Plutopia News Network

Jake Dunagan is a research director at Institute for the Future (IFTF), where his focus is the examination of social invention and the redesign of systems in light of current and emerging tools and knowledge. He recently co-authored an IFTF paper, with Doug Rushkoff and David Pescovitz, on “The Biology of Disinformation” which is about, per Pescovitz, “how media viruses, bots and computational propaganda have redefined how information is weaponized for propaganda campaigns.” This Plutopia joint explores the topics advanced by the paper, and the evolving social media arms race of “fighting memes with memes.”

Jake has conducted research, written, and lectured on a wide range of topics, including strategic foresight, governance design, comprehensive cognitive design, intellectual property, judicial foresight, kids’ technologies, Internet law and politics, mobility, and the future of learning and work.

He originally joined IFTF in 2008 and brought with him the alternative futures methodology developed at the Manoa School of Futures Studies. He continues to explore new futures methodologies and also design artifacts, games, immersive experiences of future worlds, and guerilla public engagement projects that inject the future into the mental ecology of the present.

Jake holds a BA in visual anthropology from Auburn University, an MA in visual anthropology from Temple University, and a PhD from the Manoa School of Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii with an emphasis in neuropolitics, governance design, alternative futures, and communication of foresight. He is currently an adjunct professor in the MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches strategic foresight, tactical media, and social invention.

Brandon Wiley, President of Operator Foundation, recently spoke on  “The Future of Internet Freedom – Why It Will Fail and How We Will Save It” at an EFF-Austin meeting. Operator Foundation makes usable tools to help people around the world with censorship, security, and privacy. Brandon addressed use cases for Internet freedom, and why we think of the Internet as a source of credible and reliable information. He discusses our earlier, more idealistic notions of the Internet, and how we’ve come to understand points of failure of the Internet – and how to work around them.

Former computer programmer turned author Ellen Ullman, author of Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, joined Plutopia News Network’s Maggie Duval for a conversation about engineering as a tinkering profession, persistent productive failures to produce success, and the current state of the profession, where people are always working and never re-creating. And there’s much, much more. Ellen’s life and work makes us think of the title of Norbert Wiener’s seminal work, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science) – she focuses very much on the human side of technology, and the aesthetics of algorithms.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic sci-fi masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the film has seen revival screenings in 70mm and Imax (the spectacular Imax version recalls the original massive-screen Cinerama version.)

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, we discuss 2001 with film director and writer Alex Johnson, director of “Two Step,” and science fiction author Chris Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas.

2001 is a brilliant, expansive film about the evolution of humankind from primitive apes to an idealized star child. The science-fictional vision is that evolution is supported by the intervention and guidance of unseen aliens, represented by featureless black obelisks that appear at the dawn of man, and later to guide us beyond the stars and back again. The film has a few narrative bursts, and many longer meditative scenes – critics have said the film is boring – the New Republic’s review called it “a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull.” The film did find its audience, especially among younger people who were known to enforce altered states via various drug combinations before wandering into dark theatres with massive screens to watch.

Enjoy the discussion! We were putting ourselves to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do…

Virginia Eubanks is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. She’s worked in community technology and economic justice movements for the last couple of decades. She’s a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America.

Our conversation focuses on social technology and policy. Her book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor explores how advanced data technologies are used in programs associated with poverty, with three case studies involving applications for determining eligibility for benefits and housing, and preventing child abuse and neglect. While arguably intended to provide better and more efficient services, these applications are deployed in ways that can support surveillance, profiling, and punishment.

Virginia is also participating in a two week conversation on the WELL.

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Many of us are searching for a conscious understanding and a clearer sense of the meaning of our lives in an interdependent evolutionary context, so that we can find our way to a trajectory that is more healthy and positive. What conversations do we need to have in order to evolve? Our conversation this week with transmedia poet-philosopher and “Paleontologist-Futurist” Michael Garfield is, we think, one of those essential transdisciplinary conversations. Originally a paleontologist, Michael currently hosts the “Future Fossils” podcast, and produces both art and music as well as inspiring conversations. He sees himself as midwifing new myths that can cultivate the curiosity and play we’ll need to thrive in our accelerating age, understanding that no one perspective is sufficient.

What Michael’s about: “Trained in evolutionary biology for dinosaur science before getting “distracted” by origins of life and evolution of intelligence explorations; studied integral theory + multimethodological research in grad school; spent the last decade as the most scientific guy in the room at festivals all over the world (playing music and making art and speaking on themes that would eventually become Future Fossils Podcast); fundamentally a “critique by creating” critic of the increasingly-useless and never-actually-all-that-real boundaries between art, science, and religion; convinced that the Internet is a psychedelic that the whole world ate at once and that the crisis of our age is akin to navigating through psychedelic anxiety to prevent a traumatic bad trip.”

More Michael Garfield:

* Future Fossils podcast

* On Twitter

* On YouTube

* On Instagram

* On Facebook (Art)

* Book in progress: How to Live in the Future

Michael Tobis considers himself a cyberneticist, in the original sense of the word cybernetic, where it suggests the optimal use of information in decision-making. He has two degrees in engineering and a PhD in climate science. He got into climate as it seemed to him to provide a good test case for the question “how does society account for complex information”? He was not expecting the answer to be, unfortunately, “very badly”. So now his core interest is how the feedback loop between expertise and society got broken, and how to fix it.

EFF-Austin activists organized a “silent, very nerdy: protest when Ajit Pai gave a talk in Austin on August 3. The organization set up wifi hotspots that would be visible to conference attendees with protest slogans as hotspot names. Scoop was onsite, interviewing Kevin Welch and Alex Shahrestani of EFF-Austin.

What is net neutrality, from the activist’s perspective, and from a technical perspective? The term was coined in 2003 by Tim Wu as an extension of the common carrier concept, in his paper “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” Wikipedia defines it as “the principle that Internet service providers treat all data on the Internet equally, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.” (Gilroy, Angele A. (March 11, 2011). Access to Broadband Networks: The Net Neutrality Debate. DIANE Publishing. p. 1. ISBN 978-1437984545.) The concept has been controversial, and the controversy has grown more prominent since the FCC under Ajit Pai rescinded federal net neutrality protections. In our podcast conversation with EFF-Austin President Kevin Welch and Networking Consultant Chris Boyd, we discuss the net neutrality debate and current status in some detail. Chris Boyd: [The Internet] “is an experiment gone slightly wrong, but very very right.”

Chris Boyd is an independent networking and telecommunications consultant specializing in ISP and large enterprise VoIP, Internet transit service, and Qualitity of Service implementation.

Chris has been working with various protocols to carry IP packets since before the worldwide web took over the Internet, and has even dabbled in a little bit of SNA and Token Ring. He’s worked for or consulted to MCI, Worldcom, Cox Enterprises, Mediacom Communications, Insight Communications, Suddenlink Communications, and Verizon.

Kevin Welch is the president of EFF-Austin, a digital rights organization that was founded alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and continues to be a member of their Electronic Frontier Alliance. At EFF-Austin, he leads their push to educate the public and politicians about the important digital civil liberties issues of our times.

Is net neutrality dead? Many are confused about net neutrality and what its elimination means. Jon and Scoop joined EFF-Austin president Kevin Welch for a brief interview before his talk “Net Neutrality 101: Where Freedom On the Internet Has Been, and Where It is Going” at a meeting of the Nonprofit Tech Club in Austin, Texas. Kevin discusses historical common carrier policy; how and why net neutrality matters; and why open access, with a decentralized peer to peer network, might be a best approach. “Stay vigilant, cyberpunks!”

Kevin Welch is the president of EFF-Austin, a digital rights organization that was founded alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and continues to be a member of their Electronic Frontier Alliance. At EFF-Austin, he leads their push to educate the public and politicians about the important digital civil liberties issues of our times. He is a Caltech graduate with degrees in Bioengineering and English. His professional career has consisted of a number of software-related positions ranging from programming the math in slot machine games to full-stack web programming of advanced word-processing/legal software. He follows his bliss via the writing of science fiction, mythology, and poetry, creating music and playing keyboards in a number of bands, building his own analog synthesizers, designing and programming video games, and acting in plays and films. Most recently, he created, designed, and coordinated a cyberpunk-themed party during SXSW that doubled as an educational seminar featuring Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Neil Harbisson, and Moon Ribas as the keynote speakers. He was born in, raised in, and still lives in Austin, Texas. He believes the future doesn’t have to suck, and that we can make it great for everyone, together.