Plutopia News Network

December 8th…1980

On December 8th 2023, Laurie Kaye’s memoir Confessions of a Rock N Roll Name Dropper is set for release. Laurie joins the Plutopia Podcast this time as we discuss her book and explore the events in her life that led to the interview that still haunts her.

Laurie Kaye:

The entire interview was so amazing to me. And even though I knew how John and Yoko had met and got together, John and Yoko both told me the entire story of their original meetup. And it was so cool. And not only that, but their first date, which was two years later, and how that ended up being the night that they recorded Two Virgins. And the next morning, when the sun came up, ended up making love for the first time. And it was so beautiful to hear them talk about that and remember it and just see the looks on their faces and the joy of memory. And not only that, but leading up to it, John talking about how excited he was to hear Yoko sing while he was singing and how she brought out in him all the different parts of his recording ability.

Links:

Order “Confessions of a Rock N Roll Name Dropper at Barnes And Noble

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Educator and author Amy Bruckman joins the Plutopia podcast this time. Amy is Regents’ Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Contributing Editor Wendy Grossman joins Jon and Scoop as we discuss Amy’s book “Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge.” We also explore compensating creators, online conspiracies, venture capital as a killer of apps and ask “Is Google Search reliable??”

Amy Bruckman:

You know, the reason I wrote my book was to help people to understand what a knowledge-building community is. And I think understanding the design factors that go into any successful community can contribute to a successful knowledge-building community. Like finding ways for people to feel pride in what they contribute, for example, and finding ways for peer review to correct errors. That one is really critical.

You need to make sure that people’s contributions are in small pieces that can be easily combined. People will do lots of things if they can do a little bit here and a little bit there. If you give people a giant thing to do, then they’re going to say, oh, I don’t have time. But if you give them a little chunk, then they’ll do it. So, if you break things into little chunks where lots of people can contribute, it zips together without too much effort. There’s a lot you can do.

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Rob van Eijk, the Future of Privacy Forum’s Managing Director for Europe, joins Contributing Editor Wendy Grossman, Jon, and Scoop in this wide-ranging discussion about data privacy and advertising technology. We explore digital advertising, cookies, ad blockers, privacy law, AI and ads, and we ask the question, “What the heck is hyper-nudging?”

Rob van Eijk:

The fact that you interact with digital content makes it that your behavior will be recorded, but also, in real time, analyzed. And obviously we’re all individuals, we have many aspects in common, or course, but there are aspects that generative AI will be able to pick up, and then ads and value propositions can be changed according to that. So this is what I mean with “hyper-nudging,” and the statistical approach with AB testing works really well with being able to fine tune that communication that you have through digital advertisements and your web browsing behavior – to fine tune that to who we are.

Photo by Frank Jansen

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Hugo Campos’ efforts to liberate health data from implantable medical devices has drawn widespread praise and recognition. He joins e-Patient Dave deBronkart, a cancer survivor and an international keynote speaker on healthcare, on the Plutopia podcast.

Hugo Campos:

I think the trend has been from being passive patients to become engaged in participatory medicine, and the more, I think, tools become available and the more knowledge becomes available, we’ll continue moving toward more patient autonomy. I think so. We may not be prescribing our own medication ever, but I think there is a great chance for even AI to be able to help with diagnosis, and help with care, decision-making, and all of these things that are important in the life of a patient – where the healthcare system may not always be available to help.

Hugo Campos has been a creative director, art director, visual designer, marketer, computer programmer, and presentation coach. He is an advocate for patient autonomy, accountability, and access to health data. He was named a White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine by President Barack Obama in 2015 for his data liberation advocacy. What particularly drives Hugo is a passion for participatory medicine, connected health, and patient empowerment through the use of technology.

Link to the Society for Participatory Medicine

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Wagner James Au thinks there may be a metaverse in your future! He joins the Plutopia podcast as we explore the various incarnations of the metaverse, including Second Life and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. We also discuss the birth of the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, and its appearance in many sci-fi books and movies.

Wagner James Au:

Military veterans started meeting with each other in Second Life, and so they’re anonymous through their avatars, they’re all over the world, they’re all over the country. But they would start meeting together and discussing really deeply personal issues, like their PTSD, or their injuries in combat. Very powerful, for them. I wrote an Atlantic piece about this; I quoted a retired Colonel saying “some Marines are telling me that Second Life works for them like nothing else has done before.” I think a lot of the organizations miss that. So I make it a big focus of my new book, Making a Metaverse that Matters – to see what’s organically evolving in metaverse platforms like Second Life, like VRChat, like Rec Room, like Roblox… because you’ll often find organically emerging, really powerful real world use cases like that.

Wagner James Au has written about digital culture, especially the metaverse for many years. He’s been a freelance reporter, a metaverse consultant, a game developer, a screenwriter. He was also a white-suited avatar named “Hamlet Au,” the first embedded journalist in a virtual world, Second Life, beginning in 2003. In his just-released book, Making a Metaverse that Matters, he writes with authority about the history of the metaverse concept and the reality vs the hype re virtual worlds.

Making a Metaverse that Matters reviewed by Wendy Grossman

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Climate scientist Michael Tobis returns to join Plutopians as the planet continues to bake and burn. We discuss the Canadian wildfires, climate change, and political roadblocks to finding a solution.

I think most of the members of the so-called conservative party here are going to be climate deniers, too. Especially since many of them – the bulk of them – are from Alberta, which is the Texas of the north, if you’ll pardon. It’s basically petroleum, ranching, and cold instead of petroleum, ranching, and hot. There’s been a lot of cultural overlap – there’s a longstanding resentment of the east and the power centers that feeds into this. So the yahoos are out in force here, sorry to say.

(Image by Cristian Ibarra from Pixabay)

Other Plutopia conversations with Michael Tobis:

The post Michael Tobis: Heat Wave! first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Geologist and geoscience writer Andrew Alden joins Plutopians to discuss his book Deep Oakland, inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Andrew gives us a guided tour of Oakland’s history and geology.

Andrew Alden:

It’s a new kind of book. Any of you, if you wanted to, you could write a book like that for your own city. I’m not declaring a franchise, but I’m saying Deep Oakland is a new type of book, and I hope that it gets a wider readership and inspires more books like it. I don’t have to write every book, you know – the more authors who can do this, the better. I want to wake the world up to what modern geology has to offer. Geology is not your grandfather’s geology. It’s your grandchildren’s geology. It’s a geology of the 21st century. It’s the geology the 21st century needs as we face terrible re-structuring of the world economy.

Alden is a geologist and geoscience writer who has worked for the US Geological Survey and reported for KQED and Bay Nature.

Through his writing Alden raises awareness for what he calls the deep present: the appreciation of the ancient underpinnings that shape the modern-day surroundings of daily life. His website is oaklandgeology.com.

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Climate activist, former hippie flower salesman and politician Max Nofziger returns to the Plutopia podcast. We discuss Max’s political career in Austin, his environmental activism, his in-progress memoir and much more.

Max Nofziger:

You know, I led those campaigns to stop fossil fuel plants. And nobody wants to do that now, you know why? Because it’s really hard. When we campaigned against the lignite plant, our opponents said if we don’t have it, people are going to freeze in the dark. Okay, scare tactic. We won anyhow; nobody froze in the dark – back then. Now they do. But back then… And then when we shut down the four coal plants, that was the argument then, people are going to freeze in the dark. No they’re not! Nobody… there were no brownouts, there were not blackouts, nobody froze in the dark. So we shut down power plants, and managed to fill that void, that gap, with solar power, energy conservation, and wind power.

The post Max Nofziger’s Climate Activism first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Zen Buddhist priest Renshin Bunce joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss Buddhism and Renshin’s life as a priest. Renshin received dharma transmission in 2013. She worked as a hospice chaplain from 2010 until she retired in 2022.

Renshin Bunce:

Soto Zen is no gaining idea. We don’t practice, and practice – there are a few words, like practice, like God, like love, like life – they have so many meanings. When I say practice, what am I saying? Let’s say that the hard work of actual on the cushion zazen. So, we are taught you can’t go to that trying to *get* something. But of course, if we didn’t get some kind of result from it, we wouldn’t keep doing it. So back to your starting point, I think, is to actually be so courageous as to not cling to those results.

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Alan Chamberlain aka Axon explains his music and his journey to recovery. We explore country music, songwriting, the power of music in recovery, and the 12 Step process. Axon plays a few songs in the process.

Alan is a singer/songwriter in the “herban” cowboy tradition. His songwriting examines the Western mythos in defiance of the popular image created by an atavistic mass media. He says “I’ve learned from studying songwriters like Guy Clark, John Prine, Nancy Griffith and James McMurtry that if you’re going to write a multigenerational novel in three choruses and a bridge, you’re going to have to make a lot of shit up, and then leave a lot of shit out.”

I traveled around a lot in my early years. I set out to become the next Bob Dylan, and discovered that that job was already taken. But I traveled around the southwest, I traveled around the southeast – I come from mid-Missouri, and found that I could generally find employment as a singing cowboy in medium-sized college towns, as a new kid in town. And so I would get three to six months before I stopped being the new kid in town, before I’d then move on to another town, and that was kinda how I developed my persona and my style and all that.

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