Former political consultant, current mixed martial arts blogger, editor of SB Nations's Bloody Elbow, and host of the "Let It Roll" podcast Nate Wilcox joins the Plutopian crew for a verbal cage match about politics. He takes a break from blogging about mixed martial arts to take a few swings and kicks at politics and politicians. Jon and Scoop get in a few sucker punches, in a discussion that originally aired on our YouTube livestream.

Nate Wilcox: "The powers that be in the Pentagon were still of the mindset that, like, look, a peaceful transition of power is a core brand value of USA world police. This money train stops fast if there's a gross, obvious coup in the United States. If you want to steal an election the way Bush did it in 2000, that's on thing. When it's all legal, and you've got Joe Lieberman, the other party's VP nomination, helping you do it - that's fine and dandy. But if you're gonna do this crude, crass "let's rile up a bunch of yokels, and send them storming into the Capitol building, and hang Mike Pence," that is not gonna play. And so you had a few - from what we can tell, there were a few people in the Pentagon that were backing Trump wherever he wanted to go. But that most of the powers that be in the Pentagon, especially the ones like Milley who had been out there in Lafayette Square and felt very burned by Trump, were not having it."

In this week's Plutopia podcast, Jon and Scoop make a deep dive into death... also Halloween, sex, pagan celebrations, and Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

"Everyone is a beginner when it comes to death." - Sallie Jiko Tisdale, "Everything Dies" in Lion's Roar

We don't like to think about death in mainstream America. We hide it, and when we do have a death close to us, our grief is amplified by the unfamiliarity of the experience. It's hard to let go. It's hard to envision letting go. It's especially hard to envision non-being.

Other cultures have other approaches. We're posting this on Dia de los Muertos 2021. The Dia de los Muertos celebration is an acknowledgement and a celebration of death. It's a time to honor the deceased, and at the same time recognize that death is an inherent part of life. That impermanence is inherent in the Universe. Everything is changing and moving; what seems permanent has a lower rate of change - but change is inevitable. And in this sense, in changing, everything dies.

Photo by Bala Manivasagam. Día de los muertos, Tlaquepaque, México. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Just in time for Halloween - big tech horror stories!! Thanks to our friends at EFF-Austin, we present a session with author and tech veteran Vahid Razavi. He shares some of his personal experiences - many of them bad - from his time working for some well-known tech giants. He also shares the most important question to ask a hiring manager before accepting a job offer!

Vahid Razavi: "For a small business such as mine, even though we had a registered trademark, we got tangled up by Computer Science Corporation. CSC was just a notoriously horrible company to get tangled in, in any way. They were known as the rotten company in the UK, they failed a number of projects in North Carolina, they were responsible for these rendition flights of torture, which were basically CIA planes that were being used and supplied by CSC to take people from the various salt pits and torture sites in Europe. I don't know why a tech company would be in that business, but that's what they chose, and that's what they did."

From EFF-Austin's event: "Our speaker this month is Vahid Razavi. A technology veteran of Silicon Valley, Vahid has advised and worked in senior management roles at Amazon Web Services, Fast Search, Exodus Communications, Qwest Communications, and was the founder of the Cloud Computing Company BizCloud. He has published two books, The Age of Nepotism and Ethics In Tech and Lack Thereof. As a lifelong activist and humanitarian he has published hundreds of articles and videos on various social issues including tech industry and social injustice.

"As the Founder and Managing Director of Ethics in Technology, Vahid will be sharing lessons he learned from 20 years of working in Silicon Valley. He will be sharing what is the most important question you should ask every hiring manager before accepting an offer of employment! Other topics of discussion will include what it’s like to work for Big Tech at companies such as Amazon Web Services, as well as the revolving door of Big Tech and the Defense Industry, along with highlights from his book Ethics in Technology and Lack Thereof."

Hugo award-winning author Pat Cadigan joins Jon and Scoop to discuss her novelization of William Gibson's first screenplay for Alien 3, the third movie in the Alien franchise. The final film wasn't based on Gibson's version, which had been discarded in rounds of rewriting and re-visioning. Sadly, critical response to the film was not good. Pat has created a novelization of Gibson's first script , approved by Gibson and hailed in reviews as far better than the movie.

In this interview Pat, aka the Queen of Cyberpunk, mentions how Alien is a good fit for the cyberpunk techno-dystopian ethos.

Our May 10, 2021 interview with Pat is here.

Synopsis (via Penguin/Random House): "The Sulaco—on its return journey from LV-426—enters a sector controlled by the “Union of Progressive Peoples,” a nation-state engaged in an ongoing cold war and arms race. U.P.P. personnel board the Sulaco and find hypersleep tubes with Ripley, Newt, and an injured Hicks. A Facehugger attacks the lead commando, and the others narrowly escape, taking what remains of Bishop with them.

"The Sulaco continues to Anchorpoint, a space station and military installation the size of a small moon, where it falls under control of the military’s Weapons Division. Boarding the Sulaco, a team of Colonial Marines and scientists is assaulted by a pair of Xenomorph drones. In the fight Ripley's cryotube is badly damaged. It’s taken aboard Anchorpoint, where Ripley is kept comatose. Newt and an injured Corporal Hicks are awakened, and Newt is sent to Gateway Station on the way to Earth. The U.P.P. sends Bishop to Anchorpoint, where Hicks begins to hear rumors of experimentation—the cloning and genetic modification of Xenomorphs.

"The kind of experimentation that could yield a monstrous hybrid, and perhaps even a Queen."

This time, we dig deep into the archives for a flashback to the final episode published prior to our seven-year "sabbatical".

“Miller is as quirky and delightful as ever, treating the Southwest as a vast midden from which he plucks many odorous but tasty treasures. The fun, as usual, comes from watching Tom digest.” – Larry McMurtry

Based out of Tucson, Arizona, Tom Miller has traveled the World, capturing its cultures, its people, its good, bad and ugly for Smithsonian, The New Yorker, Life, The New York Times and his critically acclaimed series of books. Perhaps best known for his incisive studies of the US/Mexico border and Latin America, he has a unique view of that strip of land separating the two nations. “Our southern frontier is not simply American on one side and Mexican on the other. It is a strip two thousand miles long and no more than twenty miles wide. It obeys its own laws and has its own outlaws, its own police officers and its own policy makers…It is a colony unto itself, long and narrow, ruled by two faraway powers.” Miller also has chronicled, among other things, murderous cacti, the Chimichanga and Jack Ruby’s kitchen sink. Learn more about his literary output, which includes “On The Border”, “The Panama Hat Trail”, “Trading With The Enemy” and “The Revenge of The Saguaro” at http://www.tommillerbooks.com

Stephanie Vale, the pen name of a longtime WELL member, is a semi-retired attorney and part-time university instructor in the US Pacific Northwest.  She has loved Jane Austen for more than 40 years, and has been reading and enjoying Austenesque fiction since 2008. In 2017 she finally became inspired to attempt writing her own JAFF or Jane Austen Fan Fiction. Her first book, THE COLONEL'S BROTHER was released in August. Stephanie guides us through the popular Jane Austen Fan Fiction genre and describes her journey from reader to author.

Johannes Grenzfurthner is a happily subversive artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. He's based in Vienna, Austria. He's founder and director of monochrom, an international art and theory collective. He'll be premiering his latest film, "Masking Threshold," at Fantastic Fest in Austin (coming soon to a brainstem near you!). In this interview, we discuss nerd culture, context hacking, sex and technology, cocktail robotics, and his new film.

Johannes Grenzfurthner: "It definitely happened, I guess, sometime in the 1990s that suddenly the nerd was almost like a procreation of hate speech, in a certain way. You take a term, and wear it as a badge of honor, and turn its meaning on the head. I think that definitely happens. The term is also not that old. I mean, I did some research for 'Traceroute,' my film about nerd culture. And the first time that 'nerd' has been used by a wider population is in the late 70s and early 1980s."

Chris Zappone works as a foreign news editor in Australian media. Chris has written about geopolitics, space, technology, ideology, and the future. He has consulted with universities, think tanks and businesses in the area of tech disruption, information war, and cryptocurrencies. And he has an interest in history and utopia (and Plutopia!).

Chris Zappone: "I think part of the issue with the social media world is that you see something and it's visceral, it's in your disembodied mind. It's overwhelming your mind. And then there's the immediate desire to respond to it. And there's not this sort of social construct around saying, 'Wait a minute. If I lash out, if I just react to this, that would look bad." As it would in the physical world, where if you're standing with a group of people, and somebody's saying something controversial, you might not have the desire to immediately launch back with some sort of fiery counter-argument. You might say, 'Well, I don't agree with you, but I'm just going to let it go.' The social element of social media is almost a problem for democracy, because we have to be able to let our whole minds thrive, so not just sort of hot button response to something, but this more dispassionate, more reason-based, more consensus-based - that's what we need, some sort of general air of consensus, that I think is starting to just crumble, because of the way the public is embracing social media."

Chris on Twitter

Suzanne Stefanac, aka Zorca, is an interactive media consultant and former journalist. As a journalist, she wrote about digital issues for Wired, Macworld, New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others. With the launch of MSNBC in 1996, Stefanac was executive producer for The Site, an hour-long, nightly television program and website that explored how technology impacts modern life. Lately she's been hosting Radio Free Zorca on kbmf 102.5 in Butte, Montana.

Suzanne's KBMF.FM show, radio.free.zorca, streams every Saturday 4-6 mountain time at butteamericaradio.org. To view past musical themes and listen to shows, visit this link.

Photo by Geri Wittig

Suzanne Stefanac: "Butte itself is an incredibly staunch Democratic stronghold, and beyond - progressive, anarchist, and this is all because of the mining history. Labor unions became very very strong. Butte had some of the first actual unions. There are whole books written about it, and that has carried through. And so Butte's very proud of its progressive standpoint. I did a show a while ago - each of my radio shows has a very specific theme, and it might be Arabic women singers or African guitar or blues covers or something kind of specific. Anyway I did one that was political. Of course it all leaned in one direction. And I got a couple of messages from people who listened from afar, and they were like 'Are you still alive? Is it okay that you played all that?' And I was like, 'This is Butte. They all buy me drinks when I do these kinds of shows.'"

Rock and roll! Plutopia News Network cohosts Scoop and Jon talk about their internet radio show, Radio Free Plutopia. They also discuss their lifetime love of rock and roll, vinyl records, digital music, record shops, album covers, and much more!