Plutopia News Network

With online host, interaction designer and facilitator Nancy White, Plutopians Scoop and Jon explore online community, social media, macro- vs micro-connections, and much more.

Nancy’s done international work supporting and practicing online and face to face group facilitation. She’s focused on distributed work, strategic planning, social learning, communities and networks. She knows a LOT about online community development and management. And a lot about social media stuff, as well.

Nancy White: We’re de-civilizing. We’re un-developing. And that, as a society, we’ve become far more individualistic, and our sense of community – which brings along with it a certain level of baseline trust, right? – has fractured in so many places. And I think – if you think about this kind of parallel track of what social media encourages, which is content, liking, numbers, scanning across this kind of – like, seeing a bunch of things, and maybe noticing patterns – it doesn’t really say “Let’s go deeper.” It doesn’t really say “Let’s get to know each other.” The content is driving it, not the relationship. Relationship certainly can emerge, but you’ve got a software that really doesn’t make it super easy, and you have lifestyles that almost resist it.

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With writer, blogger, and author Wendy Grossman, Jon and Scoop discuss the differences between early Internet culture and the current state of the Internet and social media. Wendy focuses in her work on the Internet, computers, freedom, and privacy. She’s been writing about “net.wars” since the early 1990s, and her book by that name was published in 1997.

Wendy Grossman: The place where I think we really started to diverge from the old Internet was right around 2006 to 2010. 2006 is when the iPhone came out, and 2010 is when the iPhone plus social media exploded. And so in that period – Facebook was founded in 2004, I think, and Google went public in 2004. You had a whole bunch of different social media sites vying to be what Facebook became, and Facebook was the winner. And that whole push toward centralization where you want to be where your friends are, and if your friends are on Facebook, then you’re on Facebook – that all happened in that 2006-2010 period.

Photo by Paul Jenkins (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Find Wendy on Twitter and Mastodon

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Broadcaster, DJ, and audio engineer Tracey Schulz reports on the just concluded SXSW Film and TV Festival. We discuss new films that premiered at SXSW, and the stars who attended.

Tracey Schulz: We’re coming off of “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” and the things that stood out for me this year for Southby [the SXSW Festival], especially in film and TV, had Asian cast and female leads. There’s “Beef,” a show that’s about to drop very very soon that was also there at Southby, “Joyride,” and “American Born Chinese” is another production that’s about to be released as well. And that’s just a couple of ’em. So I think you’re going to see this nice little gentle wave, I think there’s going to be something there to be said.

Tracey Schulz’ prior conversation with Plutopia

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Activist and political consultant Jaquita Wilson in a rebroadcast of our March 30th live show. We discuss the indictment of Donald Trump, announced only hours earlier. We also explore the job requirements for a Republican politician.

Jaquita Wilson: See, this is the thing I was trying to talk about the other day around local politics, right. We’re discussing somebody that’s of Trump’s stature. Understand there are a lot of big players who are invested in his behavior and his run. That’s why he can say and do the things he can say and do. That’s why he’s going to always keep lawyers, that’s why there are going to be millions of dollars raised for him. It’s all going to happen for him because him, doing what he’s doing, is helping China, is helping Russia, is helping a lot of these oligarchs. So they’re going to have a little money… “I might not be able to give you money for your campaign, legally, any more, kinda, but can I give money for your defense? Absolutely.”

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Linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas Robert Wall joins Plutopians as we examine his long career and contributions to the study of language, mathematics, and computer science.

Robert Wall: Language is deeply psychological. It goes on in people’s brains by processes that are somewhat mysterious. We don’t know how people acquire language so rapidly as children from just mere exposure to it. We don’t know how people use and understand language, we don’t know what goes on in their brains when sentences come in, and there is reasoning or whatever going on, and then sentences come out. We have only a dim idea about what that’s all about. But anyway, language, grammars, including semantics, are all psychological entities.

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In this episode of Plutopia News Network, we include a recording of a 1977 press conference held by Dr. Timothy Leary, and Scoop’s 1975 interview with forensic psychologist Dr. Stephen Pittel. In 1977, Dr. Leary was the keynote speaker at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in San Francisco. In a press conference prior to his speech, he addressed some of his causes, including space migration and an apparent disdain for ecological activism.

Image: By Eddie Codel on Flickr

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This time on the Plutopia podcast, our friend Screamish Joy joins Jon and Scoop, as we discuss all things Texan. In this rebroadcast of our March Second live show, the Plutopians reveal everything you didn’t know about Texas….but didn’t care enough to ask!

Screamish Joy: “I remember going places and people being like…because we were raised this way is like do you know your state song or do you know your state bird or do you know your state this or that. It’s like people just stare at me like I’m crazy you know like no, why would we know all those things? It’s like well because you know it’s ingrained in you and I think that’s an aspect of our culture that at one time felt very connected now we feel very just disparate you know. I do have like some bond you know like memories of being a Texan. I don’t just have like full-blown Texas shame.”

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Computer engineer and AI expert David Demaris joins Jon, Suzy and Scoop on this episode of the Plutopia podcast. We discuss ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, deep fakes, dangerous technologies, bad actors, and much more. Will ChatGPT take over the world? What is artificial intelligence, and how does it differ from human intelligence? How can we ensure that artificial intelligence is used to promote human well-being?

I feel like we have several technologies that have suddenly landed here, including this kind of AI that sort of really works and isn’t a joke, and thinks like CRISPR, that let an individual or small group kind of get in and start doing some serious DNA hacking, and suddenly we have this situation where an individual has a lot of power to cause mayhem. That can happen, and a lot of people that have that same technology but don’t cause mayhem, a lot of people who can do good with those technologies, but just the mayhem factor is pretty new, and I think in society the closest thing is whenever we had the second amendment or something, and somebody said, “Yeah, everybody ought to be able to have a gun to protect themselves against bears, or indigenous who don’t like us. The mayhem that you could create with one of those blunderbusses was pretty small scale, unless you could get everybody else to go along with your mayhem plan. But that is not quite the case with these technologies.”

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Judi Clark is an Analyst and an Emergency Preparedness Coordinator. She joins Plutopians as we do a deep dive into emergency response, and ways we can be better prepared.

Judi Clark: If there are people who don’t want to really coordinate with this system, they’re not going to be very effective. They’re just going to be out doing stuff, and that’s going to be complicating everything that’s going on. Complicating any response effort. The other thing is in a fire, or in a situation where there’s an evacuation that’s necessary, there will often be people who – there’s people who are not ready for an evacuation, and the first thing they’ll do is walk around the house in circles, and say “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And then they’ll start calling their neighbors, saying “What do I do? What do I do?” And then they’ll start calling the the neighbors – ” What do I do? What do I do?” And it goes on from there. They may or may not evacuate themselves very well. But there almost always will be people who say “No, I’m not evacuating, I’m going to stay and I’m going to fight for my house,” or whatever. And I don’t know if there’s a Venn diagram where there’s overlap of the people who just resist authority generally, and people who want to stay home and not evacuate, to save their house from whatever comes.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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Blogger and podcaster Nathan Wilcox returns to the Plutopia podcast. We explore the emergence of ChatGPT, music and art created with artificial intelligence, the evolution of dance music, changes in the Austin music scene, streaming music, and of course, politics!

“Nathan Wilcox: I’m very excited about the potential for AI in music-making. I guarantee you that’s where the next big wave of musical innovation is going to come out of. It’s going to come from kids getting their hands on this cheap AI technology, feeding songs the like, songs they don’t like, into it, to see what weird shit pops out of it, and then editing that to make something out of it. If you just take raw AI-generated music, it’s generally not that listenable, but if you get a musician working on it, and they can find those things – you know, the way AI art will have too many fingers on your hands, or whatever, too many eyes on your face – they’ll get those valley of the uncanny weirdness, and then be able to put it into a structure that works like a song.”

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