, his time running Network Solutions, the evolution of the Internet, cancel culture, and AI censorship.

Jim is also President and co-founder of the MIT Free Speech Alliance. He is the Executive Producer of the film "An Initiation to Game B." He is also the creator of Network Wars, the popular mobile game. He is past Chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. He was CEO of Network Solutions, which operated the .com, .net, and .org domain namespaces on the Internet until its acquisition by Verisign in 2000. Jim was the first CTO of Thomson-Reuters. He was Chairman of the computer chip design software company Analog Design Automation until its acquisition by Synposis in 2004.

The mother lode there in the just pre-internet period, AOL and its precursors... they actually created for Commodore first, and then for TRS-80, and then they had a deal to build Apple's network, a private network branded and run by Apple, for Apple users. And Apple canceled the project, but as an escape valve to get out of the contract, they let AOL keep all the technology. And so AOL launched the AOL service on a technology base that was gonna be Apple's private network private network. And the rest, as they say, is history. AOL became the big behemoth just before the Internet, and then they misplayed the transition TO the Internet. And you know what happened after that...

Before the Internet changed the way we experienced movies, dark theaters, and late night tv were the sole venues where sci-fi and horror fans could get a regular fix of cheap movie thrills. This time, on the Plutopia podcast, Jon, Scoop and Maggie discuss their favorite classic films, from the golden age of sci-fi and horror.

Jon: They had Kid Shows then, on Saturday morning. So you'd go down Saturday morning, and take your milk carton, or whatever mordido that you used to get into the movie. Where, as Scoop will remember, all you had to have was your Gandy's half-gallon milk carton (laughter). Empty half-gallon milk carton...

Scoop: My Mom asked what happened to the milk on Saturday morning, when I was headed off to the movie. I just told her I drank all the milk!

Jon: You didn't pour it down the sink, did you?

Scoop: Of course, I did! I wasn't that big a milk fan.

Jon: Yeah, I mean - this was a great thing about that era. I don't know that there's anyplace in the world that they do this now.

Maggie: Well, you guys had that story of the theater... for me, I'm about ten-ish years behind y'all. You know, so it was late 60s or early 70s for me. And we didn't have the theater thing, but we had a really great UHF station in the D.C. area. It was always this thing, like, in the morning you would have Saturday morning cartoons, which is great, and I could have my Quisp or my Quake cereal, and then in the afternoon, it was all the old sci-fi and horror movies. So I have this fondness for that time, it was so cool... scared the crap out of me!

Also check out Jon L.'s blog post, "Monsters from the Id."

More or less weekly, Plutopia posts a Sci-Fi Saturday tweet:

Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday: "Queen of Outer Space"! Interstellar energy beam destroys a space station and zaps a rocket to crash land on Venus, where women have killed most men, not good news for the four male earthling astronauts. https://t.co/GtZaV2GW2W— Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) May 14, 2022

Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday: "The Earth Dies Screaming" as aliens kill all but a few humans, sending malign robots to kill survivors and activate corpses as dead-eyed zombies. Score by composer Elisabeth Lutyens. The title was a joke that stuck. https://t.co/6yQGdZq4x1— Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) May 21, 2022

Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday - "The Monster That Challenged the World": giant mollusks from beneath the ocean floor "out of the nightmare of time" raise a ruckus in the Salton Sea, attacking livestock, lovers, and rabbits. https://t.co/n8KNN2wbP4— Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) March 12, 2022

Philosopher Charles Herrman interviews Michael Webb, an advocate for the practice of meditative inquiry. They discuss interviewing and questioning, stillness, truth, centering, and much more.

Michael Webb: Truth isn't necessarily instrumental. A lot of people might think that, 'I want to know something because I want to use it in order to achieve something else.'

Charles Herrman: Instrumental?

MW: Yes. Whereas I think we can almost look at truth as a motivator in itself. Almost like an end in itself, in away.

CH: When people refer to truth, I would say that they directly imply that beyond the truth lies a solid foundation, a ground, some justification for it. I would say that when we think we're telling the truth, that is essentially what we're saying in the background. So ultimately, we can justify truth in terms either of facts or a priori common sense justifications. That is to say, those truths that are true in and of themselves, not requiring any further evidence.

Charles Herrman is a published philosopher and author of four unpublished book manuscripts, four articles in the journal Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, and four articles at openDemocracy, an internet journal of foreign affairs.

Michael Webb has been a music teacher, a language teacher, a textbook editor, a tech writer, and a software engineer. He got a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology in a program that emphasized integrating Asian perspectives, which dovetailed nicely with his several decades of experience studying and practicing meditation. He's currently working to launch a podcast about the role of communication in evolution.

Photo: Photo by Marek Okon on Unsplash

In this episode, Jon and Scoop talk to Alexandra Alvarez about her new company "Love x Alex," her activity supporting the "Free Britney" movement, which was seeking an end to Britney Spears' court-ordered guardianship. The movement helped jump-start her line of fashion and pop culture goodies. We talk about her move from major studio casting to independent designer, marketer, and entrepreneur.

Alexandra Alvarez:

I think the timing was with us, as well. I had the "Free Britney" stuff there, but - this is crazy - I went to the termination hearing on November 12. We had no idea if they were going to terminate the conservatorship that day, it was just another court hearing. But I had created an entire line that said, past tense, "We Freed Britney." And I brought it with us. I brought, like, three sweatshirts and a hoodie, just in case. They were in my backpack. And then, I had my laptop with me, too, at this court hearing. And then probably like 45 minutes into the hearing we were all outside the Stanley Moss Courthouse, there was probably - MTV was there, all of the news stations were there, a huge deal at this point, because the documentaries had already come out. And they made the announcement that the conservatorship had been terminated. And I literally grabbed the t-shirts out of the backpack. I threw them at my friend, and I threw mine on, and I hit live on the website. And when I hit that button, the product was emailed out to everyone. And it said "We freed Britney," a huge celebratory thing. And I remember the news stations running up to me, and they were like "How do you guys already have merchandise, how did you guys know?" That event catapulted my followership and my business.

Jon and Scoop do a deep dive into the land of free speech, which is what this country's supposed to be - land of the free, home of the brave. We discuss current issues of free speech in the Internet/post-Truth era.

Jon: Should you be able to ban people from a system like Twitter? Which is supposedly set up for conversation, and has increasingly had to find ways to manage and moderate those conversations in ways that have been troubling to people who advocate for a kind of free speech absolutism.

Scoop: We have a neighbor here in the Austin area who has some views on that, and he took those views to the point of buying Twitter. And that has created a lot of uproar online and, in fact, in all communities. Because a lot of, not just personal communication, but business communication happens on Twitter now. And having someone who has a whole different approach take over and be the God of Twitter is frightening a lot of people.

Jon's notes on free speech.

* We're in an era of user-generated content in media.

* Many people are focused on UGC combined in some ratio with mass media content.

* Much content is from organizations that claim to present "news."

* A definition of news: "newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events."

* News does not equal truth.

* Journalistic objectivity is an ideal that professional journalists often pursue, but commitment to objectivity has probably eroded, especially as we acknowledge how truly difficult it is to create a truly objective representation of reality.

* The Internet facilitated the creation of many channels for distributing information.

* Traditional news organizations have had to fight for mindshare.

* Some safeguards, like the Fairness Doctrine, have gone away.

* It's hard to know what's true and what's not true.

* Many users lack critical thinking skills - to what extent can they be manipulated online?

* Doomscrolling: online news consumption and online fear consumption are addictive.

* "The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances." - Wikipedia

* The First Amendment does not apply to private companies and organizations - it's strictly about what government can or cannot do.

* Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally provides immunity for website platforms with respect to third-party content. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. It basically says that the source of posted content is responsible for it, and the carrier of that content is not.

* Without Section 230, platforms like Facebook and Twitter would either have to fold or vet content more strictly.

* Oddly some people who argue for less restriction on social media platforms also talk about repealing Section 230 - which would have the opposite effect.

* Elon Musk and Twitter: he wants looser moderation.

* In the social media free for all we see today, moderation is essential.

* "The first step is to distinguish between different kinds of moderation. Doing so allows discussions to engage with specific issues of life online while avoiding simplistic games of tribal signaling. The critical distinction is between moderation of “decorum” (some might alternatively call it “behavior”) versus moderation of “content.” Concerns about personal attacks, harassment, threats, bullying, and so on fall under “decorum.

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, AKMA Adam discusses his path to the priesthood, faith, interpretation and belief, doctrine, rock and roll, and postmodern thought.

My work is interpreting the Bible and not teaching doctrine, and when I say this - my wife was a theologian - I'm envisioning her saying, "No, that's not the way it is." So I'm trying to be careful. But the way doctrine functions most effectively and helpfully in the Church of England is when it's shaping the way we live. It's a reflection and expression of the kind of people we are and the kinds of things that we do and believe in.

AKMA is an ordained priest, currently a Tutor in New Testament at the University of Oxford; he's also a blogger, technology-observer, and author especially about hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. He tutors St. Stephen’s House’s ordinands, and Oriel’s undergraduates, in New Testament and Greek — after stints teaching in the US at Eckerd College, Princeton Theological Seminary, Seabury-Western Seminary, and Duke University. He and his wife Margaret taught in Scotland at the University of Glasgow before coming south to Oxford. He read Philosophy as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, then trained for ordained ministry at Yale Divinity School, and wrote his doctoral thesis on New Testament theology at Duke University.

He has written various books and articles about the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle of James, but especially about hermeneutics — the theory of interpretation, and how we identify better and worse interpretations. He draws on fields as diverse as surrealism, comics theory, midrash, information design, psychology, rock'n'roll, and postmodern critical theory to explain how people arrive at their interpretive conclusions.

He's also given keynotes at the Society for Scholarly Publishing and Catholic Biblical Association; invited talks at the early Digital Identity World conferences and at David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect conferences, as well as numerous academic talks.

AKMA says "For a variety of no doubt complicated reasons (including, and this is a bit of a coming-out observation for me, my [late diagnosis] autism) I tend to encounter and consider problems a few degrees off the conventional ways of approaching them. Not so far as to make the conventional approach unintelligible to me, but far enough that my analyses usually strike regular participants in the discourses as odd or insufficiently in touch with what everyone knows or does. As a result, I have been a liminal academic, priest, technology-observer, philosopher, what-you-will. I have had few ardent supporters, but many intrigued acquaintances: 'cult classic, not bestseller' as Mike Skinner says."

* AKMA's website: http://akma.disseminary.org

* AKMA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/akm.adam

* AKMA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AKMA

People of a certain age will recognize the sound bites we play at the beginning of this episode. Specifically those who grew up between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. This time on the Plutopia Podcast, Jon and Scoop take a walk down that scary part of memory lane known as The Cold War.

The Cold War started in the late 1940s, and continued until 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. But it was never completely over, tensions never completely abated, waves of conflict continued to ripple throughout the globe. However since 1991, at least until the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, we've had relative peace. But in the cold war era, baby boomers like Scoop and Jon grew up with the fear of nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. We laughed at "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"... but it was very nervous laughter.

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, Jon and Scoop discuss life during the cold war, and the new era of apocalyptic thinking (search "Cold War," replace with "Climate Disaster").

People don’t remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn’t really that ideal at all. My parents remind me of that. “You think it was this way, and it wasn’t all Leave It to Beaver.” But for some reason, that’s what humans do: We romanticize the past because of our discontent with the current.

~ Brian Fallon