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:

Award-winning Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss his work’s political themes: failed modern systems, rising nationalism, and the struggle to find common interest in a fragmented world. He also reflects candidly on the craft of writing as he nears completion of his 21st novel, which he says still hinges on the hardest part: plotting and bringing a story to a satisfying, coherent conclusion. In conversation with hosts Jon, Scoop, and Wendy, Ken explains how he distinguishes science fiction from fantasy (material processes versus mental ones), describes his note-driven worldbuilding process, and weighs the real prospects for human space colonization, skepticism about today’s power-hungry “AI,” and the enduring pull of socialist ideas. By far and away, the hardest thing for me to do is plot. You know, getting a general idea of the story, getting a world, an imaginary world, getting ideas. That’s easy, that’s the first stage. The thing I sweat and swear and stumble over repeatedly is plot. And most of the mental writing goes into that. At the moment I’m writing my, I guess, my 20th novel and it hasn’t got any easier. I’ve got a couple of chapters, maybe two or three chapters left to write. I’ve just re-read everything I wrote so far on the novel. It’s not quite as bad as I thought, you know. You get very critical of your work if you’ve read it several times over. Editor’s note: We realized after the interview that Ken has written 20 novels, and the one in process is his 21st! YouTube video version:

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. Video on YouTube:

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

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.

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 Video on YouTube:

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. Links A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet: video of Cory’s December 28 talk. Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow’s Craphound Cory’s latest books “Enshittification” in Wikipedia Cory at EFF Video version on YouTube: Photo copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO), www.jucophoto.com/, licensed via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0

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.

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. Links The Skeptic X.com: @jourdemayne Bluesky: @deborahhyde.bsky.social Instagram: @deborahhydefolklore YouTube: @ deborahhydefolklore Photo by Karl Withakay. Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0

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. Links: Hacking at Leaves on the Internet Archive Where to watch Solvent

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. That’s where You want to address Links: TED talk: Dustin Ballard Story in The Verge on Swiss model Aspertus Text of “Franchise”, by Isaac Asimov DonorAtlas Albanian procurement minister Diella

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.

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how long-standing rules limiting government use and combination of personal data have eroded, enabling massive dossiers on citizens and immigrants built from government records, data brokers, apps, and new technologies like ubiquitous location tracking, spyware, and facial recognition. She highlights how border zones and immigration enforcement operate as Fourth Amendment “gray areas,” how ICE and other agencies exploit data broker loopholes, and how surveillance harms vulnerable people, from abortion seekers to benefit recipients wrongly flagged as frauds. The conversation also covers the politics and dangers of spyware, the importance and limits of tools like Signal, the role of hackers and security researchers in exposing abuses, and the way popular media normalizes surveillance as necessary for safety. Jennifer closes by stressing practical self-defense steps, the need to understand one’s “threat model,” and the importance of legal and political resistance, reminding listeners that although the situation is alarming, organized pushback can still win real protections. Jennifer Granick: I think one of the biggest new things is that the rules that we had have kind of been thrown away. There were just these expectations that data I gave to the government in order to get Medicare or in order to get food stamps or something of that nature was going to stay used for those purposes. And there are rules about how the government is permitted to combine databases of information and when it’s allowed to do that. And what we’ve seen is a complete ignoring of those rules and this amalgamation of different databases of information into a dossier of people in the country, not just people who are immigrants, but also people who have been born here and were citizens as well. And you put together all these disparate pieces of information and it tells you a lot, maybe almost everything about somebody.

Technologist and former British Telecom chief scientist Peter Cochrane joins the Plutopia to talk about his lifelong pursuit of truth and his work on a “truth engine” that used AI to grade the reliability of news sources and authors. Cochrane argues that real truth is hard, costly, and collaborative — unlike social media, which feeds users comforting falsehoods that match their worldview — and warns that losing a shared grip on truth threatens civilization. Drawing on his career in communications, AI, and cybersecurity, Peter explains how he boosted lie detection rates by tracking sources over time, factoring in bias, and adding linguistic and psychological analysis, pushing accuracy toward 95%. The conversation widens into science as an ongoing search rather than final certainty, the distortions of corporate media, the risks and inevitability of AI-driven systems like driverless cars, and his own experiment living with AI-assisted hearing. Throughout, Cochrane stays optimistic but insistent on building human and machine ethics, noting that technology should be judged by whether it improves on fallible humans and helps us keep truth at the center of society. Peter Cochrane: Truth is very expensive. It costs you a lot of time, energy, concentration. You have to have these inner arguments. You have discussions with other people and you gradually zero down to an opinion based on the facts. Whereas on Facebook it is easy. You you just believe it. And it’s so outrageous — that it fits your world model. That’s the worst aspect. The whole of social media is tuned to your social or world model, and they just feed you the stuff that reinforces your belief system. I think that can be said of most religions, they do the same thing. Uh they feed you the story from being a child continually till it becomes perfect.

The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, to discuss how digital technology — especially social media, generative AI, and the constant flow of online information — shapes human memory, judgment, and vulnerability to deception. She explains that people struggle to evaluate critically the sheer volume of information they encounter, so they’re more likely to accept content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, and this helps misinformation spread. Nightingale traces her research from early work on how taking photos can impair memory to current studies showing that most people can spot fake or AI-generated images only slightly better than chance, and even training improves performance only modestly. She and the hosts dig into the limits of AI “guardrails,” the uneven global landscape of AI regulation, the rise of misogynistic online spaces, and the troubling growth of AI-enabled nonconsensual intimate imagery, arguing that legal reform, platform accountability, and public education are all needed to reduce harm. One of the things that tends to make people quite susceptible is just information overload, purely that we live in an age where we are accessing so much information all the time we can’t possibly interpret, or critically think about, everything. So we might well just accept things that we wouldn’t otherwise. There’s quite a lot of evidence showing that’s especially the case, if that information coincides with your pre-existing beliefs. So for example, if I happen to be a huge fan of Donald Trump, let’s say, and I saw some misinformation around Donald Trump that was positive about him, then I would probably be more likely to believe that than somebody who was not a fan of Donald Trump already, if you see what I mean. So those biases definitely exist. There’s a lot of evidence showing that. And then I think, you know, it kind of comes back as well to — if you want to believe something, you will.

Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, joins Plutopia to discuss his MIT Press book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. The book argues that media overstates Tor’s ties to crime. Originally developed at the U.S. Naval Research Lab as “onion routing,” Tor became practical and popular through the Tor Browser and usability enhancements, while crypto (especially Bitcoin) later enabled illicit markets that grabbed headlines. Ben traces Tor’s unusual early collaboration between military researchers and the cypherpunks. He clarifies that much “dark web” activity is mundane or pro-privacy (e.g., Facebook/BBC onion sites, SecureDrop for journalists), and suggests that most cybercrime now is industrialized “as-a-service” and often sloppy, with law enforcement increasingly operating undercover services and honeypots. He emphasizes Tor’s legitimate uses — censorship circumvention, whistleblowing, secure access to news, and services like Women on Web — and he discusses governance changes at the Tor Project and broader debates over surveillance, encryption, and the trends toward highly centralized platforms and AI. Usability and scale, he argues, are key to real-world privacy; many protections pioneered by Tor and Signal now surface in mainstream tools (e.g., Firefox, WhatsApp). For would-be contributors, he suggests running non-exit relays or funding professional operators, and he closes by stressing that privacy tech can rebalance power by resisting pervasive, automated surveillance. Tor initially wasn’t particularly useful for crime because no one really knew how to use it, it wasn’t very easy to use, it was very slow, and there was no easy way to send money over it. Obviously, when you get the rise of cryptocurrency, particularly initially Bitcoin, suddenly now you can send money anonymously — or, well, you can send money without being censored. And now you can browse anonymously. So this led to crypto markets being created that put these two technologies together. But Tor is not intrinsically a technology for crime. And actually, to be honest, if you want to see crime on the Internet, social media is probably the place to go. Relevant Links The Tor Project Wendy’s review of Dark Wire, by Joseph Cox Cybercrime is (often) boring Foundation for Information Policy Research Your grandmother is smarter than you think

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network Podcast, hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman talk with mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, who holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Cambridge and is known for his engaging talks on how math appears everywhere in life. Wright explains that math is not about numbers or formulas but about patterns, structures, and relationships, and he shares stories from his journey from academic research to applying mathematical thinking in radar systems and engineering. The conversation explores his development of Siteswap notation for describing juggling patterns, the intersection of art and science in juggling and ballroom dance, and his belief in teaching through curiosity and discovery rather than rote memorization. The group also discusses randomness, AI, human tendencies to attribute intelligence to machines, and Wright’s Maths Jam gatherings — global events where people come together to share puzzles, ideas, and enthusiasm for math. Throughout, Wright emphasizes creativity, collaboration, and the joy of seeing patterns in both the physical and abstract worlds. Colin Wright: Math is not about numbers, it’s not about formulas, it’s about patterns and knowing that the that patterns work forever, rather than just being spurious or ephemeral. So it’s being able to abstract from whatever you’re doing, throwing away irrelevant detail and working with the abstract setting. And it’s all about patterns and structures and relationships. And at its heart, that’s what math is really about. And it just turns up absolutely everywhere. I meet a lot of kids who have no apparent predisposition towards mathematics, who then — education is not about filling the bucket, it’s about lighting the fire. You give them something that engages them and gets them starting to think about a thing, and they can come to life and suddenly… they might be slow. They might not have the knowledge that other people have got. They might not have the practice and the practiced skills that some of the others have. But sometimes they just blossom and there’s no apparent reason why they they should have been pre-wired for that and yet they can do it. Links MathsJam Juggling and Maths on the BBC Juggling on Numberphile From Doodling to a Million Dollars The Mutilated Chessboard Circles in triangles

The Plutopia podcast welcomes Sumner Erickson, who discovered the tuba in sixth grade by chance and, at 18, won a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra after studies at the Curtis Institute. He recalls globe-spanning tours (Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil), collaborations under André Previn, and contrasts between orchestral and other touring lives. Erickson’s new book, Actors of Sound, blends musicianship and mindfulness: music as emotion and sound, playing from a flow/“remote control” state, and the principle that music includes technique — not the reverse. He discusses body-use methods (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais), embouchure insights, labrosones, and his patent work leading to a new brass mouthpiece venture, Unified Performance. Now a long-time teacher, he’s writing children’s songs and performing some of his brother Roky Erickson’s material, reflecting on joy, presence, and sustaining a deep, respectful relationship with one’s instrument. Sumner Erickson: I’m there, 18 years old. They had just told the seven people in the finals that they had selected this 18-year-old kid to be the tuba player in the Pittsburgh Symphony. So they pulled me into the office and they offered me a contract. And the manager looks at me, the assistant manager, he goes, you ever been to Europe? I’m like, no. He says, we’re going next spring. And the first stop was Bonn, Germany, and the first stop in Bonn, Germany was Beethoven’s birthplace. I mean, it was just, you know — how amazing to get to have those experiences and repeatedly go back to Europe. And we did seven tours of Japan, we played China, we went to Russia, we went to Poland. We always had to go to big enough places that could bring in a concert — a symphony orchestra, full symphony orchestra. So we didn’t go to little places often. But, you know, been on the beach in Rio, on the wall, in China, in the Kremlin. In Red Square

On this Plutopia episode, Mike Aaron — once a renewable-energy policy aide, now a “digital lifeguard” — explains how fast-evolving tech and social engineering are fueling scams and identity theft, citing FBI Internet Crime Center figures of $6.5B in reported 2024 losses (likely ~10× higher) and ~$160B across all cybercrimes, with average losses especially steep for seniors. He walks through common tactics (bank and FBI impostors, investment cons, romance “pig-butchering,” Coinbase login texts, gift-card shakedowns, AI voice cloning); argues that the crime wave is eroding social trust; and offers practical defenses: secure and monitor the primary email, use password managers and multi-factor auth, adopt passkeys as they mature, set code words/shibboleths, call back through official numbers, add friction for large payments, and lean on education and resources (e.g., AARP) to help individuals, families, and small businesses stay safe. Mike Aaron: In 2024, the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, part of the FBI who track this sort of stuff, reported losses of $6. 5 billion. Go back to the New York Times estimate that only about 10% of this gets reported: we’re talking $65 billion. That’s just investment scams. The actual total was $160 billion for all of the different online crimes — for the ransomware, the botnets, the malware, the extortion, the real estate, the identity theft, the credit card checkfront, all of them. $160 billion. Average loss for people over the age of 60 is $83,000 each.

In this Plutopia News Network episode, political historian Dr. Roy Casagranda joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Casagranda contrasts strong domestic achievements (e.g., LBJ, Eisenhower) with consistently troubling U.S. foreign policy, argues presidential “outsider” politics have degraded executive quality, and calls Trump uniquely brazen in his corruption, yet notably reluctant to launch foreign wars. He critiques tariffs as a regressive tax on Americans, worries about NATO reliability amid Russia’s aggression, and describes a global rightward lurch reminiscent of the 1930s, fueled by polarization, media algorithms, and oligarchic power. From campus protests to Quebec and South Korea, he cites sustained mass action as the realistic check on authoritarian drift. The discussion ranges through climate, tech “bros,” healthcare, and mislabeling of socialism, ending with a sober assessment that most leaders are neither wholly good nor bad—and that citizen pressure will decide the Republic’s trajectory. Roy Casagranda: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, There isn’t that kind of polarizing effect. There’s nothing to sort of latch on to. The world isn’t black and white anymore. And I see people struggling so hard to make it that way. Like Putin’s a good guy. Well, he invaded Ukraine. That’s not good. He was forced to do it. Nobody held a gun to his head and said if you don’t invade Ukraine we’re gonna blow your brains out. You know what I mean? Like there’s this weird thing that we have as a species where we want to have a good guy and we want to have a bad guy. And the reality is, is that most of the world leaders are somewhere in between.

Nate Wilcox joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysfunction to global overreach, from NATO tensions to surveillance and deepfake threats. He is sharply skeptical of AI, seeing persuasion and control, not productivity, as its main value. Touching on topics from super-PAC influence and generational turnover in Congress to conspiracy-laced histories of state violence, Nate paints a picture of systemic rot but leaves open the hope of a “soft landing” and a reimagined international order. Nate Wilcox: The big tech money guys have all clearly gone over to Trump. Some of them, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, are clearly vying to replace the deep state, or it’s like the IT guy pulling a coup in the office because Palantir was created by the CIA. And there’s these internal battles within the deep state happening in the Trump administration. It’s still impossible for me to figure out what went on with Elon Musk, and we’re also in this environment where companies like Tesla, whose financials make no sense, lose massive amounts of money every quarter. They’re losing market share hand over fist. If we weren’t keeping Chinese electric vehicles out of America, Tesla would be dead in the water. And we’re becoming the sort of technological hermit kingdom where Americans don’t even know what’s available in the rest of the world. Where most American citizens — like if you grew up in Joplin, Missouri, and most of those people that live in Joplin, Missouri don’t travel outside Joplin, Missouri very often, much less gallivant off to China and Shanghai and see how the first world lives, have no context for what’s going on on Earth.

On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti-Wired” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstream, celebrate the tactile joy and permanence of a beautifully produced physical magazine, and describe their editorial approach: entertaining, evergreen pieces (from smartphones and surveillance to agile/Scrum and absurd job titles), dense visual jokes, and “inside baseball” references that reward readers who get them. They riff on the HAL-like AI cover and fair-use parody, discuss distribution (online, Europe via MagCulture, U.S. retail coming via Barnes & Noble), and gripe that Google search oddly buries their site. The business model is essentially philanthropic, with mostly fake ads by design; the goal is cultural critique, not clickbait. The conversation widens to iPhone’s societal impact, AI’s authorship and environmental concerns, and why sharp humor — made by people who’ve been inside the industry — is a necessary antidote to today’s hype. Brian Maggi: It’s funny how much more mainstream the term “tech bro” is today. As a joke even. Paulina and I did this piece in the last issue, in the second issue — was it the second or the first, Paulina? Paulina Borsook: Second, and that was “Silicon Valley Alpha Males.” Brian: Yeah. Paulina: Yeah. And, you know, the tech bro one is clearly a descendant of that. And you and I were vastly amused by what we did with the Alpha Males one, but it was very inside Silicon Valley. You know, you can go back and read it, and it’s held up pretty well, but it’s like you have to have been there at the time to understand why it was perfect in its small way. Whereas the tech bro thing has become “so everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them” and yeah. I don’t know what else to say about that. Buy In Formation at https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/. In Europe: https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3

The Plutopia podcast talks with Dr. Jeremy Faludi, a Delft University sustainable design researcher and lead author of Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action, about practical, systems-level strategies for lower-impact products and services. Faludi stresses life-cycle assessment (LCA) to “run the numbers” and focus effort where it matters—durability, repairability, energy efficiency—citing examples like Fairphone and circular-economy models that outdo recycling alone. He contrasts Europe’s stronger policy and recycling performance with U.S. shortcomings and frequent greenwashing, arguing most missteps stem from not quantifying impacts. Current projects include making medical devices and even clinical trials greener (where travel dominates impacts), aviation design that prioritizes weight reduction, and evaluating AI’s heavy training energy footprint. He also describes biomimicry-inspired 3D-printing research using water-based, upcycled materials that slash energy and embodied impacts, though print strength still lags plastics. The conversation returns to tools—systems thinking, LCA, circularity metrics—and Faludi’s workbook-style book, which pairs methods with exercises, business models, and collaboration practices to turn sustainability “vision” into actionable design. Jeremy Faludi: One of the things that I teach people in this book is how to run the numbers on things, how to do a life cycle assessment yourself, or at the very least, how to look up an LCA that other people have done. Or in fact, we include a bunch of Pre-calculated LCAs of different product categories in the book so that you can sit there and say, okay, I’m designing a t-shirt, or I’m designing an office chair, or I’m designing a mobile phone. What are the biggest environmental impacts, probably? Where should I spend my design time and effort?

Hugh Forrest, former President and longtime programming lead for Austin’s famed South by Southwest Festival, joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss shifting from running massive events to consulting on smaller community-focused experiences. Hugh argues that size is the enemy of community — people attend events to form a few meaningful connections — and says organizers should design “experiences,” not just events. These experiences should prioritize community formation, face-to-face interaction, safety, and year-round engagement. Reflecting on lessons learned, he notes how growth fractures communities, how conflicts can be weathered with transparency, and how logistics decisions (like moving hallway chats into rooms) can unintentionally dilute the magic. The conversation widens to the internet’s lost sense of fun, the limits and risks of AI (including energy costs), and the enduring need for professionally curated local journalism and civic forums. Forrest highlights his work with Andus Labs to keep humans central in tech adoption and concludes that fostering smaller, civil, in-person gatherings remains vital to rebuilding trust and connection. Hugh Forrest: Size is very much the enemy of community. This was something we talked about some at South by Southwest, and everybody made the decision, well, no, we shouldn’t restrict size. And part of the decision-making process was because we had so many problems getting any kind of size to the thing. But again, size and scale is the enemy of productive conversations. No one goes to a conference or an event to meet 15,000 other people, 20,000 other people, 30,000 other people. You go there to meet, to make strong connections with, a much smaller portion of people. There are an infinite amount of mulligans I would take advantage of if you could do that in life, but certainly one of the ones would be in rethinking the growth of South by Southwest.

In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Dr. James Wayman, a pioneer in biometrics, shares his career journey. His studies grew from computational acoustics in the 1970s to becoming a leading authority on automated human identification. He explains the challenges of technologies such as fingerprinting, facial recognition, and retinal scans, emphasizing that biometric “accuracy” is complicated by issues like false matches, enrollment failures, and human anomalies. Wayman discusses legal cases, privacy concerns, and misuse of biometric data, noting how law enforcement sometimes over-relies on flawed recognition results. He highlights advances in deep learning for facial recognition, ongoing challenges such as monomodal and multimodal fusion, and the risks of contactless fingerprinting, while also stressing that the bigger privacy threat may lie in ubiquitous cellphone tracking. The conversation ranges from regulatory battles over biometric data, to surprising anecdotes about physiological variations, to unintended consequences of deploying these systems, offering a candid, often humorous look at both the promise and pitfalls of biometric technologies. James L. Wayman: We can’t recognize them from drones. We can’t recognize them at 100 meters. And that’s due to air scintillation more than anything else. We cannot recognize them at a high angle. So — now this is interesting — I love to volunteer my time for criminal cases, and I get a lot of phone calls from public defenders who don’t have any money, and that’s fine. I’m happy to do that. And they say “The police have some images of a bank robber, and they say it’s my client. Can you show that these images from the bank are not my client?” And so she sends me a nice picture of her client, right? Driver’s license or something. And then sends me these pictures from the bank, up the top of a head where the guy’s wearing a hat. No. I cannot testify that that person is not your client, although I will be happy to testify that the prosecution can’t testify that it is the client.

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, the hosts revisit Austin’s formative 1970s music scene through Scoop’s archival 1977 interview with Fletcher Clark and Jack Jacobs, co-founders of the eclectic show band Balcones Fault. The conversation traces their unlikely journey from academia and banking into Austin’s burgeoning countercultural soundscape, where the band became known for wild, genre-blending performances and theatrical full-moon shows at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. Mixing satire, spectacle, and musical virtuosity, Balcones Fault embodied Austin’s spirit of creativity and weirdness, helping lay the foundation for the city’s later reputation as the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Fletcher Clark: Jack was living down in Austin. I was living up in Boston, getting kind of fed up with doing the banking business. And I was coming down to Austin on my way to California, and I stopped in, and Jack had been hyping me about what a nice place it was. You know, come on down, it’s a nice place. And the good music scene happened, and he was hanging out and picking a lot with the Greezy Wheels and some of the local bands that were happening down there. And he jammed a few times with this drummer and bass player and this other guy. And I came down to visit, and it became clear that my plans to go to California ought not to go through, and I just ought to stay there. So we had this jam session in the afternoon. We worked up — it was me and Jack and a bass player and a drummer, and this other fellow who, by the way, now runs Armadillo World Headquarters, Hank Aldrich — sat on the original jam session. We worked up about 20 tunes. Jack Jacobs: Yeah, and thing that really kept him there though was you know those double wide papers? Well, Fletcher came down from Boston where uh I started turning on when I was in college and I always thought that pot was something that was sort of like allspice or paprika that came in a little plastic bag and it was some kind of green powder. And I didn’t really discover that it was an agricultural commodity until I moved much closer to the border.

On this episode of Plutopia, we welcome Michael Marshall — project director at the Good Thinking Society, editor of The Skeptic, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and host of the Be Reasonable podcast — to unpack “compassionate skepticism”: why emotions drive belief, how pseudoscience and conspiracies spread (from flat earth to QAnon to the Rogan pipeline), and practical ways to change minds without shaming. He shares fieldwork — from exposing psychic scams to organizing homeopathy protests — and lessons on building resilient, rational communities in a post-truth world. Michael Marshall: If you want to start to be an effective communicator and you want to start to be effective at helping people check their own biases and beliefs, you come through that because you realize that’s not the best tactic. Telling people they’re an idiot isn’t going to help them, and shouting at them, and acting like you’re smarter than them, is never going to help people out. So, if you really have the right goals in mind of trying to help people, you come through that adolescence into an understanding that, first of all, we need to know what it is these people feel. Because people are led first and foremost by their emotions and not by the facts. That’s true of them, it’s true of us. We train our emotions to be satisfied by good answers, but our our instincts, first and foremost, come from our gut. If I said something to you that sounded false, you’d fact-check it. If I said something to you that sounded true, you’d accept it, because your gut is telling you, yeah, that sounds about right, I won’t question it. So we all make these decisions based on emotion.

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook joins hosts Scoop Sweeney, Wendy Grossman, and Jon Lebkowsky to discuss his deeply personal and provocative new book, The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Drawing from a trove of family documents inherited after his father’s death, Seabrook uncovers the complex, and often dark, legacy of Seabrook Farms — his family’s frozen food empire that once dominated agriculture in southern New Jersey. The conversation explores themes of power, exploitation, family dysfunction, capitalism, and historical memory, as Seabrook reflects on uncovering painful truths, reconciling with his past, and telling the long-silenced stories of exploited workers whose labor built his family’s fortune. John Seabrook: I felt that I was fulfilling some kind of from the grave wish of my father, to achieve, not just revenge, but also justice in some way for what he endured and what he tried to do and and why the company failed. And so that’s kind of what I did. And it motivated me while I was writing to feel like I was doing this for my father. And it also brought me into a better understanding with my father, who was kind of a chilly and remote person. But now I understood why, because he had to survive this sociopath. It was pretty clear that this man who created this company was a sociopath, and that probably helped him in many ways in creating and controlling the company, but it brought the family down.

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, veteran journalist and author Chris Tomlinson joins us to unpack his reporting on the July 4th floods in Central Texas — why they were predictable and preventable — and to warn that American democracy is being endangered by aggressive redistricting and other election-rigging tactics. Now a columnist on money, politics, and life in Texas for the Houston Chronicle and Hearst newspapers, Tomlinson — author of Tomlinson Hill and co-author of Forget the Alamo — also talks about accountability journalism, Texas’s evolving disaster-response model versus FEMA, H-E-B’s disaster brand, the precarious economics of local news, and the threats reporters face in today’s polarized climate. It’s a sobering, timely conversation about policy failures, history Texans still aren’t taught, and what it will take to keep both journalism and democracy alive. Chris Tomlinson: We are in dangerous times. And I feel like I rub my bosses the wrong way when I keep trying to make this point — that we are in far more perilous times than most Americans realize. As soon as I get off with you, I’m going to file my column about redistricting that will be online tomorrow. You know, this is fundamental democracy stuff going on now. And if we keep losing journalism and we keep losing independence and we keep allowing the election elections to be rigged through how we draw the political maps — then we’re in serious trouble. Links: Chris’s page at the Houston Chronicle: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/author/chris-tomlinson/ July 2025 Central Texas floods Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents Wendy’s review: https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2022/04/grounded.html H-E-B Grocery: https://heb.com H-E-B Disaster Relief Why Texans are calling H-E-B the ‘FEMA of Texas’ after devastating floods Mattress Mack Citizen Kane New York Times Pitchbot: @nytpitchbot.bsky.social Texas Constitution

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan joins the hosts to discuss her new novelization of the classic Japanese sci-fi series Ultraseven. Cadigan shares how she came to work on the project, her early exposure to Ultraman, and her appreciation for the show’s themes of teamwork and heroism. The discussion branches into reflections on science fiction’s role in shaping cultural perspectives, changes in media consumption, the challenges of AI and copyright, and the increasing dangers of misinformation and deepfakes. The conversation also reflects on nostalgia, historical awareness, and the enduring value of books and analog media in an increasingly digital world. Pat Cadigan: I was one of the very rare Americans who had seen the original Ultraman, so they asked me if I would be interested in doing the novelizations. And I said, yeah, sure, I’ll try anything. So they they got me the DVDs and uh and they picked out the stories For Ultraman, but when it came to Ultraseven, they told me to pick out the stories to novelize. So I did that on Ultra 7. I think that’s the big strength of both of them – of Ultraman and Ultraseven. It’s not just that he’s such a powerful hero — but he has he’s got people who have his back.

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, philosopher Charles Herrman discusses his lifelong study of honor and dignity as cultural forces, framing them as a dichotomy shaping societies and conflicts worldwide. He explains that honor and dignity function as intertwined yet distinct values—honor is the face of dignity, and dignity has honor’s back—and explores how cultures typically emphasize one over the other. Herrman illustrates how honor-based societies, driven by respect, trust, and earned worth, contrast with dignity-based societies that uphold acceptance, faith, and inherent rights. Applying this lens, he examines political, religious, and international tensions, arguing that deeper understanding and mutual respect between these cultural types could reduce conflict and help preserve democratic values. Honor and dignity are not easy to define, but most people have an idea of what honor and dignity are, and generally speaking, that idea is going to be fairly good. But let me try something on you that is not that well known. In my work, I consider that dignity is the back of honor. And honor is the face of dignity. So if you lose a little bit of honor by doing a faux pas, and people recognize you as having a fair amount of dignity, that dignity will keep you afloat. And if you have honor and you express that honor in doing a good job for the community, then that’s not only honor, but it also heightens your dignity. So honor is a reflection of dignity and dignity has honors’ back. Charles Herrman on Google Scholar

Journalist and author Brendan McNally joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we discuss his latest book, Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage, which tells the story of Martha Dodd, the daughter of an American ambassador in 1930s Berlin who became a Soviet spy. McNally spent years researching declassified CIA files and interviewing people with knowledge of Martha and her amazing story. McNally reveals how Dodd’s promiscuous entanglements with Nazi elites and later a Soviet diplomat drew her into espionage, leading to years of FBI surveillance, a failed spy career, and an absurd exile in Communist Prague. His meticulous research, drawing on declassified CIA, FBI, KGB, and Venona project files, plus interviews with old spies and exiles, paints a darkly comic portrait of espionage driven by flawed, colorful personalities. Brendan McNally: I found what was essentially a hot babes of the Third Reich website where somebody had devoted a whole website to Nazi girlfriends and wives and mistresses, and there she was, Martha Dodd. And as it turned out, she had been lovers with so many different Nazis, it would make your head spin — including the head of the Gestapo. And similar along the line, she fell in love with a Russian diplomat who turned out to be a Soviet spy, and he recruited her for the Soviet intelligence. For a year or two, she was Stalin’s top gal, top spy in Berlin.

On this Plutopia News Network episode, buildings archaeologist Dr. James Wright — founder of Triskele Heritage, author of the “Medieval Myth-Busting” blog, and writer of Historic Building Myth Busting: Uncovering Folklore, History, and Archaeology — joins hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman to unpack 25 years probing cellars, attics, castles, pubs, and church walls. Wright explains how he marries fieldwork, archival sleuthing, and dendrochronology to challenge cherished legends: ship timbers recycled from Spanish-Armada wrecks, mile-long secret tunnels, pubs claiming eleventh-century origins, spiraling castle stairs built to favor right-handed defenders, and the bawdy carvings adorning medieval churches. While his evidence-first approach can anger believers, Wright uses humor and detailed “show-your-work” transparency to bridge emotion and fact—demonstrating that, even in a post-truth age, rigorous archaeology can separate folklore from history without losing the stories that make old buildings matter. James Wright: People don’t like their truths, their entries, their stories being questioned, being queried. But I always try and do this by presenting all the evidence. In this anti-truth environment that we live in at the moment, a post-truth world, that doesn’t always work. Logic and reason and evidence are discounted by people — it’s feelings and emotion for most people at this point — which is why I do try and deliver some of these debunkings in a wry and exasperated and humorous sort of way. I do find that humor can sometimes help it across the line, trying to meet people halfway rather than just standing up and being bullheaded and trying to shout them down. That’s never going win any fans at all. But I always do show my working out. I always do show where the evidence comes from. I do think that the truth is fundamentally important.

In this “Talking Heads” edition of the podcast, Plutopia News Network cohosts Jon, Scoop, and Wendy roam freely across a grab-bag of current issues and curiosities: airport security hassles, billionaire excesses, the politics of air-conditioning, ICE detentions, LA’s media myths, Juneteenth and U.S. travel fears, hometown highways, regime-change misadventures, MAGA culture wars, abortion and right-to-die debates, food safety, cannibalism lore, hot-pepper cuisine, and even Joe Rogan. It’s an unscripted, globe-spanning conversation that blends personal anecdotes, cultural commentary, and wry humor into an hour of eclectic Plutopian chatter.

You might say Professor Chris French is a skeptic’s skeptic. He has published over 150 articles covering the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He emphasizes the importance of understanding why people believe in the paranormal, emphasizing psychological explanations for experiences often attributed to ghosts, aliens, psychic powers, or past lives. Professor French joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we discuss his latest book, The Science of Weird Shit, Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal. Drawing from personal experience and decades of research, he outlines how cognitive biases, memory flaws, sleep paralysis, and suggestibility contribute to paranormal beliefs. Chris shares his transformation from believer to skeptic, discusses the challenges of testing paranormal claims, and critiques popular yet unsubstantiated phenomena like alien abductions and reincarnation. The conversation underscores the importance of critical thinking in an age saturated with misinformation, conspiracy theories, and entertainment masquerading as fact. Chris French: Like a lot of post-graduates, when I was doing my PhD, I used to teach in an adult education college in Leicester. I would give an introductory lecture on psychology and then say, “what topics would you like me to prepare lectures on?” I must have had so much time on my hands. And I’d go away and prepare a lecture just for the following week. I remember doing one on parapsychology that was totally uncritical, and I look back now and think — now they’re probably sitting there thinking, well, he’s doing a PhD, he must know what he’s talking about. I did not know what I was talking about at all. But it was during that period when I was doing my PhD that a friend recommended a particular book, called Parapsychology, Science or Magic. It was by James Alcock, a Canadian psychologist, and it was the first skeptical treatment of all this stuff that I’d ever read. And not only did I really enjoy the book, I also found his arguments very persuasive and that’s what opened my eyes to the wonderful world of skepticism.

Dr. Patrick Ball, a statistician and founder of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss how rigorous data analysis can expose and challenge human rights abuses — even when official data is missing or manipulated. Beginning with his work in El Salvador during its civil war, Ball explains how statistical methods, including multiple systems estimation, have been used to identify patterns of violence, hold perpetrators accountable, and support truth commissions worldwide. He emphasizes that governments committing abuses rarely provide accurate data, so HRDAG has developed tools over decades to uncover the truth, even in the face of lies and obfuscation. While Ball’s own focus is mostly international, HRDAG increasingly works on U.S. issues like police violence, missing data, and systemic racism, using AI to process large volumes of testimony and documents efficiently but with rigorous oversight. Despite rising disinformation and political secrecy, Ball remains committed to defending truth with data, underscoring the moral obligation to witness and document state violence — cheerfully and persistently.  Patrick Ball: Governments that commit human rights violations do not generally provide us with data about it, so our methods have been developed over decades specifically to respond to government obfuscation. People who commit violence and, even more so, those who apologize for people who commit violence, always lie about it — always. My experience is not mostly in the United States. My colleagues at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group mostly work on U.S. issues now. I do not. I wrote that one paper and I don’t really work much on the U.S., I work in a variety of other countries. But our methods, the methods that we use to figure out what’s going on even when there is no official data, and in the face of official lies, are useful in all these contexts. And so if under your hypothesis is that the Trump administration is going to hide data, misrepresent arguments, lie about it, well, our methods will be very useful. Relevant Links Human Rights Data Analysis Group HRDAG’s page on police violence, including a link to “Violence in Blue” Structural Zero New Scientist interview of Patrick Ball by Wendy Grossman Wendy Grossman’s net.wars interview with Patrick Ball regarding correlation and piles of data   

In this wide-ranging Plutopia podcast episode, Dr. Neil Baer — television writer and producer, physician, and public health advocate — discusses The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, a book he edited that explores the ethical, medical, and social implications of gene editing. While CRISPR holds transformative potential to cure diseases like sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia, Baer warns of a slippery slope when it comes to altering human embryos, raising difficult questions about disability, human variation, and who decides what traits are worth preserving. The conversation touches on potential abuses such as eugenics, designer soldiers, bioterrorism, and corporate exploitation, while also examining CRISPR’s impact on biodiversity, animal welfare, and transhumanism. Baer emphasizes the need for public understanding, strong ethical frameworks, and compassionate storytelling in navigating the complex intersection of science, identity, and politics in an era where scientific facts are increasingly challenged. Neal Baer: You know, evolution is so long, and this is what makes me nervous when we start to tinker with evolution as well. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have CRISPR to alleviate suffering. I think we should have CRISPR to alleviate the suffering of sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia or many other genetic diseases. Should we use it to get rid of these these diseases? Well I think there would be no one who would argue that Tay-Sachs is a good thing. But in our book, Ethan Weiss, who’s a cardiologist at UC San Francisco, has a child with albinism. And he says that he and his wife would have probably decided to abort had they known that she was carrying a fetus with albinism. But once their child was born — they can’t imagine life without her. So should we get rid of albinism? Should we get rid of Down Syndrome? This is the slippery slope of CRISPR. Relevant Links CRISPR Genetically modified organism Genus Genetically Modifying Livestock for Improved Welfare: A Path Forward Eugenics New Yorker article on people who feel no pain Michael Sandel, The Atlantic, “The Case Against Perfection” Hollywood, Health, and Society ER ER: Blizzard ER: Hell and High Water The Pitt St. Elsewhere Dr. Kildare The Boys From Brazil Gattaca Law and Order SVU: Selfish Law and Order SVU: Transitions JK Rowling’s essay explaining her views on trans issues Background image by Elena I Leonova, license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International