Plutopia News Network

David Weinberger joins Jon and Scoop to discuss how the Internet and machine learning impact our lives and beliefs. We discuss the current state of the Internet, the web, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more…

David is an insightful author, speaker, and influencer. He explores the effect of the technology on our lives, businesses, and ideas. He has written about new rules for organizing ideas and information, and how those rules transform business and culture. His latest book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility examines how AI, big data, modern science, and the Internet are enabling us to embrace the chaos from which the future arises. He looks at how machine learning, combined with computer networks, is changing our ideas about how the world works and how to flourish in it. He was also co-author of the influential book, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

David is also the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

Photo by Alberto Mingueza @AMingueza

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Gareth Branwyn contributes regularly to “Boing Boing,” “Adafruit,” and “HackSpace Magazine” and publishes a weekly newsletter, “Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales.” He is also working on volume 2 of his best-selling 2018 book, Tips and Tales from the Workshop.  Gareth is a well-known writer and editor, and a pioneer of both online culture and the “maker movement.”  Other gigs: he is the former Editorial Director of “Make:,” was a contributing editor to “Wired” for twelve years, and a senior editor of Boing Boing print.  Gareth is author or co-author of over a dozen books, including The Mosaic Quick Tour (the first book about the Web), The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates (with the editors of Boing Boing), and the “lazy man’s memoir,” Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems).

Photo by Jon Lebkowsky

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Patrick Lichty is a media artist, writer, futurist, curator and designer of over 30 years. He’s currently a professor of media design at Zayed University in Dubai, where he is the Director of the Immersive Media Research Cluster. As an activist and artist, he was part of or worked with the collectives RTMark, Pocha Nostra, The Yes Men, Terminal Time, Second Front, Shared Universe, and Critical Art Ensemble.

After getting his Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering and working in the discipline, he began an art and design studio in 1990, and created work for Accenture, Allstate Insurance and the X-Prize. He is one of the co-creators of the Shared Universe climate fiction universe with Alaskan Nathan Shafer. Shared Universe is a collective indigenous-anglo climate fiction universe set in the 22nd Century, based on lost plans for dome cities proposed for Anchorage Alaska in the early 70’s.

His writings on VR, AR, and media culture are widely published. For 10 years he was Editor in Chief of Media Arts Journal Intelligent Agent, published by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Twitter: @patlichty

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.” – from the Tears in the rain monologue, in “Blade Runner.”

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Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She’s a professor in the English department of Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman.

Her new book, Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first feminist cultural history of the Miss America pageant.

Margot’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Photo by Thea Dery.

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In 2014, Plutopian Maggie Duval produced a great EFF-Austin party and event called Cyberpunk 2014 Retrofest during SXSW. A highlight of the event was an ambitious panel about cyberpunk as a literary subgenre and, even more so, as the movement that followed. It featured science fiction authors Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and Christopher Brown, and editor Gareth Branwyn, who in the 1990s assembled the hypercard stack “Beyond Cyberpunk.” Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky was moderator. Bruce was an important author in the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Cory and Chris came later, but like so many more recent sci-fi authors were both influenced by the “high tech low life” ethos of cyberpunk. Gareth was a consumer and critic of cyberpunk fiction. This panel threw a lot of sparks, and we’re happy to present this record of it.

Moderator:

Panelists:

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John D. Marks was the unlikely featured speaker at the 1977 Libertarian Party National Convention in San Francisco. Marks, the former staff assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in The State Department and Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote the controversial 1974 book, The C.I.A. and The Cult Of Intelligence. Marks and Marchetti’s book was responsible, in part, for the 1975 Congressional investigation of intelligence agency abuses by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations a.k.a. The Church Committee. That landmark investigation led to substantial changes in the way the U.S. government handled it’s various intelligence agencies. In this program, Marks discusses the numerous abuses of power he and Marchetti uncovered in their research. Central to his speech is the fact the C.I.A. and F.B.I., under various administrations, had become tools of political power, often used against legally elected foreign governments and citizens of the United States. In this program, John Marks details how his book was the first to ever be censored by the government PRIOR to publication.

Why are we going so far back in history? Given the recent political changes in the United States and the possibility of many more changes to the way things are done in Washington D.C., it may be helpful to be reminded what can happen when a U.S. President decides to step outside the legal limits placed upon the intelligence agencies. The current administration insists the F.B.I. and intelligence services should be loyal to the President and support his policies. Philosopher and author George Santayana warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Are we about to have a deja vu experience?

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Jon and Scoop interview science fiction author and attorney Christopher Brown about his latest book, Failed State, his second “dystopian lawyer” novel. The book is set just after the Second American Revolution. Protagonist Donny Kimoe, a good lawyer in a bad time, looks for a kidnap victim while trying to broker a truce between bright green rebels and their capitalist adversaries. If he fails, violence is almost certain to follow.

This is our 4th interview with Chris. Previous interviews:
Tropic of Kansas – Buy the Book
Rule of Capture – Buy the Book
2001 50th Anniversary

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Maggie and Scoop interview Jeanne Mozier, a popular astrologer and speaker. Her understanding of both politics and astrology inform her wide-ranging predictions.

Jeanne holds degrees in political science from Cornell and Columbia universities. Her professional background includes research, planning and electoral politics. She has worked through the years for both Republican and Democratic candidates at every level from city, county and state to national. “I support the person not the party,” she says. Jeanne comes by her passion for American history through her family roots: she is a direct descendant of John Morton, Signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Jeanne lives in her adopted hometown of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. She is one of the best-known people in the small city, and commands recognition throughout the state of West Virginia thanks to her decades-long efforts in arts, tourism, and history.

In our discussion with Jeanne, she discusses how she predicted the current turmoil, and her hope that we’re heading into a period of progressive energy.

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Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. She carefully researches initial parameters of each work, which evolve as a result of interaction with people, time, and weather. Her latest environmental art project, “All the Way to Hell,” has appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic (leading contemporary art site), The Brooklyn Rail, and other art publications.

In a previous life Eliza was an academic focused on economic development and entrepreneurship via her research role at the IC2 Institute at UT Austin, and later in a nonprofit that forged private/university relationships. I took my first art class, Drawing 101, at Austin Community College in summer 2012. Since 2014 she’s been what she describes as an itinerant artist, living in more than 20 locations, including New Mexico, New York, and Tennessee.

From the website:

“‘All the Way to Hell’ converts 1000 individual gestures into a new form of environmental resistance at the intersection of property law, fossil fuel business practice, and bureaucracy.

“All the Way to Hell LLC is transferring its mineral rights to 1000 people. Because it costs developers just as much to acquire 500 acres as it does small properties—they have to track down owners, negotiate leases, and file documents with the county clerk—this aggressive fragmentation of the property will inhibit fossil fuel interest in it. The aim is to make mineral rights as inconvenient and expensive to acquire as possible.”

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In this episode, we talk about e-Patients, participatory medicine, and Covid-19. We also talk about “long haulers,” people who have Covid-19 as more of a chronic condition. Their symptoms extend long after recovery. Our guests are e-Patient Dave deBronkart and Dr. Marge Benham-Hutchins. Dave is a cancer survivor and international speaker on healthcare. He focuses especially on patient empowerment, engagement, and experience. Marge is Interim Chair of the Biobehavioral Health Science Department at the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.

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