Plutopia News Network

Plutopians met Robert Jackson Bennett at “Science Fiction House” during SXSW 2019. Thats where we began our fascinating discussion about the blurry border between fantasy and science fiction.

Robert is an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. He’s a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. City of Blades was a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards. The Divine Cities Trilogy was nominated for a Hugo for Best Series. His eighth novel, Foundryside, was released in 2018 to wide acclaim.

Robert “likes to write worlds that have a fantasy feel” … “spy novels that are dressed up like fantasy.” His narratives were inspired in part by cyberpunk fiction. In our Plutopia interview, we talk about how Robert approaches writing, and how he builds the worlds in which his narratives live and breathe.

Author, lecturer, critic, and culture jammer Mark Dery gave this talk, “Let’s Get Lost: an Experiment in Controlled Digression,” at the ACTLab 2019 conference in June. (For more information on Mark, see our earlier conversation with him about his latest book, a biography of Edward Gorey called Born to be Posthumous. In this talk, Mark explores the thematic conference notion of “rebooting the noösphere,” beginning with the concept of the dérive, “a determinedly directionless, but far from purposeless stroll through city streets” that results in a “psychogeographical reimagining” that “disrupts the unitary urbanism imposed by capitalism on our experience of everyday life.”

Author Lewis Shiner has written nine novels and many short stories. His latest novel is Outside the Gates of Eden, a novel of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The novel is set in the evolving counterculture and world of popular music of the time, mixing fictional and real characters. Shiner captures the spirit of the 60s and the creative energy of the emerging rock and folk music scenes. His early writing was science fiction, and he was identified with the revolutionary cyberpunk sub-genre. Formerly a resident of Texas, Lew currently lives in North Carolina.

He was a musician while in high school and college, and was a self-supporting session musician for a few years. Several of his novels have rock and roll characters and elements. His latest novel is his most ambitious, and the focus of our Plutopia conversation.

Lewis Shiner’s website

Lewis Shiner’s Twitter

Lewis Shiner at Amazon

Robert Matney is Managing Director of Stream Integrity at New Knowledge, a company that detects, monitors, and mitigates social media manipulation — in various contexts, for diverse clients. The company produced a well-covered report called “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency”. This report, co-authored by Robert, quantified and contextualized the extent of the Russian influence campaign during the 2016 US elections.

New Knowledge specializes in disinformation defense for highly visible brands under attack by coordinated disinformation campaigns — Robert speaks of “the dumpster fire of the Internet.”

In our unsettling discussion with Rob, we discuss what’s wrong with the contemporary Internet, and how to address the growing proliferation of disinformation and propaganda within the digital ecosystem.

Owen McNally is a researcher and technology analyst in Austin, Texas. An enduring theme in his work over recent decades is the analysis and evaluation of technology based on humanistic principles. After completing undergraduate studies in Psychology at the University of Dallas, he turned in the early 1990’s to studying cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, the pre www internet, and cyberpunk culture. After completing graduate work in psychology at Duquesne University, he joined a series of software development teams as a usability and quality assurance tester. He subsequently earned an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, with a program of work in Medical Cognitive Science, and has taught college level software design, cognitive studies, psychology, research methods, and statistics for the behavioral sciences. In recent years his work has been in the areas of research for investors in cybersecurity, neurotech, AI, logistics and hospital technology.

In part 2 of our interview with Joe Nick Patoski, we focus on essential Texas and Austin food, and on Austin’s unique cultural history and evolution. We cover a lot of ground: SXSW, Austin is for the curious, basic food groups (TexMex, BBQ, and chicken fried steak), music (alt country, psychedelic, punk; the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon), coevolution with San Francisco (“so much of the foundation that was poured in San Francisco was poured by Texpatriates.”), armadillo art, and post-ethnic Austin.

Also: check out Joe Nick’s weekly Texas Music Hour of Power!

In his latest book, “Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas,” Joe Nick Patoski gives us an insider’s analysis of the changes wrought upon the state capital and “sleepy college town” that became an alternative to the stereotype of “Texas Culture.” Joe Nick has chronicled many Texas “institutions” in his previous writings, including Willie Nelson, the Dallas Cowboys, Selena, Conjunto music, barbecue and many more typically Texan subjects. His weekly Texas Music Hour of Power, broadcast on KRTS FM Marfa Public Radio, has become a Saturday evening tradition for fans of Texas music.

Jon and Scoop spent an entertaining afternoon chatting with Joe Nick about his book and everything Austin. In this first of two episodes, Joe Nick gives us a history lesson on “Old Austin” and its journey to becoming ATX. “It was always an outsider’s city, contrarian and tolerant by nature, a refuge apart from the state surrounding it.”

Vinay Gupta is CEO of Mattereum, an organization dedicated to “Organizing the world’s property and making it universally accessible and useful” – riffing on the Google mission statement and applying it to the physical realm. Or, actually, the place where the physical realm can have meaningful relationships with data in the virtual realm. Per Tech Crunch, Mattereum is “trying to bridge the gap between programmable blockchain ‘smart contracts’ and actual legal contracts.”

Vinay was formerly a software engineer who became a disaster consultant focused on environmental and infrastructure risks, and the need for resilient and sustainable thinking. He was involved with the Rocky Mountain Institute and the US Department of Defense. From Vice: “War, natural disaster, pandemics, economic collapse, resource scarcity, how the poor die: these are his abiding concerns. Horsemen of the apocalypse he negotiates with a humorous sense of the absurd as much as a deeply thought-through philosophical and spiritual base.” Among other things, Vinay invented a refugee shelter, the hexayurt, based on Buckminster Fuller’s thinking.

More recently, Vinay became global release coordinator for the blockchain based Ethereum Project, and his involvement with blockchain and the need for practical use cases led to the formation of Mattereum.

During SXSW, Plutopians Jon and Scoop had an opportunity to hold an extended conversation with Vinay. It’s a longer conversation than we usually publish, but worth hearing from beginning to end.

Brian Bushway lost his sight to optic nerve atrophy when he was 14 years old. Despite the loss of site, Brian finished high school, graduated from Pepperdine University, and pursued solo mountain biking. Via the Braille Institute, he met Daniel Kish, an expert in human echolocation, who inspired him. Kish helped him change his sense of what’s possible. Brian has gone on to become “the world’s best totally blind mountain biker” (per Mountain Bike Action Magazine).

Currently, Brian serves as a Perceptual Navigation Instructor for World Access for the Blind, teaching persons of all ages how to echolocate or “see with sound.” He has worked with many other organizations to create blind mobility programs and education courses based on FlashSonar™, Perceptual Navigation, and family coaching.

Plutopia News recorded this talk at the BDYHAX 2019 Conference in Austin, Texas. You can also find a transcript of the talk here.

Writer and cultural critic Mark Dery has written (and fed into) cyberculture, Afrofuturism (a term he coined), and evil clowns, but his latest work is about the surreal illustrator and writer Edward Gorey, who said “My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.” Mark is lately author of Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, a detailed biography covering Gorey’s life and work. Mark joined Plutopians Scoop, Maggie and Jon while visiting Austin for an SRO talk at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.