Plutopia News Network

In this episode, we discuss complexity, post-Covid foresight, climate change, and building capabilities to evolve and survive with Zaid Hassan. Zaid is a strategist, facilitator, social innovator and writer. He is the co-founder of several ventures, most recently 10-in-10 and Complexity University.

Zaid has 20 years of experience tackling complex social challenges, working all over the world. His experiences range from working in rural India on reducing acute child malnutrition to tackling racism, violence and youth unemployment in inner city Chicago.

He has helped pioneer a new approach to tackling complexity involving people learning how to tackle their own challenges in partnership with experts.

He is best known for his work building a practice for effective response to complex social challenges. He’s currently working on Complexity University and specifically the Gigatonne Challenge, a bold bottom-up, at-pace and at-scale response to the climate crisis.

He has supported and advised many organizations over the years including the World Bank. the UN, the Climate Action Network, WWF, Oxfam, as well as several governments. Zaid regularly teaches, guest lecturing at universities across the world including the New School in New York, the University of Bergen in Norway and the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving Our Most Complex Challenges, as well as numerous published essays and papers. He lives in Oxford.

Links:

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Justin Hall has a two decade history pushing the limits of networked media. His website Justin’s Links from the Underground launched in 1994. The site grew to thousands of hand-coded pages. The New York Times referred to Justin as “perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging,” and he was the focus of the Doug Block documentary “Home Page.” He’s worked on web and game projects. As a journalist he’s written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, South China Morning Post and other leading international publications.

Find Justin:

Featured photo by Jon Lebkowsky (2006)

In 2015 Justin made a documentary about himself making a web page about his life, it’s called “overshare: the links.net story.” He’s currently cofounder of bud.com, a business that facilitates access to and delivery of legal cannabis.

Here’s “overshare”:

Stream audio of our interview with Justin, below:

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Dr. Sharon Strover discusses how disinformation has mushroomed in the U.S. around a variety of subjects and from a variety of sources. Her research group at TIPI has looked over some of the Russian-placed social media disinformation and investigated the possible tactics behind it. They have analyzed why some people in the U.S. responded to propaganda messages, and how the press has dealt with those same messages. She shares those results and more in this talk at EFF-Austin’s monthly meeting on December 8, 2020.

Sharon is the Philip G. Warner Regents Professor in Communication and former Chair of the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas, where she teaches communications and technology courses and directs the Technology and Information Policy Institute. Some of her current research projects examine local and statewide networks and broadband services; the relationship between economic outcomes and the Internet; misinformation; the digital divide; and rural broadband deployment.

Dr. Strover has worked with several international, national and regional government agencies on telecommunications policy matters, including the U.S. Department of Agricultureís Rural Utilities Service, U.S. Federal Communication Commission, the government of Portugal, the Center for Rural Strategies, the European Union, The Appalachian Regional Commission, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Rural Policy Institute, the Ford Foundation, the European Union, the Texas Public Utility Commission, the Department of Information Resources and Department of Health and Human Services, and the Aspen Institute. She has published several articles and chapters on subjects related to technology and telecommunications, and has been the editor or co-editor of three books, edited journal issues for The Information Society and Government Information Quarterly, and serves on the editorial boards of several major publications. She is currently working on a book addressing economic development and the spatial distribution of telecommunications resources.

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Alexandra Alvarez, also known as Alex, found she has a talent for finding talent. She’s from Austin originally, but she currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a casting coordinator for Walt Disney Studios and 20th Century Fox. She’s also an independent casting director for CBS television. Her previous work includes extras casting and both studio and post production. In her Plutopia interview, Alex discusses how she realized her movie buff’s dream of working in the film business. We also get a glimpse inside the process of casting films and television.

Alex thinks the most important things about casting are having an open mind, and considering all races, ages, and types of people even for roles that are predominately stereotyped. Breaking stereotypes in the industry is really important, as is exercising nontraditional ways of finding new talent. She says some of the most talented people can be found on social media. She and her colleagues recently found a very talented set of twins on Tik Tok and Instagram that had exactly what they needed. They didn’t have an agent or a manager, which in the past would have been a pre-requisite for being “discovered.”

Alex on Instagram

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“We live in a paradox in which digital tech alleviates social isolation in some ways even as it worsens it in others. It may be fashioning wholly new brain pathways for good or ill in ways we neither notice nor can predict. While we are technically more connected to one another than ever before, we bond on media platforms engineered to make outrage and indignation infectious. They exploit the psychological principle that emotion, like yawning, is highly contagious.” ~ Richard Cytowic, “Digital Distractions: Energy Drain and Your Brain on Screens”

Plutopia’s Maggie Duval interviews Richard Cytowic. Richard is best known for having rediscovered synesthesia — the automatic cross–coupling of the senses — and returning it to mainstream science after decades of obscurity. His work bridges the gap between art and science. His book Wednesday Is Indigo Blue received the Montaigne Medal and is a book Oliver Sacks called “a unique and indispensable guide for anyone interested in how we perceive the world.” Dr. Cytowic is Professor of Neurology at George Washington University in Washington DC. This Plutopia interview is a fascinating discussion of the brain, including the impact of contemporary communications technologies on thinking, perception and attention.

Other Resources:

Other books:

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Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for 40 years. He’s written about Texas music, and hosts the weekly Texas Music Hour of Power on Saturday nights. In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we talk about the Fort Worth 60s-70s blues scene and his latest book, The Ballad of Robert Ealey and his Five Careless Lovers, an oral history of Fort Worth blues in the 70s.

Joe Nick has authored and co-authored biographies of Willie Nelson, Selena, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Dallas Cowboys, and collaborated with photographer Laurence Parent on books about the Texas Mountains, the Texas Coast, and Big Bend National Park. He wrote essays for the 2015 book Homegrown: Austin Music Posters, 1968-1982 and Conjunto by John Dyer with Juan Tejeda. He has covered conservation in the book Generations on the Land: A Conservation Legacy and the state religion of Texas in the book Texas High High School Football: More Than the Game.

Patoski’s byline has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, the Texas Observer, Oxford American, TimeOut New York, Garden and Gun, and No Depression magazine, for whom he was a contributing editor. He recorded the oral histories of B.B. King, Clarence Fountain of the Blind Boys of Alabama, Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson, Tejano superstar Little Joe Hernandez, and 15 other subjects for the Voice of Civil Rights oral history project sponsored by AARP and the Library of Congress, some of which appeared in the book My Soul Looks Back in Wonder by Juan Williams.

In 2015, Patoski directed his first film, the music documentary Sir Doug & The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove, which premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival.

He hosts the Texas Music Hour of Power, broadcast on KRTS FM Marfa www.marfapublicradio.org Saturdays 7 – 9 pm central, and lives near the Texas Hill Country village of Wimberley where he swims and paddles in the Blanco River.

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Participatory Medicine is a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners.

In 2006 Tom Ferguson, MD asked Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky to attend a retreat with a group of physicians and others. This group, referred to as the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, had been working with him on a white paper, published in 2007 as “e-Patients: how they can help us heal healthcare.” Tom died not long after that retreat, and Jon continued to meet with that group. They went on to found the Journal of Participatory Medicine and the Society for Participatory Medicine. The group continued to meet regularly over the years, and to stay in touch via an email list. Plutopia News Network invited several members of the group to introduce themselves and talk about how they became involved with participatory medicine. We also talked about participatory medicine in the era of Covid-19.

Society for Participatory Medicine Founder’s Circle

Photo by Jon Lebkowsky: Tom Ferguson with Danny Sands at a the 2006 retreat and meeting of the e-Patients Scholar Working Group.

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Cory Doctorow returns! Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book, which we’ll be discussing today, is Attack Surface, a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother. He’s written many other books, including Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction; How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. He’s also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties.

In our discussion of Attack Surface, we consider it as a Trojan horse for delivering information about surveillance and counter-surveillance, and as a consideration of the ethics of privilege vs dissent.

From the book: “Information doesn’t want to be free… but people do…. People use technology to make themselves free, by using it to share and organize and connect. Freedom isn’t something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.”

Photo: At Borderlands Books, San Francisco, CA. Photo by Alex Schoenfeldt Photography, www.schoenfeldt.com , CC-BY)

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Plutopia News Network’s Jon Lebkowsky gave this talk on “truth in the time of the Internet” on November 3, 2020, at a virtual EFF-Austin meeting. Jon had been thinking about the 1960s slogan “question authority,” and how in the 21st century era of mainstream internetworking and proliferation of media and news sources, we don’t know where to look for an authoritative perspective for a consensus about what’s real. In his talk, he discusses the evolution of media and the impact of the Internet. He also talks about the rise of cable news “infotainment” and the growing emphasis on opinion over fact. Finally, he talks about potential solutions, and considers possible myths about misinformation.

EFF-Austin’s description of the event:

Jon is currently co-founder and co-host at the Plutopia News Network. He is well known as an activist and writer/blogger focused on strategic foresight, Internet evolution, digital culture, cyber liberties, media, and society. In addition to this, he managed technology projects and companies for over 25 years, and was formerly President of EFF-Austin.

Jon Lebkowsky considers the 1960s phrase “question authority” in light of the 21st century evolution of the Internet as a platform for all media. What is the state of truth in the time of the Internet? Are we still questioning authority, or have we lost all sense of an authority for truth? What’s been the impact of blogging and disruptive social media on our perception of the world? How do we find consensus about what’s real? And why would that be important?

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Covid-19, as a novel coronavirus, has been known to cause various degrees of illness, diverse symptoms, and long recoveries. Last summer, we discussed “E-Patients and Covid-19” with e-Patient Dave deBronkart and Dr. Marge Benham-Hutchins.. In this episode, we talk to Austin-based consultant, strategist, and investor, Matt Cohen, about his long-haul Covid-19 experience. Matt became ill on June 12, 2020, and is still in a process of recovery. He had a mild fever and flu-like symptoms for less than 24 hours, then developed pneumonitis (fluid in the lungs) a week later. He’s since tested negative, but he’s been in a process of slow recovery that still continues.

In our talk, Matt mentions Survivor Corps, a grassroots movement connecting, supporting, educating, motivating and mobilizing COVID-19 Survivors to support all medical, scientific and academic research, help stem the tide of this pandemic and assist in the national recovery.

He also mentioned a video available via YouTube, “How Does COVID-19 Testing Actually Work?”

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