Plutopia News Network

Dave deBronkart and Doc Searls take aim at the American healthcare system. They discuss empowered patients, medical technology, electronic medical records, and much more.

Dave, known on the internet as e-Patient Dave, is a blogger, health policy advisor and international keynote speaker. Dave beat stage IV kidney cancer in 2007.

Doc is an American journalist, columnist, and a widely read blogger. He was co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book about the impact of the Internet on marketing, claiming that conventional marketing techniques are rendered obsolete by the online “conversations” that consumers have and that companies need to join. And Dave just wrote a blog post called “The Evolution of Who Knows What: A Cluetrain Manifesto for empowered patients.”

Doc Searls: To my persistent astonishment, doctors want to communicate, send data to each other, by fax, an ancient analog technology. It’s still the case, it’s still the case!

Dave deBronkart: I know, I know. And there’s so much foolishness, you know. They will complain that email is not a secure way to send you your information, because it could leak. There are constant horror stories…

Doc: As a digital thing, you can leak, but an analog thing can’t leak, because it’s not digital… (laughs) exactly!

Dave: Well, guess what? There are constant horror stories of a doctor’s fax machine dialing the wrong number and sending all your information.

Doc: (Laughs) There’s an analog hole for you!

Doc Searls, The Patient as the Platform:

The new health care infrastructure must be built on independent and autonomous patients, not on systems that surround and subordinate patients. Once it is, the systems will be vastly improved, and far more profitable for all.

We cannot fix health care only at the institutional level. No company and no government agency can fix health care, any more than any company or government could fix networking or computing. Those had to be fixed by hackers building solutions for everybody and not just themselves. (Even if they were just “scratching their own itch”.) Today the Internet, Linux, and countless free and open source code bases are core infrastructural systems on which civilization itself relies. The amount of business this vast and growing infrastructure supports so far exceeds the amount it undermines and obsoletes that it’s silly to even bother doing the math — if it could be done in any case. One might as well argue against the Big Bang.

Jon Lebkowsky, “Doc Searls: patient as platform and ‘point of integration'”:

To have true independence and control, we need access to all of that data, and as Doc says, we need to be the “point of integration for the health care we get, and the point of origination for controlling that care.”

Dave deBronkart, “The Evolution of Who Knows What: A Cluetrain Manifesto for empowered patients”:

In recent speeches I’ve increasingly focused on a comparable change we can no longer deny: if “Knowledge itself is power,” as Francis Bacon said, then we can no longer deny that the power structure in medicine is changing as knowledge spreads. I’ve called it “The Evolution of Who Knows What,” and it’s hot stuff, because it’s undeniable and it’s truly changes what’s possible

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Howard Rheingold joins Jon and Scoop for a discussion that includes virtual communities, social media, AI and chatbots, media education, good vs bad on the Internet, cultural evolution, and tools for thought. Howard is a writer, critic, and teacher, former editor of “Whole Earth Review”, and author of several books including Virtual Reality, The Virtual Community, and Smart Mobs.

Howard Rheingold:

The Internet and social media is like a tide that lifts all boats. And that means that the hospital ships and the pirate ships are enabled. If you are the only gay teenager in a small town, or you have a very rare disease that only one in a million people have, then social media is a lifeline for you. If you’re the only Nazi in a small town, you can connect with like-minded souls and do bad things. When I wrote The Virtual Community, when I first wrote the article “Virtual Communities” in Whole Earth Review in 1987, the online population was mostly college students and computer scientists and a few early adopters, like all of us. Now it’s a significant percentage of the human race. I think it’s about a quarter or a fifth of the human population, and with that, you’re going to get the people who want to do good things and the people who want to bad things, and it’s pretty clear that the ability to do bad things has been vastly amplified.

Photo by Chris Michel

CC BY-SA 4.0

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In this Plutopia podcast, we’re joined by Joanna Bryson, an academic expert in intelligence, both natural and artificial. In a conversation led by Wendy Grossman, we explore intelligence, both artificial and natural.

Bryson has experience in programming and systems administration in several commercial sectors, and degrees in both psychology and AI from Chicago, Edinburgh, and MIT. She has been a professor since joining University of Bath Computer Science in 2002. Since 2008 she has been increasingly involved in AI policy and AI regulation, advising governments, NGOs, and corporations.

Joanna Bryson:

“The problem here is not with robots taking over the world, but with people taking over the world (or at least corrupting large parts of it) by pretending that robots are responsible. In fact people and corporations that decide how robots act.

“The fact is, robots completely belong to us. We author AI, we don’t give birth to it. People, governments and companies build, own and program robots. Whoever owns and operates a robot is responsible for what it does.”

– AI Ethics: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Society

Joanna Bryson on Twitter

Joanna Bryson’s Blog

Can we trust AI? (Video)

Paper on the EU AI Act (PDF)

“Just Another Artifact” (1998)

The Curse of Bigness, by Tim Wu

Mindf*ck, by Christopher Wylie

“Making Bitcoin Legal” by Ross Anderson, Ilia Shumailov and Mansoor Ahmed (PDF)

Tracers in the Dark, by Andy Greenberg

Moral Crumple Zones, by Madeleine Claire Elish

“On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,”

“Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” by Lina Khan

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, by Katharina Pistor

The post Joanna Bryson: Artificial and Natural Intelligence first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Writer, blogger, and author Wendy Grossman, author of net.wars joins Plutopians for a conversation about hacking with Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned computer security professional and author. Bruce’s latest book, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back, is an expanded view of hacks and hackers beyond computers to other kinds of systems, from tax laws to financial markets to politics.

Bruce Schneier:

Things like https are now everywhere. Google is securing email between itself and the other major email providers. And a lot of the passive methods that the NSA used ten years ago aren’t working today. Now, the flip side of this is corporate surveillance has gone from zero to sixty over those ten years, and now, if you are a government, and you want to surveil somebody, you tell Facebook to tell you what they know about them. Or Google, or Apple, or any of those companies.

Mentioned in the discussion:

Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr

The post Bruce Schneier: A Hacker’s Mind first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Plutopians talk to Claire Fitch, a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research contemplates the role that simulated natures in virtual reality (VR) play in shaping trajectories of human-environment relations. In order to unravel the current forms and functions of this medium, she investigates various ways in which VR is used to provide experiences of nature, and consider how these natures act as arenas in which human-environment relationships are (re)considered, (re)negotiated, contemplated and enacted. This research centers the socio-material entanglements of virtual nature environments, contextualizes this within a broader discussion of mediated subjectivity within techno-capitalism, and considers the overlap of the two as a dynamic and central geographic question of the Capitalocene epoch.

We discuss her doctoral research into virtual reality simulations of nature. We also explore the impact of capitalism on the environment, AI, and much more.

Claire Fitch:

So I was doing a lot of environmental organizing and thinking a lot about human-environment relationships, and came to Human Geography in my Master’s as a sort of combination of these two, the human and the environmental. And I wasn’t really interested in technology at the beginning, but being an environmental organizer and talking to so many folks about their relationships to climate change and their feeling of precarity as youth confronting climate change, I was also becoming really fascinated with watching people simultaneously having this really strong connection to technology. I finished my Master’s in 2017, so at this point everybody had phones they were using all the time, everybody was becoming deeply entangled in social media, and this was a lot of the way people were living their lives. And I was really interested in these environmentalist communities, seeing how people negotiated their presence in cyberspace, their identity formation in cyberspace, at the same time that they were sort of struggling through their identities or their futures on earth, in this material world.

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This time on the Plutopia Podcast, we feature a presentation about the OAUTH protocol, delivered at the May meeting of EFF-Austin. Due to the visual nature of the demo portion of the session, we have posted the entire video of the OAUTH presentation on our YouTube channel. For the audio podcast, we present an edited version. Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky introduced the session.

If you wish to view the entire OAUTH presentation on the Plutopia News Network YouTube channel, go to https://www.youtube.com/@PlutopiaNewsNetwork

The post Daniel Roesler: OAUTH Explained first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Ethan Smith has been an advocate for affordable student housing, particularly as it applies to UT-Austin’s student population. His 2021 thesis proposed a housing and equity strategy for UT. In this episode of the Plutopia Podcast, Ethan, Jon and Scoop explore the affordable housing crisis in Austin and it’s impact on students, musicians, and workers.

Ethan Smith: “Median-income tied definitions of affordable housing are problematic for student housing because it doesn’t imply it really is a legal framework that is not made for students because it’s based off HUD and a lot of things that you know the federal housing way you can get money. It specifically does not include student housing. Likewise at U.T. the PUF money, which is the permanent fund specifically is carved out that you can’t do student housing. So we don’t really have an existing legal framework for student housing. And that’s something that the city council could do but I just wonder if anybody will go to bat for it.”

You can find Ethan’s thesis at:

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Michael Webb joins Plutopians to discuss meditative inquiry, meditation practices and intelligence, experts, and much more.

Michael Webb:

It almost seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? To speak of thinking non-verbally. What the heck does that mean? And I would hasten to say, too, not only thinking non-verbally, but thinking without using mental images. That’s perhaps even more shocking, because some people can maybe learn to not cogitate. Maybe that inner voice quietens a bit? But they still might be thinking in terms of visuals – metaphors that they see. Even if they’re very subtle ones. But in this form of inquiry, even the mental images drop off. So it’s coming from a place of real silence, I guess you could say – silence and emptiness.

The post Michael Webb: Meditative Inquiry first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

With climate scientist Michael Tobis, Plutopians discuss the current state of climate change. We look at the good, the bad, the ugly, and the terrifying aspects of our climate dilemma.

Michael Tobis: You’re just starting to get to the point where people are noticing, it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get more and more obvious. It’s going to get more and more difficult. And I would say, like, the dust storm in Springfield is not something I look out for. But droughts and – one year drought and one year flood, five years of drought and five years of flood, that’s going to be more common. And that’s what really bites, that’s what really causes a lot of disruption. So, yeah, I’m not an optimist about either side of this picture. I think it’s going to get worse, and I wish we could figure out some way to decide that we’re going to stop.

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

Former Austin City Council member and environmental activist Max Nofziger joins the Plutopia podcast. Max explains the evolution of Austin’s motto, “the Live Music Capital of the World,” and the affordability challenges facing Austin. Max has plenty of stories about Austin politics and politicians, and the area’s environmental struggles.

Max Nofziger: Nancy Coplin, who was the chairwoman of the [Austin] Music Commission at the time, came to my office with the suggestion we name Austin the Live Music Capital of America. And I said, well, this is no time to be shy or modest. You know, we’re Texans, let’s beat our chest a little bit and be outrageous, and say we’re the Live Music Capital of the Universe. And to hell with the Martians, they can invade us, vaporize us, whatever they’re gonna do, if they want to fight it. Yeah! But she said “I like that idea, but you’ll never get it passed by your colleagues [on the City Council]. And I knew she was right. So that was the compromise. From America, the Universe, to the World. I feel like that slogan worked out really well, but I think the city has not done a good job of living up to that. I think a lot of policies City Councils have enacted since then have really gone against that, and I mean obviously made the city a very expensive place to live, which puts a squeeze on all the musicians and artists, so I don’t think that … I think other considerations came to the fore with other mayors and other council members.

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