Plutopia News Network

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, Jon, Scoop and Wendy welcome award-winning British science fiction novelist and literature professor Adam Roberts to discuss his new critical book Fantasy: A Short History and what it means to “suspend disbelief” in fantasy and science fiction. Adam explores how science fiction can be seen as a subset of fantasy rooted in modern scientific thinking, while fantasy is humanity’s default storytelling mode, stretching from ancient epics to Tolkien and beyond. He traces how genre fantasy crystallized as a recognizable category in the late 1960s and 1970s with Tolkien’s paperback boom and publishing lines like Ballantine Books. The conversation ranges across the Avatar films blending of sci-fi spectacle and mythic enchantment, the commercial and cultural drive toward endless sequels and mega-series (from Victorian triple-deckers to Star Wars), and the idea of fantasy as “re-enchantment” in a disenchanted modern world. The conversation is tempered by questions about grimdark violence, romantic fantasy trends, fascism and authoritarianism in fantasy settings, and how technology, the internet, and AI may reshape imagination, community, and the ways people escape into (or build) alternate worlds through books, film, cosplay, and video games.

Adam Roberts:

But I think it may be that cinema is becoming more like video games. And it’s more about particular special effects, spectacular. That’s diminishing, I think, for the art form, because video games are necessarily structured by the obstacles that you put in the way of the player. The player overcomes the obstacles and gets to the end of the stage and beats the big boss. And that’s a rather kind of denuded way of thinking about the possibilities of storytelling. But then I also think that in a game like Skyrim you can do anything at all. You can fight dragons and you can go on adventures and quests, or you can just live in a village and explore what the possibilities of that are. And that’s rare. It’s rare certainly in cinema, but even in book form, where there usually is a more linear conflict that has to be overcome.

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In this Plutopia News Network podcast, author and social media expert Dave Evans discusses the nature and spread of online misinformation and introduces Does It Square?, an AI-assisted fact-checking tool designed to help users pause, evaluate claims, and ground conversations in shared facts. Evans explains that misinformation is often “half true,” built on a factual core but extended with unsupported interpretations that exploit emotion, division, and engagement-driven social media algorithms. Drawing on his long experience with social media’s evolution, he argues that ad-driven platforms amplify outrage and reinforce echo chambers, while bots and click farms further accelerate false narratives for profit. Rather than declaring content simply true or false, Does It Square focuses on linguistic analysis — identifying emotionally charged, authoritarian, or intuition-based language — to encourage media literacy, reflection, and more constructive dialogue in a polarized information environment.

Dave Evans:

One of the more interesting facts about misinformation is that it’s generally about half-true. In developing Does It Square?, one of the first scales that I implemented was how true, how false is this? And what I found was everything was basically 50% right, because really good information starts with some kind of fact that everyone agrees, “this is a fact .” But then it extends that in a way that either the data or the methodology doesn’t support. It makes some kind of unfounded claim. It makes no references to anything that supports those extensions or those interpretations or anything like that. So you’re left with — okay, if this underlying fact is true and here’s the interpretation of it, wow, I mean, I guess that’s, you know, true. Well, not really.

Link to DoesItSquare.com

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In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Charles Herrman interviews philosopher Randall Auxier about his unconventional academic path, process philosophy, and personalism, exploring how his early struggles with formal instruction led him to self-directed study and original interpretations of thinkers like Peirce, Whitehead, Bergson, Dewey, and Royce. Auxier critiques mainstream academia for discouraging originality and enforcing conformity, argues that philosophy is a way of life rather than a profession, and explains his view of “process personalism,” in which personhood is relational, dynamic, and present throughout reality in varying degrees. He challenges individualism, defends communities as primary moral persons, critiques corporate personhood as sociopathic, and aligns his thought with pragmatism, radical empiricism, and process traditions that emphasize becoming, value, and shared meaning over static doctrines or institutional authority.

Randall Auxier:

From the very beginning, I had difficulty finding teachers, and so kind of had to teach myself this stuff… and most people regard it as enormously difficult stuff. And so, in a way, it was a challenge to not have a teacher, and in a way, it was a blessing. Because if I had a teacher, I might have fallen into whatever that teacher thought about this material. Because that’s the natural thing to do, is to pay attention to your mentors and the people you respect. As it turned out, since I had no one to teach me this stuff — I mean, my professors were perfectly content for me to study it, but they said, you know, we don’t read this stuff. We don’t know what you’re talking about. And so I ended up having to sort of make it up, in the sense of make up my own interpretations of these people’s very difficult ideas. And that ended up being pretty good, actually, for me, because I don’t think that I would have been satisfied with anyone else’s version of this stuff.

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Roy Casagranda returns to the Plutopia News Network to help the hosts process what Scoop calls the “cornucopia of crap” that was 2025, ranging from social media’s corrosive incentives to AI hype, rising economic pain, and the destabilizing effects of Trump-era foreign and domestic policy heading into the 2026 midterms. Casagranda argues the U.S. is drifting toward an “electoral monarchy,” with a hollowed-out Congress and a Supreme Court increasingly empowering a unitary, executive-order-driven presidency, while the panel connects this to broader institutional decay, public cynicism, and a sense that global leaders are making irrational, self-destructive choices reminiscent of darker historical periods. They debate whether social media is the primary driver or merely an accelerant that converts frustration into addictive “hour of hate” posting rather than real-world collective action like organizing, boycotts, and strikes, and they trade observations about AI’s usefulness as a tool versus its dangers as an unaccountable decision-maker, especially as “AI slop” contaminates law, education, and public knowledge. The conversation also touches on crypto, energy-hungry data centers, and governance contrasts, with Casagranda describing Dubai’s future-oriented planning and service efficiency as a stark counterpoint to U.S. dysfunction, before closing on skepticism that the Democratic Party alone can meaningfully “rein in” Trumpism and a worry that the same cycle of backlash, complacency, and renewed crisis could repeat.

The definition of monarch is one person rules. It’s not necessarily that it’s hereditary. So what the United States has basically done is — Congress doesn’t function anymore, and the Supreme Court is handing the power over to the presidency, and the president is ruling through executive orders. And so at that point, that’s the definition of a monarchy. You could have it so that you elect the monarch every four years. But the Constitution James Madison wrote us was meant for Congress to be in charge, not Congress to be the rubber stamp for the president. And that’s where we are. We’re in a situation where we have devolved into a monarchy. Osama bin Laden’s in his grave laughing his head off… like, wow, I triggered U. S. idiocy to the point where Americans can’t get their heads out of 911. And here it is, 24 years later, and they voted for this maniac who’s destroying the empire. He did more damage to the United States than could have been imaginable. Well, the United States did all the damage

Link to Roy Casagranda’s podcast

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In this excerpt from the Plutopia News Network, Cory Doctorow discusses his book Enshittification and the broader forces behind why digital platforms (and other industries) have “suddenly gotten worse.” He explains the term’s now-famous three-stage cycle: platforms lure users with quality, pivot to serving business customers at users’ expense, then squeeze both sides for maximum profit. Cory argues that this isn’t just greed, but the result of an “enshittogenic” policy environment shaped by weakened antitrust, captured regulators, and diminished worker power.

Cory Doctorow:

All of these policies that are antithetical to the interests of billionaires keep cropping up all over the world. And I think that’s best understood as an effect and not a cause, right? That there is a giant tailwind for smashing corporate power. And it has many manifestations: environmental law, opposition to genocide in Gaza, the anti-poverty campaigns, anti-corruption campaigns. Many other aspects of the fight about corporate power are all kind of reflecting, I think, this popular sentiment that, like the wind, is invisible and can only be understood by what it propels. And I think we’re all really angry with corporate power, we’re all fucking done with it. And there is this maxim out of finance, Stein’s Law: that anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. And I think that we’re reaching the stopping point for corporate corruption.

Photo copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO), www.jucophoto.com/, licensed via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0

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Austin environmental activist Paul Robbins joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss the 2025–26 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, framed around “resilience” in the wake of Winter Storm Uri and recurring disasters, and packed with practical guidance on low-cost outage survival, home-scale energy and water conservation, and local food security. Paul describes the obsessive labor behind producing the first hard-copy edition since COVID, updating years of web-published reporting, editing hundreds of graphics, and synthesizing material “not reported anywhere else.” The hosts dig into systemic failures that made Uri so devastating, including inequality (wealthy residents can buy resilience, most can’t). The conversation expands to looming stresses from AI/data centers and cryptocurrency on the Texas grid, debates over dispatchable clean energy and storage beyond intermittent wind/solar (including emerging battery chemistries and geothermal “fracking for heat”), and the accelerating water crisis: groundwater competition, costly aquifer-storage schemes, and the limits of desalination and atmospheric water capture. Ultimately, Paul argues that government won’t act boldly without public pressure, urging collective local activism to demand better planning, R&D investment, conservation, and regional food production, and he closes by sharing where listeners can find the Directory in Austin.

Paul Robbins:

The Directory has a chapter in it on low-cost solutions that will get you through a power outage. So, in terms of survival, that might help a bit. TI’ve written in other past directories, and this is on my website still, about alternative energy and clean energy that can be used in buildings, water conservation that can be used In homes. There’s all manner of things that can be done on an individual level.

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Deborah Hyde joins the Plutopia News Network podcast to explore why sane, rational people can sincerely report supernatural experiences — ghosts, werewolves, UFOs — without those experiences necessarily reflecting reality. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, social influence (including “mass sociogenic” phenomena), history, and folklore, she argues that anecdotes matter as human testimony but have limits as evidence because they aren’t controlled data. The conversation ranges from the many cultural uses of werewolf stories (allegory, scapegoating, witch-trial paranoia, even sympathetic tales) to Satan as a monotheistic “accounting device” for evil, and to modern belief systems like flat earth and anti-vax thinking as expressions of agency, fear, and distrust of expertise. Hyde emphasizes respectful skepticism — honoring people’s experiences while questioning interpretations — and notes how popular media reshapes folklore, why skeptics must be comfortable with ambiguity, and how studying “unreal” creatures still reveals real truths about human nature.

Deborah Hyde:

We do accept that human beings have lots of very strange experiences, and let’s dig into why the experiences may not represent reality, why perfectly sane people can have these experiences. And you can have independent neurological explanations, psychological explanations. Social explanations are a huge one. There are so many examples throughout history of mass sociogenic conditions where people go through dancing manias or something like that. Social influences on people really do make a difference to their perceptions and to their behaviour. That’s the whole point of it just being somebody’s experience, because you’re not dealing with data, you’re not dealing with controlled experiments or anything like that, you are dealing with anecdotes. And anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean nothing, but there is a limit to what it means.

Photo by Karl Withakay. Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0

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Austrian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Johannes Grenzfurthner joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss his two new films: Hacking at Leaves, an experimental documentary sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and rooted in the struggles of Navajo communities, U.S. healthcare failures, and hacker-led mutual aid; and Solvent, a found-footage horror film shot on his grandparents’ farm in Austria that explores buried Nazi histories and intergenerational silence. In a wide-ranging conversation, Grenzfurthner reflects on the creative processes behind both films, his collaborations with actors like John Gries, Austria’s unresolved relationship with its fascist past, and the parallels he sees between the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the United States. The discussion expands into capitalism, technology, healthcare, political polarization, and cultural memory, revealing how Grenzfurthner uses film to probe both personal and systemic hauntings—and why he believes confronting roots, not just symptoms, is essential to understanding contemporary crises.

Johannes Grenzfurthner:

For people who have not seen it yet, it (Solvent) is a found footage film. So it’s a point of view. So you see it from the perspective of the main character, the expat who gets hired to look for some old historic Nazi documents in an old farmhouse. There is a character played by myself who plays the grandson of that old Nazi character, who died a couple of years, or disappeared a couple of years, before the action in the film takes place. They hire a couple of historians, kind of like a salvage operator who specialized in tracking lost, hidden goods and stuff like that. They they go through the the remnants, they go through this decrepit farmhouse, trying to find the Nazi box with all the documents that the Nazi collected back in the days during the Second World War in a Polish concentration camp — and they discover more than the documents. They actually never discover the documents, but they discover more, it’s pretty much like a Nazi demon story, and I turned my own grandfather into the Nazi demon.

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On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier joins the hosts to discuss his new book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Schneier frames democracy as an information-processing system that aggregates citizens’ preferences into policy, and defines AI broadly as computer systems doing tasks once done by humans. He argues that AI is fundamentally a power-amplifying tool: in the hands of small-d democrats it can strengthen participation, transparency, and decision-making, but in the hands of authoritarians or monopolistic tech corporations it can just as easily supercharge surveillance, manipulation, and control. Throughout the conversation, he emphasizes that many fears attributed to “AI itself” are really fears about capitalism, corporate power, and concentrated ownership of technology, and he offers real-world examples where AI is already helping journalism, courts, voters, and legislatures. Rather than utopian hype or doom, Schneier advocates a clear-eyed, politics-first view: AI’s impact on democracy will depend less on the technology and more on who controls it and how we choose to govern its use.

Bruce Schneier:

But what we want to say is AI is a tool. It’s a power-enhancing tool. In the hands of someone who wants better democracy, it’s a tool for better democracy. In the hands of an authoritarian, it’s a tool for better authoritarianism. And that’s what it’s going to do. And a lot of times, people confuse the evils of AI with the evils of the corporations controlling the AI. And I think that is the most important thing that I say to the people who say nothing’s good here. And you’re right, in a lot of ways, nothing’s good there. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s the fault of the monopolists. It’s the fault of Silicon Valley. It’s the fault of the white male tech billionaires.

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On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, hosts Jon, Wendy, and Scoop talk with Próspera VP of Growth Lonis Hamaili and community development consultant David Armistead about Próspera, a privately managed “governance as a service” special economic zone in Honduras. Lonis explains that Próspera operates with its own autonomous legal, regulatory, and tax framework, somewhat analogous to Hong Kong or Dubai’s DIFC. It aims to attract global business, generate high-wage local jobs, and experiment with streamlined, market-driven regulation using mechanisms like insurance-based oversight and private arbitration courts. The conversation covers Próspera’s rapid growth since breaking ground in 2020, with hundreds of companies incorporated, thousands of jobs created, and a mixed public–private council that shares lawmaking power, along with revenue-sharing agreements that send a portion of tax revenue to the Honduran government. The guests also address criticisms and concerns, such as fears of deregulation, exploitation, power infrastructure, local opposition, and comparisons to micro-nations or freeports; arguing that Próspera is apolitical in practice, relies on voluntary participation, bans eminent domain, and is legally protected despite the repeal of Honduras’s ZEDE law. They close by touching on frontier ideas like longevity medicine, potential AI legal status, and possible expansion to other countries, framing Próspera as a real-world testbed for new governance and economic models rather than a fully formed utopia.

Lonis Hamaili:

With Próspera we’re inventing a new industry we call governance as a service. Essentially we partner with host countries, in this case Honduras, and create these zones that have very special and autonomous laws, regulations and practices. You can think of it as a little bit like Hong Kong in China. At least as it used to be, where Hong Kong is part of China, but it has its own completely independent political and economical systems. Similarly, with Prospera here in Honduras, we have our own independent system. However, it’s privately managed, right? So we help with the governance operations which include providing the laws, the security, the justice system. Our business model is access.

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