Plutopia News Network

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” ~ William Gibson, in The Economist, 12/4/2003

“This isn’t the dystopia that I wrote about!” ~ Bruce Sterling

Artist, writer, and curator Patrick Lichty returns to the Plutopia podcast as we explore the future. We do a deep dive into Web3, crypto, bad actors on the Internet, Meta and the Metaverse, Second Life, science fiction and life on Mars.

Patrick Lichty: “It’s kind of funny… I wound up doing a lot of study on the whole Martian thing, because a friend of mine over in the UAE and I, we were actually proposing a VR habitat for people in Mars colonies. Because you’re going to wind up in these relatively cramped quarters, or you’re going to be on a ship for two years, and that sort of thing, and you need a way to feel like you’re not in a can. So this is one really good psychological use for VR.”

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The mid-term election is over, ballots are still being counted, and the dreaded red wave turned out to be a red ripple. Our friend Roy Casagranda joins Plutopians as we dissect election 2022.

Roy Casagranda: If you look at the 2018 election, 95% of blacks voted Democrat, which is, like, unbelievable. 67% of Hispanics voted Democrat, and 75% of Asians voted Democrat. In 2020, the black number didn’t really move much, maybe a little bit. The Hispanic number went from 67% to 60%, and then the Asian number went from 75% to 70%. So there was a little bit of loss of reliability in the 2020 election. But the voter turnout was so massive it didn’t really matter, because the big problem that Democrats have is not the unreliability of people of color, it’s that 60% of white people are voting Republican. That’s the real problem. And then the other part that have that’s a problem is that Democrats are really awful at showing up and voting.

The post Mid-term Election Debrief first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Plutopians enjoy a free-form fiesta of facts and fictions! Jon, Suzy and Scoop discuss voting, Austin politics, Twitter, politics on Tik Tok, cannabis politics, Trump in 2024, and other nightmares.

Suzy: I’m off Twitter. I’ll never Twit again.

Jon: Oh, really?

Suzy: No, I’m done. Did you see what happened, the spike in the use of racial slurs, most particularly the “n” word? 500% up.

Jon: After that, he [Elon] said that, “Well, we’re not really going to change moderation policies right now….” I don’t know whether they kicked any of those people off or what they did about it. He’s in a bit of a quandary, because he made all of this noise about how he was going to have this great free speech thing going, but he’s going to lose all of his advertisers.

Scoop: Yeah, that’s who’s being lobbied to get out of Elon’s business, because they are going to look bad if they stick around, and it becomes the hellscape that people are thinking it’s going to be.

From Jon L.: Almost down to the wire with 2022 midterms, we decided a discussion of voting was in order. However Elon Musk was shitting on all the news cycles, so we had to go there, too. Our stream of consciousness flowed pretty well on this show, considering that apocalyptic nature of the subjects we were discussing. Help us row the boat, navigate the stream!

The post Midterm Voting, Twitter, and the Wyrd first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Daniel Hope is a Spiritual Director and Enneagram Coach who runs spirituality programming in the healthcare industry. In this Plutopia podcast, Daniel and Jon discuss spirituality, meditation, spiritual direction, artificial intelligence vs. humanity, finding common ground, and much more.

Daniel Hope: Darwin was – I don’t think he was the first to propose this, but he put forward that collaboration outperforms competition at the group level. Sometimes at the individual level, individuals can be more competitive, and they may outperform the other individuals. And so it may give them some short-term gain, it may give them some benefit. But if that is brought up to the group level, the collaborative groups are always going to win. Look at the Wall Street data, the analysis of companies with women in leadership. They outperform all the others hands down in every area.

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

“We are not the victims, we are the collaborators and, if we accept this role, we can be the co-creators of something transformative.” – Daniel Hope

The post Daniel Hope: A Spiritual Direction first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

In our latest Plutopia News Network podcast, with guest Robert Freeman Wexler, we discuss his early career, his work in book design and his new novel, The Silverberg Business.

Robert Freeman Wexler is an author of surreal fantasy. His latest book is novel, The Silverberg Business, from Small Beer Press. Previous books include short story collection Undiscovered Territories, the novel The Painting And The City, and Circus of the Grand Design. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with the writer Rebecca Kuder.

RFW (re. The Siverberg Business/): I intended it, or had visualized it, as a novella, because I was working on another novel. Then I had this idea – I thought I can write it pretty quickly, I’ll write this novella. And then I wrote the novella, and gave it to some people to read. One person thought that it was maybe only halfway finished, and I didn’t like that answer. But it turned out to be true. So I wrote the rest of it. So in that case, I had more of a sense of that first part, and then I knew what was going to happen next, once I got back to the writing. And then after that, it kind of fell into place.

The post Robert Freeman Wexler: Surreality first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Midterms are coming, and already-hot political discussions and divisions are getting even HOTTER. The Plutopian (Groucho) Marxists are on it! This podcast is a recording of our Plutopia Livestream from 10/13/2022.

Plutopia’s Not Ready for Cable News players return for another free-form fiesta of political foolishness. Jon, Suzy and Scoop dissect a wide range of political potholes, including the January 6th hearings, Alex Jones, Beto and Abbott, the Great Replacement Nonsense, taxes, Jewish space lasers, and… beer enemas?

Jon: So you have all of these “Grand Old Party” people who don’t consider themselves to be public servants, they’re just basically lunging for power. And part of what they’re doing in order to take power is that they’re playing culture games. Fighting culture wars.

Suzy: That’s all it is. They want laws because what’re they gonna do with those of us that they disagree with, or don’t like. They’ve gotta get us for the small amounts of marijuana, and throw us in jail, right? Is it willful ignorance, or is it just rabid xenophobia that we’re dealing with on the right?

Scoop: There’s a lot of those people out there that – they’ve always voted Republican, and they’ve been basically bullied into holding their noses and voting one more time for another guy that they don’t like. They’ve been doing that for the last 20 years. Hold your nose, and vote for this guy, even though he’s an idiot and will probably embarrass the whole party.

The post Exploring Political Madness first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Wikimedia LLC President Lane Becker joins the Plutopia Podcast. We discuss Lane’s early career, and his involvement in UT’s ACTLab; his work in product design, AI, VR and AR; the Institute for the Future; and all things Wiki.

Lane Becker: I discovered that I wasn’t really a designer. I learned that in the best possible way, which was that I was working with some of what were, at the time, some of the world’s best designers. And I was able to sort of stand back and look at them and go, “Oh, that’s what it’s like if you’re really good at this. That’s not me. I guess I should figure out what I’m really good at.” And it turned out what I really enjoyed was actually just running the business, like running the business was the most interesting part of it, to me. Thinking strategically about what is this business, how do we grow it, how do we make it more successful, how do we understand what it actually is. You know, maybe this is also the ACTLab’s fault. I always start off by thinking I’m interested in the thing itself, and then it turns out that I’m much more interested in like – I dunno, the backstage shenanigans that go on to make the thing possible?

Links:

The post Lane Becker: From Actlab to Wikimedia first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Should we be obsessed with politics? Is political obsession really about our lives, or is it cultivated by skillful marketing of grievance, to raise more and more money? Are we using our cognitive surplus and our energies to fight abstractions, when we should be dealing with real problems, e.g. climate change?

Do minorities care about ideology? Do they care about culture wars? What do people want?

People want safety, a degree of comfort, a sense of stability. Do they get either from the far left or far right?

Is the real war between those who espouse cultural socialism vs those who espouse cultural liberalism?

Cultural liberalism is the belief that individuals and groups should have the freedom to express themselves, should not be compelled to endorse beliefs that they oppose, and should be treated equally by social norms and the law.

Cultural socialism is the idea that public policy should be used to redistribute wealth, power, and self-esteem from the privileged groups in society to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities, and women. This justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups.

“For some Democratic voters, a commitment to cultural socialism overrides their historical defense of free speech. Most Republicans disagree with that position. They also oppose what they perceive to be the denigration of white Americans and the nation’s past, which underlie their support for a new politics of civil rights in schools and workplaces.” ~ Eric Kaufmann, “The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America”

The post Political Obsession first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Plutopians welcome Johannes Grenzfurthner for a second discussion about his life and work, focusing especially on his new film “Razzennest,” which just premiered at Fantastic Fest. Johannes is an artist, film director, performer, and founder of the Austrian art collective Monochrom.

With Johannes, we explore social media and mass media in the US and Europe. We also compare US and European politics. And Johannes explains cocktail robots, horror films, and his latest feature film, “Razzenest.”

Johannes: I made this almost like “Sesame Street,” 98 minute documentary where I try to explain certain concepts, why I think some of them are still important and some of were probably lost. But that was two films before that, and now I made two horror films in a row, which is strange… but, I mean I have to say I like horror films, because, if you look back in the history of filmmaking, horror films were always very early in adopting interesting aesthetic techniques. Horror films were always very creative, or did things that then became aesthetic tropes or things in other formats, but horror films did it first.

Trailer for “Razzennest.”

The post Roboexotica and Razzennest first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Plutopians discuss current events, including Steve Bannon’s arrest and his plan for a wall made of weed, Trump’s document stash, borders, psychedelics, techsplaining, critical thinking, and much more! This is a recording of the Plutopia News Network’s livestream webcast on 9/8/2022.

Jon: We were talking about borders – open borders vs controlled borders, and so forth – earlier, and Patrick Lichty, who’s been hanging out in the chat room said that he thinks there ought to be a fungal dem-militarized zone at the border, just laced with shrooms.

Suzy: I like that! I do, I like that.

Jon: There’d be a lot more border crossings in that case, I suppose.

Scoop: My friend, Paul Mavrides, a fine comic artist in San Francisco, advised me that the City of San Francisco has decriminalized mushrooms and other psychedelic substances.

Suzy: Oh, I love that.

Scoop: It was a unanymous vote of the board of supervisors, so…

Suzy: It’s a felony, right? Federally?

Scoop: Yeah. It kinda depends on where you’re busted, too.

The post Current Events (Are Making Us Tense!) first appeared on Plutopia News Network.