Plutopia News Network

Paulina Borsook In this Plutopia News Network conversation, Paulina Borsook reflects on the coming reissue of her book Cyberselfish with a mix of gratitude, puzzlement, and discomfort, describing the book as an imperfect but timely snapshot of Silicon Valley’s long-standing libertarian mindset rather than a tightly argued work, while also noting how strange it feels to be newly celebrated for writing she produced 25 years ago after years of professional frustration and obscurity. The discussion broadens into a sharp critique of billionaire tech culture, Elon Musk, AI hype and “AI slop,” the environmental and social costs of generative AI, and the enduring antisocial impulses embedded in parts of tech culture, themes that the hosts connect to newer books about elite survivalism and Silicon Valley ideology. Along the way, Borsook praises the AI-assisted satirical video “Greenland Defense Front” as a rare example of AI used creatively under clear human artistic control, and the group also touches on war, oil, Trump, market manipulation, parasocial relationships, internet culture, fandom, and the fading of once-vital spaces like CFP and old South by Southwest, ending with details about the Cyberselfish rerelease: preorder links go live April 22 and the new edition is due September 15. Paulina Borsook: This was definitely a first book, and since it went through three publishers, the seams still show. It’s not. . I don’t even think it’s that great a book. It’s just interesting to me that people look at it in a certain way now. And it was more of a travelogue pastiche. There wasn’t a dominant through narrative. There was a snapshot of this subculture, snapshot of that.Wired to a whole bunch of other things. It wasn’t like I wasn’t making an argument. I was just being an anthropologist in a funny kind of way. So I’m obviously pleased and puzzled. I’m grateful for being reputationally brought back from the dead. I don’t trust it, but I don’t know what this has to do with — you know, I’m the same person that was trying to do stuff for the last 25 years and it also feels weird that I’m being celebrated for what I wrote 25 years ago, not just the book, but other stuff. I’m glad I created stuff of lasting value. But I can’t… you know, this should be posthumous, but I’m still alive.

In this Plutopia podcast episode, futurist and data analyst Anne Boysen argues that today’s AI systems, especially large language models and emerging AI agents, are being adopted far faster than their reliability, transparency, and testability justify. She contrasts older, more deterministic technologies such as traditional search and rule-based systems with today’s probabilistic models, which generate plausible answers without clear provenance, reproducibility, or dependable truth-testing, making them vulnerable to hallucinations, disinformation, and misuse. Anne warns that handing decisions over to AI agents could amplify these risks, especially when users misunderstand AI as precise or authoritative, while also noting that companies often push AI into products out of hype, monetization pressure, or fear of missing out rather than clear user need. At the same time, she acknowledges that narrower, well-guarded uses of AI, such as media enhancement or limited decision support, can be helpful, and she ultimately advocates for careful testing, human oversight, targeted applications, and simple, thoughtful regulation focused on guardrails and accountability rather than blanket overregulation. Anne Boysen: We’re going to start leaving these decisions to agents. AI agents. So on top of all of this probabilistic hodgepodge of maybe truths, and maybe not reproducible truths on top of that, we’re going to start letting agents make decisions for us. So, you’re basically just going to use this interface that may or may not understand you completely and may come up with their own interpretations, and they’re like, “Oh, I thought you said enter my bank account to buy Bitcoin.” I don’t know, like, “That’s what I thought you wanted to do.” And then that could be the result. So, that’s where we are. Video on YouTube

In this Plutopia News Network interview, Marc Abrahams discusses the Ig Nobel Prizes, which he founded in 1991 after becoming editor of the “Journal of Irreproducible Results.” These prizes honor real achievements that make people “laugh and then think,” not work that is simply silly or worthless. He describes how the prizes grew from a quirky MIT event into a long-running international celebration supported largely by ticket sales and volunteers, featuring Nobel laureates, comic stage devices like “Miss Sweetie Poo,” and handmade awards built from cheap materials. Abrahams discusses how winners are chosen from roughly 9,000 nominations a year through argument and debate, why self-conscious attempts to win usually fail, and how the associated “Annals of Improbable Research” highlights unusual but meaningful work ranging from pasta physics to fingernail growth studies and even medical research on colonoscopy explosions. He also reflects on occasional controversy, especially from officials who misunderstood the spirit of the prizes, and notes a newer challenge: some international winners no longer feel comfortable traveling to the United States, prompting a major shift as the 2026 Ig Nobel ceremony moves to Zurich. Marc Abrahams: If you win an Ig Nobel Prize, you’ve done something that will make almost anyone anywhere immediately laugh, and then start thinking. So there’s something about it that, whatever it is, will just instantly make somebody start laughing, and then it’ll stick in their mind, if we’ve chosen well. And for the next week or so, all they want to do is tell their friends about it, talk about it. But it has nothing to do with whether the thing is good or bad, or valuable or worthless, could be all of those or none of those. If you set out to create, devise, invent something that has that effect, You’re almost certainly going to fail. You can do one or the other. You can invent something that makes people laugh, or you can invent something that makes people really start thinking. But to invent something that does both of those, That’s really difficult. Don’t try, really, really. It’s just a side effect. Video on YouTube: Original photo of Marc Abrahams by David Kessler (background enhanced) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

In this Plutopia News Network episode, Jon and Scoop talk with political scholar Dr. Roy Casagranda, joining from Dubai, about Iran’s modern history, the rise of the Islamic Republic, and the rapidly escalating conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States. Roy argues that the crisis is rooted in a long history of oil politics, foreign intervention, and colonial power struggles, and he warns that the current war could spiral into a far broader regional and global catastrophe, disrupting trade, driving up oil prices, destabilizing neighboring states, and increasing the risk of mass displacement and wider war. Throughout the conversation, he also critiques the motives and competence of current U.S. and Israeli leadership, questions claims about democracy and security, and frames the conflict as part of a larger pattern of geopolitical chaos with potentially devastating economic and human consequences. Roy Casagranda: I think what they decided was we’re going to keep doing this, we’re going to go all in. And their goal is to break the global economy. Their goal is to make it so that the price of oil goes through the roof, that everybody runs out of oil, that India runs out of oil, that Europe runs out of oil. They want to break the GCC economy. They want to break UAE, they want to break, to hurt everybody who’s ever had anything to do with the United States. They want to destroy Israel if they can. They’re gonna go for broke, and their thinking is that eventually the world will turn on the United States because the world will realize the cost that the United States is inflicting on the global economy isn’t worth whatever goal Israel and the United States have.

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, we interview AI and society expert Kate Devlin about the rise of AI companions, sex robots, and the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Devlin explores why people fall in love with chatbots despite knowing they lack consciousness, tracing the phenomenon back to ancient myths like Pygmalion and forward through science fiction and shows like “Black Mirror.” She discusses the ethics of AI design, the limits of machine “morality,” concerns about exploitation and “ghost work” behind supposedly autonomous systems, and the need for thoughtful regulation that holds tech companies accountable. The conversation also touches on generational shifts in intimacy, online misogyny, AI’s role in education and law, and the persistent moral panics that accompany new technologies, highlighting Devlin’s view that while AI cannot love us back, the feelings people experience are real, complex, and part of a long human history of forming emotional bonds with our creations. So a lot of the science fiction stories feature — usually, if it’s a female robot, they tend to either be incredibly subservient or they tend to break their programming and go rogue, which is sort of a cautionary tale about what happens if feminism gets out of control, and these women break the shackles and rise up against their male owners. There was a “Black Mirror” episode, the “Be Right Back” episode, where the husband dies in a car wreck and she creates or she gets a robot version that she can imprint his leftover messages and videos and everything onto so she can create herself a new version of the husband. But, of course, it’s uncanny — it’s not really him, and it all goes terribly wrong because she doesn’t feel it’s really him. So, lots of good questions there about what we expect, I think, from these artificial alternatives. Video on YouTube:

The Plutopia News Network podcast welcomes writer, editor, and media critic Gareth Branwyn to discuss his workshop “Dreaming for Creatives,” which focuses less on dream symbolism or interpretation and more on mining the “dream-time mind” for usable creative material. Gareth and the Plutopians reminisce about early-1990s zine and cyberculture scenes (The WELL, FactSheet 5, bOING bOING, Mondo 2000, “Jargon Watch,” and “Street Tech”), then shift into Branwyn’s lifelong dream practice, including lucid dreaming as a teen and techniques to improve dream recall, especially using a “dream recall tally sheet” and the habit of staying still upon waking to retrieve dream fragments. He describes three liminal sources of creativity: “night thoughts” (hypnagogic scribbles), “night bulbs” (clear middle-of-the-night insights), and dreams themselves. He gives examples of how these have shaped his work and even his name. The conversation also touches on “second sleep,” sleep tracking, recurring flying dreams, sleep paralysis and its eerie “presence” hallucinations, and the idea that paying attention to dreaming, like meditation, can deepen one’s relationship with consciousness — while still warning against turning dream work into an unhealthy obsession. Gareth Branwyn: I’ve only done the workshop once so far, and one thing I wanted to make, clear because when I started talking it up before I did it — people immediately think you’re going to talk about dream interpretation, dream symbolism, which I have basically no interest in, besides the obvious things of that was clearly an anxiety dream, like I lost my wallet, or I lost my phone (I have those a lot) or I got lost at a conference. But I’m not interested in that at all, and so I really needed to make it clear that’s not what this is about. This is really mining your dream time mind for creative material. That’s really what my interest is. Video on YouTube:

Shira Chess joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, arguing that online culture has always been shaped not just by code and commerce but by myth, ritual, and “enchanted logic.” The conversation traces how early internet and 90s cyberculture overlapped with Technopaganism and other non-mainstream spiritual currents, creating a productive (and sometimes destabilizing) fuzziness between “technology as magic” and “magic as technology,” echoing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous formulation (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”). Chess explores how this occult-inflected sensibility persists today as background “wallpaper” in everything from simulation theory and reality-shifting to conspiracy culture and politicized “meme magic,” while also touching on the loss of open-web imagination among younger users, the fragility and importance of digital archives, and how fragmentation at scale has helped erode consensus reality, leaving us in an internet-shaped world where, as the counterculture mantra goes, “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Shira Chess: The thing about that Arthur C. Clarke quote that always sort of struck me was that it works in both ways, right? Any significantly advanced society is indistinguishable from magic, or technology is indistinguishable from magic. But any any magic is also indistinguishable from an advanced technology. And I think that slippage helped create a kind of fuzziness, right? Where it can both be magical and not magical at the same time, right? And people could kind of choose how they wanted to look at things. I think that was very much part of the Technopagan ethos. It wasn’t some people absolutely believed in literal magic. Some people just were like — well, the technology that we have is magical enough. Video on YouTube

David Weinberger joins the Plutopia podcast to weigh AI’s real strengths, especially pattern recognition, against its major dangers: hallucinations, bias, corporate power, and energy costs. He’s less focused on sci-fi doom than on how AI reshapes how we think about knowledge and ourselves. We dig into surveillance and facial recognition failures, “human-in-the-loop” debates in medicine and justice, job disruption, and whether copyright is the right tool for regulating training data. David Weinberger: I am less concerned, but I may just be wrong about this — I am less concerned about machine learning AI becoming conscious and consciously hostile to us and subjugating us. I cannot evaluate the risk of it in a non-malignant way, taking over for us. I mean, there’s some popular scenarios from very knowledgeable and responsible people saying, you know, this conceivably could… even if we tell it, do no harm to humans, only do good, do what’s good for humans… that it could come to very bad conclusions about what’s good for humans and get us into a situation that we don’t want to be in. YouTube video version: