Plutopia News Network

This time on the Plutopia Podcast, we feature a presentation about the OAUTH protocol, delivered at the May meeting of EFF-Austin. Due to the visual nature of the demo portion of the session, we have posted the entire video of the OAUTH presentation on our YouTube channel. For the audio podcast, we present an edited version. Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky introduced the session. If you wish to view the entire OAUTH presentation on the Plutopia News Network YouTube channel, go to https://www.youtube.com/@PlutopiaNewsNetwork

Ethan Smith has been an advocate for affordable student housing, particularly as it applies to UT-Austin’s student population. His 2021 thesis proposed a housing and equity strategy for UT. In this episode of the Plutopia Podcast, Ethan, Jon and Scoop explore the affordable housing crisis in Austin and it’s impact on students, musicians, and workers. Ethan Smith: “Median-income tied definitions of affordable housing are problematic for student housing because it doesn’t imply it really is a legal framework that is not made for students because it’s based off HUD and a lot of things that you know the federal housing way you can get money. It specifically does not include student housing. Likewise at U.T. the PUF money, which is the permanent fund specifically is carved out that you can’t do student housing. So we don’t really have an existing legal framework for student housing. And that’s something that the city council could do but I just wonder if anybody will go to bat for it.” You can find Ethan’s thesis at: http://forwardthesis.com/forward.pdf

Michael Webb joins Plutopians to discuss meditative inquiry, meditation practices and intelligence, experts, and much more. Michael Webb: It almost seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? To speak of thinking non-verbally. What the heck does that mean? And I would hasten to say, too, not only thinking non-verbally, but thinking without using mental images. That’s perhaps even more shocking, because some people can maybe learn to not cogitate. Maybe that inner voice quietens a bit? But they still might be thinking in terms of visuals – metaphors that they see. Even if they’re very subtle ones. But in this form of inquiry, even the mental images drop off. So it’s coming from a place of real silence, I guess you could say – silence and emptiness.

With climate scientist Michael Tobis, Plutopians discuss the current state of climate change. We look at the good, the bad, the ugly, and the terrifying aspects of our climate dilemma. Michael Tobis: You’re just starting to get to the point where people are noticing, it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get more and more obvious. It’s going to get more and more difficult. And I would say, like, the dust storm in Springfield is not something I look out for. But droughts and – one year drought and one year flood, five years of drought and five years of flood, that’s going to be more common. And that’s what really bites, that’s what really causes a lot of disruption. So, yeah, I’m not an optimist about either side of this picture. I think it’s going to get worse, and I wish we could figure out some way to decide that we’re going to stop.

Former Austin City Council member and environmental activist Max Nofziger joins the Plutopia podcast. Max explains the evolution of Austin’s motto, “the Live Music Capital of the World,” and the affordability challenges facing Austin. Max has plenty of stories about Austin politics and politicians, and the area’s environmental struggles. Max Nofziger: Nancy Coplin, who was the chairwoman of the [Austin] Music Commission at the time, came to my office with the suggestion we name Austin the Live Music Capital of America. And I said, well, this is no time to be shy or modest. You know, we’re Texans, let’s beat our chest a little bit and be outrageous, and say we’re the Live Music Capital of the Universe. And to hell with the Martians, they can invade us, vaporize us, whatever they’re gonna do, if they want to fight it. Yeah! But she said “I like that idea, but you’ll never get it passed by your colleagues [on the City Council]. And I knew she was right. So that was the compromise. From America, the Universe, to the World. I feel like that slogan worked out really well, but I think the city has not done a good job of living up to that. I think a lot of policies City Councils have enacted since then have really gone against that, and I mean obviously made the city a very expensive place to live, which puts a squeeze on all the musicians and artists, so I don’t think that … I think other considerations came to the fore with other mayors and other council members.

With online host, interaction designer and facilitator Nancy White, Plutopians Scoop and Jon explore online community, social media, macro- vs micro-connections, and much more. Nancy’s done international work supporting and practicing online and face to face group facilitation. She’s focused on distributed work, strategic planning, social learning, communities and networks. She knows a LOT about online community development and management. And a lot about social media stuff, as well. Nancy White: We’re de-civilizing. We’re un-developing. And that, as a society, we’ve become far more individualistic, and our sense of community – which brings along with it a certain level of baseline trust, right? – has fractured in so many places. And I think – if you think about this kind of parallel track of what social media encourages, which is content, liking, numbers, scanning across this kind of – like, seeing a bunch of things, and maybe noticing patterns – it doesn’t really say “Let’s go deeper.” It doesn’t really say “Let’s get to know each other.” The content is driving it, not the relationship. Relationship certainly can emerge, but you’ve got a software that really doesn’t make it super easy, and you have lifestyles that almost resist it.

With writer, blogger, and author Wendy Grossman, Jon and Scoop discuss the differences between early Internet culture and the current state of the Internet and social media. Wendy focuses in her work on the Internet, computers, freedom, and privacy. She’s been writing about “net.wars” since the early 1990s, and her book by that name was published in 1997. Wendy Grossman: The place where I think we really started to diverge from the old Internet was right around 2006 to 2010. 2006 is when the iPhone came out, and 2010 is when the iPhone plus social media exploded. And so in that period – Facebook was founded in 2004, I think, and Google went public in 2004. You had a whole bunch of different social media sites vying to be what Facebook became, and Facebook was the winner. And that whole push toward centralization where you want to be where your friends are, and if your friends are on Facebook, then you’re on Facebook – that all happened in that 2006-2010 period. Photo by Paul Jenkins (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Find Wendy on Twitter and Mastodon

Broadcaster, DJ, and audio engineer Tracey Schulz reports on the just concluded SXSW Film and TV Festival. We discuss new films that premiered at SXSW, and the stars who attended. Tracey Schulz: We’re coming off of “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” and the things that stood out for me this year for Southby [the SXSW Festival], especially in film and TV, had Asian cast and female leads. There’s “Beef,” a show that’s about to drop very very soon that was also there at Southby, “Joyride,” and “American Born Chinese” is another production that’s about to be released as well. And that’s just a couple of ’em. So I think you’re going to see this nice little gentle wave, I think there’s going to be something there to be said. Tracey Schulz’ prior conversation with Plutopia

Activist and political consultant Jaquita Wilson in a rebroadcast of our March 30th live show. We discuss the indictment of Donald Trump, announced only hours earlier. We also explore the job requirements for a Republican politician. Jaquita Wilson: See, this is the thing I was trying to talk about the other day around local politics, right. We’re discussing somebody that’s of Trump’s stature. Understand there are a lot of big players who are invested in his behavior and his run. That’s why he can say and do the things he can say and do. That’s why he’s going to always keep lawyers, that’s why there are going to be millions of dollars raised for him. It’s all going to happen for him because him, doing what he’s doing, is helping China, is helping Russia, is helping a lot of these oligarchs. So they’re going to have a little money… “I might not be able to give you money for your campaign, legally, any more, kinda, but can I give money for your defense? Absolutely.”

Linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas Robert Wall joins Plutopians as we examine his long career and contributions to the study of language, mathematics, and computer science. Robert Wall: Language is deeply psychological. It goes on in people’s brains by processes that are somewhat mysterious. We don’t know how people acquire language so rapidly as children from just mere exposure to it. We don’t know how people use and understand language, we don’t know what goes on in their brains when sentences come in, and there is reasoning or whatever going on, and then sentences come out. We have only a dim idea about what that’s all about. But anyway, language, grammars, including semantics, are all psychological entities.

In this episode of Plutopia News Network, we include a recording of a 1977 press conference held by Dr. Timothy Leary, and Scoop’s 1975 interview with forensic psychologist Dr. Stephen Pittel. In 1977, Dr. Leary was the keynote speaker at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in San Francisco. In a press conference prior to his speech, he addressed some of his causes, including space migration and an apparent disdain for ecological activism. Image: By Eddie Codel on Flickr

This time on the Plutopia podcast, our friend Screamish Joy joins Jon and Scoop, as we discuss all things Texan. In this rebroadcast of our March Second live show, the Plutopians reveal everything you didn’t know about Texas….but didn’t care enough to ask! Screamish Joy: “I remember going places and people being like…because we were raised this way is like do you know your state song or do you know your state bird or do you know your state this or that. It’s like people just stare at me like I’m crazy you know like no, why would we know all those things? It’s like well because you know it’s ingrained in you and I think that’s an aspect of our culture that at one time felt very connected now we feel very just disparate you know. I do have like some bond you know like memories of being a Texan. I don’t just have like full-blown Texas shame.”

Computer engineer and AI expert David Demaris joins Jon, Suzy and Scoop on this episode of the Plutopia podcast. We discuss ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, deep fakes, dangerous technologies, bad actors, and much more. Will ChatGPT take over the world? What is artificial intelligence, and how does it differ from human intelligence? How can we ensure that artificial intelligence is used to promote human well-being? I feel like we have several technologies that have suddenly landed here, including this kind of AI that sort of really works and isn’t a joke, and thinks like CRISPR, that let an individual or small group kind of get in and start doing some serious DNA hacking, and suddenly we have this situation where an individual has a lot of power to cause mayhem. That can happen, and a lot of people that have that same technology but don’t cause mayhem, a lot of people who can do good with those technologies, but just the mayhem factor is pretty new, and I think in society the closest thing is whenever we had the second amendment or something, and somebody said, “Yeah, everybody ought to be able to have a gun to protect themselves against bears, or indigenous who don’t like us. The mayhem that you could create with one of those blunderbusses was pretty small scale, unless you could get everybody else to go along with your mayhem plan. But that is not quite the case with these technologies.”

Judi Clark is an Analyst and an Emergency Preparedness Coordinator. She joins Plutopians as we do a deep dive into emergency response, and ways we can be better prepared. Judi Clark: If there are people who don’t want to really coordinate with this system, they’re not going to be very effective. They’re just going to be out doing stuff, and that’s going to be complicating everything that’s going on. Complicating any response effort. The other thing is in a fire, or in a situation where there’s an evacuation that’s necessary, there will often be people who – there’s people who are not ready for an evacuation, and the first thing they’ll do is walk around the house in circles, and say “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And then they’ll start calling their neighbors, saying “What do I do? What do I do?” And then they’ll start calling the the neighbors – ” What do I do? What do I do?” And it goes on from there. They may or may not evacuate themselves very well. But there almost always will be people who say “No, I’m not evacuating, I’m going to stay and I’m going to fight for my house,” or whatever. And I don’t know if there’s a Venn diagram where there’s overlap of the people who just resist authority generally, and people who want to stay home and not evacuate, to save their house from whatever comes. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Blogger and podcaster Nathan Wilcox returns to the Plutopia podcast. We explore the emergence of ChatGPT, music and art created with artificial intelligence, the evolution of dance music, changes in the Austin music scene, streaming music, and of course, politics! “Nathan Wilcox: I’m very excited about the potential for AI in music-making. I guarantee you that’s where the next big wave of musical innovation is going to come out of. It’s going to come from kids getting their hands on this cheap AI technology, feeding songs the like, songs they don’t like, into it, to see what weird shit pops out of it, and then editing that to make something out of it. If you just take raw AI-generated music, it’s generally not that listenable, but if you get a musician working on it, and they can find those things – you know, the way AI art will have too many fingers on your hands, or whatever, too many eyes on your face – they’ll get those valley of the uncanny weirdness, and then be able to put it into a structure that works like a song.” Nate Wilcox on Twitter. Let It Roll Podcast Donate to keep Let It Roll podcast alive!

Plutopia News Network invited Carl Stone and Eric Theise for a conversation mainly focusing on Carl’s work/play as an electronic composer. Carl and Eric recently performed sold-out shows together in Northern California, with Carl playing electronic compositions via laptop, and Eric creating visuals. Carl Stone is a pioneer of live computer music, hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan. Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker, photographer and vocalizer. He’s also a full stack developer focusing on maps and other visualization, and an operations researcher. Performance Videos: https://vimeo.com/753131639 https://vimeo.com/753140991 https://vimeo.com/757818407 Listen to Carl’s latest album, “Wat Dong Moon Lek” Bandcamp Apple Music Spotify Amazon Photo: Akira Saito

Broadcaster, DJ and Audio Engineer Tracey Schulz joins the Plutopia Podcast this time. Tracey is a regular voice on K.U.T. FM and K.O.O.P. Radio. He joins Scoop and Suzy in a wide-ranging discussion about radio, making media and much more.

Once upon a time..people of a certain age witnessed a historic change in the way humans destroy each other in a war. In 1945, the United States ended World War Two by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. The end of the war ushered in a new form of conflict…the Cold War. This time on the Plutopia Podcast, Jon and Scoop share memories of growing up in the shadow of the bomb. Jon: “The bomb was never used again partly because everybody sort of realizes is that, especially now that various countries all have nuclear weapons. What do they call it…there is this chance of mutually assured destruction if a couple of countries start throwing bombs at each other.” Scoop:”Yeah it’s basically the last few minutes of the movie war games where they proved on the screen that the only winning approach to wargames is don’t play because we need to get it to that level of warfare there are no winners, because immediately yeah we shoot a bomb at them…they shoot back at us…we go back and forth until there’s nothing left but a scarred little lifeless planet.”

Jon and Scoop conclude their postmortem for the year 2022. We look at the drama within the Republican party that managed to last into 2023. We also examine the GOP’s extremist desire to tear down the government and replace it with something straight out of dystopian sci-fi. We also look at pathological liars, Georg Santos, whatever happened to the old, no-crazy Republicans, how the old Southern Democrats became Southern Republicans, and much more! Jon: There’s a handful of Republicans that are far-right MAGA tea party whatever you want to call it folks, who are opposed to the idea of government – not just opposed to a different party, but opposed to government itself. And they are also not very experienced, most of them, in politics. Scoop: You’re being kind. Well, it seems to me these guys have watched too many Kung Fu movies, and they think they’re going to be like the Five Fingers of Death. The Five Thumbs, maybe – they’re all trying to write themselves in as characters in the Matrix, going against the evil programs from the Biden Administration… Also note: Jon is cofounder and cohost, with Bruce Sterling, of the annual State of the World conversation. You can find it via https://tinyurl.com/state-world-2023.

In this, the first Plutopia podcast of 2023, the Plutopian brain trust offers you their postmortem report on the late, and not quite lamented year, 2022. Jon: So the point, I guess, is that we would have to – and that we should – be finding a way to live that doesn’t depend on extracting resources to the extent that we do now, and it’s possible to do that. But it’s a big re-education, and really, it contradicts the basic tenets of capitalism. Because capitalism is based on exploiting resources. Scoop: Well, I’ve heard conservative folks say that it’s our fault, for helping out all those other countries that were doing so poorly compared to us, supposedly. That we shouldn’t have helped them out, because their getting better just contributed to the changes in the climate, and pollution… Suzy: And I think that’s one of the things I have such a hard time with, explaining to certain Republicans that the people you’ve elected don’t represent you anymore, you know, and I heard one older woman say the other day, just flat out, that she doesn’t believe in CLIMATE. Jon L.’s review of 2022: January: War in Ukraine persisted throughout the year. Russia demanded that NATO agree never to admit Ukraine and accused Washington of installing Nazis to lead Ukraine (Zelenskyy is Jewish.) Omicron surged worldwide early in the year. February: Winter Olympics in February – limited attendance mainly because of China’s “zero Covid” policy. Government officials from UK and USA among others boycott because of China’s human rights abuses. Putin says the Ukraine was created by Russia but has become a colony of the West. His invasion of the Ukraine is therefore retaliatory. March: Ron DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill for Florida in March. Much yammering about “wokeness.” The bill restricts what elementary schools can teach about sexual orientation and gender identity. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Comic relief? April: In April Macron won a second term in France, defeating far right Marine Le Pen. Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the Supreme Court’s first black woman justice. A Trump judge invalidated mask mandate for mass transit, ruling that blocking transmission of the virus is not “sanitation” under the law. May: In May the draft majority opinion overruling Roe v Wade leaked, pissing John roberts off. It later appears that Alito leaked his opinion, apparently this is something he does. The house approved an aid package for Ukraine – ongoing support for Ukraine vs Russia. A new Omicron subvariant resulted in a surge if Covid cases. 19 students and 2 teachers were slaughtered in Uvalde while police stood around for an hour or more. Why they didn’t act more quickly is puzzling and controversial. June: A baby formula shortage, gasoline over $5 per gallon. First major federal gun reform in 3 decades passed, expanding background checks for for gun buyers under 21, incentivizing states’ red flag laws, and allocating 1.3 billion for mental health and security initiatives at schools. The January 6 public hearings detailed Donald Trump’s efforts to stoke insurrection. 26 states moved to ban or restrict terminating pregnancy. July: Historic heat in Europe, another effect of climate change. Brutal drought in China. Rivers dried up worldwide. A long hot summer with Biblical rainstorms in St. Louis, Illinois, and eastern Kentucky. More gun violence: a rooftop sniper killed 7, injures 40 at a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. Manchin screwed Biden’s domestic agenda by blocking the two trillion dollar “Build Back Better” bill. Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister after various scandals and resignations. A 10 year old Ohio girl impregnated by a rapist was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion. August: Kansas voters in a referendum opted by 59 to 41 to maintain a right to abortion. Manchin agreed to support a pared down spending bill tht lowers health care costs and includes largest ever funds for climate initiatives. Biden signed a student loan forgiveness bill which was later challenged in court and may never be implemented. Texas governor Abbott started busing thousands of immigrants to DC and NYC, supposedly to call attention to the increasing number of border crossings. The FBI raided Mar Al Lago and found over 13,000 government documents, including some that are highly classified. Was Donald Trump using them for toilet paper? China was pissed because Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. September: The Ukraine kept fighting, taking back 3000 square miles of territory. Putin said attacks on Russian soil would cause Moscow to deploy “all means at our disposal,” hinting at a nuclear option. Queen Elizabeth II died. Everybody stopped for a minute to say goodbye. Fascists won a majority i

Science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast. We discuss his latest book, Chokepoint Capitalism, and his definition of a chokepoint. We also explore the impact of mergers and consolidation on American society, the need for increasing enforcement by the FTC and SEC, antitrust law, and much more. Cory Doctorow: It’s a chokepoint, that’s the kinds of structures that Rebecca and I identify in this book. That ou have these structural problems where two firms control all the mobile, and those firms have convergent policies that act to the detriment of both audiences and – importantly here – creative workers. And takes money out of their pockets, changes the distributional outcome. Even if you can claim, “Oh, look at how big the app marketplace is, look how many billions of dollars apps are generating,” unless you also look at where those billions of dollars go, you don’t know anything important about how it’s affecting the material conditions of creative workers. So what we didn’t want to do with this book is write one of those chapter 11 books, where there’s ten chapters about how screwed up things are, and then in the eleventh chapter we say, “Hey, everybody, go vote harder, we’ll get this!” Instead, we take the position that anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop, and that when it stops there will be a crisis. We’ve had lots of crises in arts policy and in copyright policy over the last couple of decades. There are far more to come. And that when those crises arrive, as my arch-enemy Milton Friedman used to say, “Ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center very quickly.” Cory’s previous Plutopian encounters: Cory Doctorow: Covid-19, Dystopia, and Adversarial Interoperatibility Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface Cory on Mastodon Photo by Joi Ito. Licensed CC-BY

Author and activist Casey Walker talks about her early life in Nevada City, California, where she created and published the literary and environmental journal “Wild Duck Review.” We also discuss biotechnology, media content vs. money, moving from anti-tech to useful tech, intellectual evolution, confronting the bullies, and changing the news. She produced 20 book-length issues of the Review, and grew circulation to 48 US states and 13 countries. In 2000, Sierra Club Books published Issue 19 of “Wild Duck Review” as Made Not Born: The Troubling World of Biotechnology. Unexpectedly, “Wild Duck Review” was perhaps one of the last, homemade print journals to go viral before the world migrated to online search/social. Was a hinge moment between those with natural tendencies toward being community-centered, back-to-landers, tech-suspicious, nature-lovers, independent bookstore lovers, social justice activists, etc., versus those who became idealistic about what worldwide internet connection could yield for humanity. Casey gave interviews on national media, participated in conferences, and began speaking out on what she saw as a crisis in public news and discourse. In 2004, she founded the Institute for Inquiry to pursue high-stakes, bio-cultural issues, beginning with “A Wireless Age?”. By 2009, Walker began a pursuit of a firm intuition: that the accepted idea of public news and discourse is itself paradigmatically “off.” She spent the next decade working out new theory (and architectural principles for online inquiry) via close observation, deep retreat, and writing. Presentations of that work will soon go public. Casey Walker: I mean, a lot of my thinking is really at core the question that an editor would ask, which is “what’s the most important thing that I can print, and put out into the world?” And once you take that question seriously, it takes you on a path that is truly independent of what we have today, which is this negotiation between advertisers and markets. Demographics. And the polling and matching that goes between those two completely eclipses the question of “what do we need to be thinking about?”

Author, scholar, and translator Pablo Vazquez is our guest this time on the Plutopia podcast. We discuss their conversion from Catholicism to Zoroastrianism, and its influence on other religions. Pablo explains Zoroastrian beliefs, and Zoroastrianism in North America. We also explore Q-Anon as a possible religion. Born in Panama and now living in Texas, Pablo is also a game writer, lecturer, consultant, and essayist. His has just published his translation of The Sacred Gathas of Zarathushtra & the Old Avestan Canon. Currently working on their second graduate degree, Pablo’s first degree was a MA in Religions of Asia and Africa from SOAS University of London. While there, they were affiliated with the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies where they learned Zoroastrian history, theology, and the Avestan language. Pablo is also unique as an officially accepted convert to Zoroastrianism while also personally embracing a multireligious approach. Pablo Vazquez: When interviewed, most Americans actually share religious beliefs with one another on a frequent level. Of an interesting scale, a lot of Christians in the United States do not believe in hell, actually. If they do believe in any sort of divine punishment, they believe in immediate punishment. And that’s sort of different from what’s being told to us by the media, as to what the Christian landscape looks like. In the same way, the Zoroastrian landscape is kind of difficult to pinpoint down, because the main emphasis of Zoroastrianism is free will. So each individual – I joke that, if you get a roomful of Zoroastrians together, ten of them, you’ll get twelve different opinions as to what Zoroastrianism is.

Author, media theorist, and fellow podcaster Douglas Rushkoff joins the Plutopia podcast as we discuss his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. We also explore technoutopians, capitalism, billionaire tech bros, psychedelic tech bros, The Mindset, going beta, the blockchain and crypto, Q Anon, and much more! Douglas Rushkoff: But there’s almost darker forms now, whether it’s the Effective Altruism, which a lot of people are talking about now since the crash of FTX, which was a crypto exchange started by one of the main funders of the Effective Altruism movement, which is the idea that you don’t do as much good doing good as you do by making money, and then donating some of it to do good. So stop worrying about treating people nicely, stop worrying about whether your business is destroying the planet or hurting other people. As long as you make a ton of money, you’re going to more efficiently by some utilitarian algorithm that we’ve developed, we can justify – you take 5% of your income, and give it to charity, you’re doing more good long-term than you are by actually being (laughter) a good person. “Most simply stated, our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with the other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system. Our physical and mental health is contingent on nurturing those connections. Leaving others behind is futile and stupid. It’s as if we’ve come full circle—and sensibilities that the Western world with its empirical science and individual progress were meant to transcend are back in full force.” The Mindset: a belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods and transcend the calamities that befall everyone else. It’s a way of applying the “exit strategy” of a Silicon Valley startup to civilization itself. “The Mindset is rooted in empirical science: the reduction of nature and complexity, the domination of others, and the extraction of substance and energy from the real world and its conversion into symbol systems, like money. Digital technologies catalyzed and amplified The Mindset, yielding tech billionaires who believe that they can lord over us and then leave us behind as they migrate to humanity’s next phase of existence.” From Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” ~ William Gibson, in The Economist, 12/4/2003 “This isn’t the dystopia that I wrote about!” ~ Bruce Sterling Artist, writer, and curator Patrick Lichty returns to the Plutopia podcast as we explore the future. We do a deep dive into Web3, crypto, bad actors on the Internet, Meta and the Metaverse, Second Life, science fiction and life on Mars. Patrick Lichty: “It’s kind of funny… I wound up doing a lot of study on the whole Martian thing, because a friend of mine over in the UAE and I, we were actually proposing a VR habitat for people in Mars colonies. Because you’re going to wind up in these relatively cramped quarters, or you’re going to be on a ship for two years, and that sort of thing, and you need a way to feel like you’re not in a can. So this is one really good psychological use for VR.” Patrick also manages Plutopia News Network’s “Reality Augmented” Twitter account. Patrick Lichty on Twitter Patrick Lichty on Wikipedia Patrick Lichty on Instagram Techspressionism

The mid-term election is over, ballots are still being counted, and the dreaded red wave turned out to be a red ripple. Our friend Roy Casagranda joins Plutopians as we dissect election 2022. Roy Casagranda: If you look at the 2018 election, 95% of blacks voted Democrat, which is, like, unbelievable. 67% of Hispanics voted Democrat, and 75% of Asians voted Democrat. In 2020, the black number didn’t really move much, maybe a little bit. The Hispanic number went from 67% to 60%, and then the Asian number went from 75% to 70%. So there was a little bit of loss of reliability in the 2020 election. But the voter turnout was so massive it didn’t really matter, because the big problem that Democrats have is not the unreliability of people of color, it’s that 60% of white people are voting Republican. That’s the real problem. And then the other part that have that’s a problem is that Democrats are really awful at showing up and voting.

Plutopians enjoy a free-form fiesta of facts and fictions! Jon, Suzy and Scoop discuss voting, Austin politics, Twitter, politics on Tik Tok, cannabis politics, Trump in 2024, and other nightmares. Suzy: I’m off Twitter. I’ll never Twit again. Jon: Oh, really? Suzy: No, I’m done. Did you see what happened, the spike in the use of racial slurs, most particularly the “n” word? 500% up. Jon: After that, he [Elon] said that, “Well, we’re not really going to change moderation policies right now….” I don’t know whether they kicked any of those people off or what they did about it. He’s in a bit of a quandary, because he made all of this noise about how he was going to have this great free speech thing going, but he’s going to lose all of his advertisers. Scoop: Yeah, that’s who’s being lobbied to get out of Elon’s business, because they are going to look bad if they stick around, and it becomes the hellscape that people are thinking it’s going to be. From Jon L.: Almost down to the wire with 2022 midterms, we decided a discussion of voting was in order. However Elon Musk was shitting on all the news cycles, so we had to go there, too. Our stream of consciousness flowed pretty well on this show, considering that apocalyptic nature of the subjects we were discussing. Help us row the boat, navigate the stream!

Daniel Hope is a Spiritual Director and Enneagram Coach who runs spirituality programming in the healthcare industry. In this Plutopia podcast, Daniel and Jon discuss spirituality, meditation, spiritual direction, artificial intelligence vs. humanity, finding common ground, and much more. Daniel Hope: Darwin was – I don’t think he was the first to propose this, but he put forward that collaboration outperforms competition at the group level. Sometimes at the individual level, individuals can be more competitive, and they may outperform the other individuals. And so it may give them some short-term gain, it may give them some benefit. But if that is brought up to the group level, the collaborative groups are always going to win. Look at the Wall Street data, the analysis of companies with women in leadership. They outperform all the others hands down in every area. On Medium On Twitter “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin “We are not the victims, we are the collaborators and, if we accept this role, we can be the co-creators of something transformative.” – Daniel Hope

In our latest Plutopia News Network podcast, with guest Robert Freeman Wexler, we discuss his early career, his work in book design and his new novel, The Silverberg Business. Robert Freeman Wexler is an author of surreal fantasy. His latest book is novel, The Silverberg Business, from Small Beer Press. Previous books include short story collection Undiscovered Territories, the novel The Painting And The City, and Circus of the Grand Design. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with the writer Rebecca Kuder. RFW (re. The Siverberg Business/): I intended it, or had visualized it, as a novella, because I was working on another novel. Then I had this idea – I thought I can write it pretty quickly, I’ll write this novella. And then I wrote the novella, and gave it to some people to read. One person thought that it was maybe only halfway finished, and I didn’t like that answer. But it turned out to be true. So I wrote the rest of it. So in that case, I had more of a sense of that first part, and then I knew what was going to happen next, once I got back to the writing. And then after that, it kind of fell into place. Review of The Silverberg Business in Locus. R.F. Wexler on Twitter R.F. Wexler on Instagram R.F. Wexler on Facebook

Midterms are coming, and already-hot political discussions and divisions are getting even HOTTER. The Plutopian (Groucho) Marxists are on it! This podcast is a recording of our Plutopia Livestream from 10/13/2022. Plutopia’s Not Ready for Cable News players return for another free-form fiesta of political foolishness. Jon, Suzy and Scoop dissect a wide range of political potholes, including the January 6th hearings, Alex Jones, Beto and Abbott, the Great Replacement Nonsense, taxes, Jewish space lasers, and… beer enemas? Jon: So you have all of these “Grand Old Party” people who don’t consider themselves to be public servants, they’re just basically lunging for power. And part of what they’re doing in order to take power is that they’re playing culture games. Fighting culture wars. Suzy: That’s all it is. They want laws because what’re they gonna do with those of us that they disagree with, or don’t like. They’ve gotta get us for the small amounts of marijuana, and throw us in jail, right? Is it willful ignorance, or is it just rabid xenophobia that we’re dealing with on the right? Scoop: There’s a lot of those people out there that – they’ve always voted Republican, and they’ve been basically bullied into holding their noses and voting one more time for another guy that they don’t like. They’ve been doing that for the last 20 years. Hold your nose, and vote for this guy, even though he’s an idiot and will probably embarrass the whole party.

Wikimedia LLC President Lane Becker joins the Plutopia Podcast. We discuss Lane’s early career, and his involvement in UT’s ACTLab; his work in product design, AI, VR and AR; the Institute for the Future; and all things Wiki. Lane Becker: I discovered that I wasn’t really a designer. I learned that in the best possible way, which was that I was working with some of what were, at the time, some of the world’s best designers. And I was able to sort of stand back and look at them and go, “Oh, that’s what it’s like if you’re really good at this. That’s not me. I guess I should figure out what I’m really good at.” And it turned out what I really enjoyed was actually just running the business, like running the business was the most interesting part of it, to me. Thinking strategically about what is this business, how do we grow it, how do we make it more successful, how do we understand what it actually is. You know, maybe this is also the ACTLab’s fault. I always start off by thinking I’m interested in the thing itself, and then it turns out that I’m much more interested in like – I dunno, the backstage shenanigans that go on to make the thing possible? Links: Lane on Twitter Lane on Linkedin Get Lucky, a book that Lane co-authored.

Should we be obsessed with politics? Is political obsession really about our lives, or is it cultivated by skillful marketing of grievance, to raise more and more money? Are we using our cognitive surplus and our energies to fight abstractions, when we should be dealing with real problems, e.g. climate change? Do minorities care about ideology? Do they care about culture wars? What do people want? People want safety, a degree of comfort, a sense of stability. Do they get either from the far left or far right? Is the real war between those who espouse cultural socialism vs those who espouse cultural liberalism? Cultural liberalism is the belief that individuals and groups should have the freedom to express themselves, should not be compelled to endorse beliefs that they oppose, and should be treated equally by social norms and the law. Cultural socialism is the idea that public policy should be used to redistribute wealth, power, and self-esteem from the privileged groups in society to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities, and women. This justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups. “For some Democratic voters, a commitment to cultural socialism overrides their historical defense of free speech. Most Republicans disagree with that position. They also oppose what they perceive to be the denigration of white Americans and the nation’s past, which underlie their support for a new politics of civil rights in schools and workplaces.” ~ Eric Kaufmann, “The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America”

Plutopians welcome Johannes Grenzfurthner for a second discussion about his life and work, focusing especially on his new film “Razzennest,” which just premiered at Fantastic Fest. Johannes is an artist, film director, performer, and founder of the Austrian art collective Monochrom. With Johannes, we explore social media and mass media in the US and Europe. We also compare US and European politics. And Johannes explains cocktail robots, horror films, and his latest feature film, “Razzenest.” Johannes: I made this almost like “Sesame Street,” 98 minute documentary where I try to explain certain concepts, why I think some of them are still important and some of were probably lost. But that was two films before that, and now I made two horror films in a row, which is strange… but, I mean I have to say I like horror films, because, if you look back in the history of filmmaking, horror films were always very early in adopting interesting aesthetic techniques. Horror films were always very creative, or did things that then became aesthetic tropes or things in other formats, but horror films did it first. Trailer for “Razzennest.”

Plutopians discuss current events, including Steve Bannon’s arrest and his plan for a wall made of weed, Trump’s document stash, borders, psychedelics, techsplaining, critical thinking, and much more! This is a recording of the Plutopia News Network’s livestream webcast on 9/8/2022. Jon: We were talking about borders – open borders vs controlled borders, and so forth – earlier, and Patrick Lichty, who’s been hanging out in the chat room said that he thinks there ought to be a fungal dem-militarized zone at the border, just laced with shrooms. Suzy: I like that! I do, I like that. Jon: There’d be a lot more border crossings in that case, I suppose. Scoop: My friend, Paul Mavrides, a fine comic artist in San Francisco, advised me that the City of San Francisco has decriminalized mushrooms and other psychedelic substances. Suzy: Oh, I love that. Scoop: It was a unanymous vote of the board of supervisors, so… Suzy: It’s a felony, right? Federally? Scoop: Yeah. It kinda depends on where you’re busted, too.

Kevin Welch and Chris Boyd of EFF-Austin join Jon and Scoop for a lively discussion of technology past, present, and future. We begin with Jon’s history of EFF-Austin, followed by computer and Internet nostalgia, phone phreaking, encryption, open source software, license plate readers, and location data brokers. Kevin: One thing we did for the last couple of years was survive Covid, same as everybody else, basically. I think we actually did a lot more than a lot of people because we’re tech savvy and we all live on the Internet. Jon: Yeah, Zoom meetings. Kevin: But, yeah, basically we pivoted to doing Zoom virtual meetings for about two years there, keeping our normal monthly meetups going. They’ve now started up again at Capital Factory in person, and they still seem to be attended by people, so we still seem to have a community here in Austin to likes that we exist and appreciates what we do. Probably the biggest political activism we’ve done since then, we’ve been pretty involved in because there’s a big debate going on here in Austin right at this moment, around whether the city should bring back its automated license plate reader program. We’ve been involved pretty heavily with a coalition of other groups here in town trying to defeat that. EFF-Austin’s Mission Statement EFF-Austin advocates establishment and protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology. We promote the right of all citizens to communicate and share information without unreasonable constraint. We also advocate the fundamental right to explore, tinker, create, and innovate along the frontier of emerging technologies.

Roy Casagranda joins Plutopians for a wide-ranging discussion of current events and red vs blue political meltdowns. We ask the question, to jail or not to jail he who must not be named. We explore Christian nationalists, China vs Taiwan, Fox vs Dominion, the credibility of elections, abortion rights, and beer bongs! Roy: I think the problem is that something like 80% of Republicans still think he’s the man, and I don’t know how you overcome that. And I also think the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago brought the party around to him again… like maybe he was slipping and maybe DeSantis was in the picture. I think he’s out of the picture, at least for now. Two years is a long time, though – who knows? I don’t know if this has been confirmed or not, but one of the things I understood that he took was the nuclear codes. But the hilarious thing about that is that those changed on January 20th, 2021, and that feels like that’s a typical Trump thing, where he doesn’t understand the situation he’s in, so he just does something really boneheaded. Our discussion touches on an issue of candidate harassment in Williamson County, Texas. Here’s Facebook a link to more info. Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

Plutopians join Bijoy Goswami to talk about bootstrapping your business vs. venture capital funding, the human journey and the American journey, the great replacement theory, capitalism and greed, socialism, and religion as a product. Bijoy Goswami: “The mindset is very different when you’re building to sell, when your product is essentially the company, you’ve already – that’s what they call the exit, you know, you give the five or twenty minute spiel to the venture capitalists, and then it’s all about “How are we going to exit this.” And so your whole notion is, you’re not really treating the business as a being on its own journey. You’re treating it as an asset that’s being bought and sold. That mindset brings a narrow focus which can be very liberating in some ways, because you’re just all here to go get the same thing done. But it takes the humanity out of it many times, and you end up with really horrible types of situations, like a WeWork, or an Uber – they’re just bulldozing over people, they’re megalomaniacs… that’s sort of where that model goes to die.” From Bijoy’s website: Raised in India, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Bijoy moved to the US in 1991 to attend Stanford, where he studied economics, history and computer science. He was an Oxford scholar and completed an Honors program in Science, Technology & Society. In 1995, he joined Trilogy Software in Austin, TX, where he worked for five years in business development, sales, consulting, and product management. In 2000 he cofounded Aviri with Bruce Krysiak. This led to the MRE Model and The Human Fabric (2004), coauthored with Dave Wolpert. In 2003 Bijoy started Bootstrap Austin, a community for entrepreneurs pursuing the bootstrap path of entrepreneurship. Over the next 7 years, the community became a learning lab for bootstrapping, resulting in the Bootstrap Method. It also resulted in a model to understand community and how it differs from other human organizations, such as companies. Collaborating with Heather McKissick, the question: what makes Austin, Austin? led to the ATX Equation Model. The final(?!) 2 models – JOurneY Method and Human Fugue – arrived in tandem. The Human Fugue describes 4 houses of human endeavor – phenomena, rights, resources & meaning – and their attendant methods. The first 3 methods – scientific, democratic and entrepreneurial – were developed over the last 400 years. The JOurneY Method fills the method gap in the 4th House of Meaning, illuminating a process for personal and organizational meaning generation. Bijoy collaborated with Danny Gutknecht on Meaning at Work, which describes Essence Mining, Danny’s method for articulating a being’s meaning. The Human Fugue neatly encapsulates all the previously developed models & methods, bringing the journey full circle. Bijoy evangelizes and teaches the models to individuals, organizations and beyond.

Plutopians perform a deep dive into the Dark Brandon meme. We also look at Dark Maga… to woke or not to woke – that’s the question… Trump in ’24… Beto… Mar-a-Lago gate… and much more! (Speaking about Darnold Trump:) Jon: Apparently there is a law that says that if you, in public office, appropriate documents and misuse them or take them elsewhere, that you can no longer hold public office. So if they actually convict him for taking these documents, that might be it for him. Scoop: There’s a whole problem with possessing and taking away things marked “Top Secret” and “Classified,” that’s known as espionage. Suzy: Yeah, yeah. The fact that he… I mean, he just keeps lying, and getting caught lying. And the people who “work” for him keep getting caught in lies. Over, and over, and over, and I don’t understand at what point does this end and somebody pay a price.

Plutopians explore the search for meaning in our lives, especially in an era of pandemic and polarization. Jon, Scoop and Suzy explore the Goldwater rule, a world based on lies, Victor Frankl, Q-Anon and lie-based causes, Alex Jones, capitalism, and Christian Nationalists. Suzy: I think it’s really interesting what people are trying to find to give meaning, or that is the meaning in their lives, since the pandemic started. I mean, I think it was really an opportunity for everyone to sit down with literally nothing else to do and confront themselves. And ask themselves why I’m in this job I hate. I don’t get enough money for this shit. Jon: I think there’s been a lot of that consideration of, you know, am I really happy in this job. A lot of people have not gone back to their jobs. Scoop: Yeah, there are a lot of jobs that just are not being filled, because people moved on, they realized they didn’t have to be doing that for ten dollars an hour. Suzy: That’s a step toward a self-aware search for meaning. “The construction of a world based on lies is a key component of authoritarians’ takeover of democratic societies. George Orwell’s 1984 explored a world in which those in power use language to replace reality, shaping the past and people’s daily experiences to cement their control. They are constantly reconstructing the past to justify their actions in the present. In Orwell’s dystopian fantasy, Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite history for the Ministry of Truth to reflect the changing interests of a mysterious cult leader, Big Brother, who wants power for its own sake and enforces loyalty through The Party’s propaganda and destruction of those who do not conform. “Political philosopher Hannah Arendt went further, saying that the lies of an authoritarian were designed not to persuade people, but to organize them into a mass movement. Followers would “believe everything and nothing,” Arendt wrote, “think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” “The ideal subject” for such a dictator, Arendt wrote, was not those who were committed to an ideology, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.” ~ Heather Cox Richardson Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Plutopians explore the use and misuse of language. Jon, Scoop, and Suzy take a deep dive into political language, the voices of Christian nationalism, the January 6 hearings and Liz Cheney, Donald Trump’s language, and much more. “Language is a virus from outer space.” – William S. Burroughs In which Jon discovers that you can’t google googl, because it’s not really a word. The word he was looking for is googol, aka 10,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000: Suzy: Google is now a verb and a noun, Webster has added it, and I guess other dictionaries have. Jon: Google is actually a word for something, but not with the “e” at the end. Damn, I can’t even – it’s hard for me to look that up. What is a googl? Suzy: Or tweet – you know, these kinds of things that we’ve come up with… Jon: You can no longer look googl up – you can’t google googl, because it gives you google instead of googl. Suzy: Can you say “What is a googl?” Jon: Oh, there we go, let’s try that… Scoop: If you google googl on Google, it creates a time warp or paradox. You just can’t do that. Suzy: That’s creepy. Scoop: In some areas, Google is an expletive, so… (muffled) Suzy: Oh, careful, careful. Jon: I thought that it was googl, but it’s GOOGOL. Not to be confused with Nikolai Gogol. Suzy: Yeah, don’t do that! Photo by Hannah Gibbs on Unsplash

Plutopians wax poetic on food and drugs. We discuss low fat diets, vegan diets, hospital food, narcotic pain killers, psychedelics, hot sauce, and hot foods. No herbivores or apex predators were harmed during the production of this podcast! Scoop: I’m from that school of thought where you’re only here so long, and if you avoid all these wonderful things, as you’re on your deathbed you go “I should’ve eaten that! And I didn’t.” So I’m trying to make sure that I don’t have any of those regrets. Jon: I have an answer for that, though, which is that food has an impact on your quality of life. And if your quality of life is degraded by some problem that’s created by what you’ve eaten… Suzy: Let’s define quality of life. For me quality of life is traveling and eating new things and, you know, if my health is degraded, that might not bother me so much. Photo by Jon L.

Suzy Shelor returns to Plutopia News Network’s livestream with an exploration of the current state of American politics. Never one to shy away from controversy, Suzy came prepared to offend those who deserve offending, and to support those who don’t. We discuss the January 6th Hearings, the 2022 Texas governor’s race, the Texas GOP party platform, the 1619 Project, Steve Bannon, and much more. Recorded from our weekly livestream on July 14, 2022. Suzy Shelor: I think we all have to recognize our racism, our… everything we’ve ever been conditioned to believe, that we have to unlearn. How do you live in a world of white privilege and not become used to that which makes you think that you are on a different level, because you’re treated differently. So, yeah, I don’t think that was the only thing (laughs). I think there’s been a lot of soul-searching on my part about it, because I’ve never… that’s not something that is part of my character. But it’s definitely shadow stuff — you know, you look in, and you say, “Wow, I’m just as capable as everybody else of having these horrible thoughts.” And if this human is capable of breaking down and having a Karen moment, then I am, too, and I have to go through and confront that person. Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Jon and Scoop take a nostalgic trip to the early days of the computer and online communication. We discuss our first computers and their impact on our lives, our early online experiences, and programs and services that change the way we work and play. We’re inspired by our recent conversations with Kevin Driscoll, author of The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media: Kevin Driscoll: The Modem World Kevin Driscoll: Modem World Convergence Jon and Scoop were both pioneers of various aspects of computer communication and the Internet, including online communities, Internet media, digital convergence, and digital cultures. But they both started with little knowledge of technology, and started learning on and off the job. Jon: I don’t know if it was the first one, but kind of the most popular early browser was Mosaic, and you could get Mosaic and put it on your computer – assuming that you had a decent screen, you could see pretty good visual imagery. It was kind of limited. Scoop: Yeah, those were the early days. Just waiting for stuff to display was – you could go and get a beer, make a sandwich and come back, and it’s still trying to render. The product that really changed my life… remember RealAudio? From RealNetworks. That was when I first was able to do radio on the Internet, in a really klunky sort of way.

Dr. Roy Casagranda, Professor of Government at Austin Community College, and wise observer of politics, returns to the Plutopia podcast. Roy is also a political philosopher, aspiring feminist, author, internationalist, struggling revolutionary. We discuss the January 6th hearings, the Supreme Court vs. abortion, gerrymandering, angry and frightened voters, dog whistles, and 2024 presidential hopefuls. Basically the United States has turned into an oligarchy, and it’s run by nine and a half people. Because the President still has some influence through executive orders, but for the most part, even Biden can’t rule. So it’s basically these nine people, with Biden occasionally doing an executive order. And that’s not what Madison intended. The Republicans are always like “we need to follow the Consitution,” and I’m at the point where I’m like, “It’s not a great document, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the garbage we have now.” Roy on Twitter Roy is also author of The Blood Throne of Caria, a historical fiction.

Media Studies professor and “The Modem World” author Kevin Driscoll joins Jon and Scoop in taking a nostalgic and informative look back at the early days of online and Internet communication. Kevin explains the impact of early bulletin board systems, newsgroups, online services, and the coming of the web. This conversation is a followup to our February conversation https://plutopia.io/kevin-driscoll-the-modem-world/ about Kevin’s work and his book, “The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media,” which has since been released by Yale University Press. Kevin is also participating in a two week asynchronous conversation about “Modem World” and related subjects on the online community, The WELL, which was originally an online BBS that connected early on to the Internet. You have these two pretty parallel stories, and some people that I talk to from the BBS side would say “Yeah, we knew about ARPANet, this isn’t a secret, but it’s not accessible to the everyday folks unless you’ve had a connection.” And so some people would have these kind of informal relationships, it’s like “Basically, I know a guy who gets me an account at the university,” or something like that, or you had an account at a job, or something, and you’re able to access it or carry it on. So there’s a lot of informal kinds of connections between them. The real moment of convergence is generally around the early to mid 1990s, which coincides, of course, with privatization of NSFNet and big components of what we would think of as the Internet. That’s a really good reason why we use the word Internet to talk about this big mess of communications systems. Kevin Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. His research explores popular culture, political communication, and networked personal computing. Some of his recent work explores everyday and emerging uses of social media such as live-tweeting, joking about politics, and spreading rumors. In 2017, he published a technical and cultural history of the French Minitel with Julien Mailland from Indiana University titled Minitel: Welcome to the Internet. His latest book, “The Modem World,” traces the pre-history of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ufology: the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may have extraordinary (e.g. extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional) origins. Often derided by skeptics and science educators as an example of pseudoscience, ufology has can represent a field of legitimate scientific investigation, as practiced by Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallée, Allen Hynek, et al. A ufologist is one who investigates UFO phenomena. The late Stanton Friedman was an American nuclear physicist and professional ufologist who resided in New Brunswick, NJ and Canada. He was the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident. As a nuclear physicist, he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications. He left full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of unidentified flying objects. His many books and public presentations were criticized by some of this fellow scientists and government officials. In May of this year, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Ronald Moultrie, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray testified before a House subcommittee. They revealed that the Defense Department is organizing reports of UAPs or “unidentified aerial phenomena” after a congressionally mandated report released last year found most of the incidents analyzed remain unidentified. The government’s seeming admission that UFOs may be real appears to vindicate Dr. Friedman. In 1975, Scoop interviewed Dr. Friedman prior to his lecture at the University of California in Berkeley. The major reason why no government in the world wants its people to know the whole story about flying saucers — aside from the primary concern of ‘how do you duplicate the flight propulsion system,’ which you aren’t going to tell your enemies about — is a very simple- minded one, that no government wants its people to start thinking of themselves as earthlings, instead of as Americans, or Russians, or as Chinese, or whatever. The whole way that this world is structured is predicated on a system of nationalistic competitions. I don’t care whether it’s the Olympics or the battlefield. The problem is the same. Or the development of nuclear weapons systems. So from an alien viewpoint, it’s clear we’re a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. It’s further clear that despite all the jokes about “Take me to your leader,” that there is no leader to be taken to. Photo by Gianluca Carenza on Unsplash

Jim Rutt, host of “The Jim Rutt Show” podcast, joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging discussion about business and technology. Jim details his start in business and tech, his time running Network Solutions, the evolution of the Internet, cancel culture, and AI censorship. Jim is also President and co-founder of the MIT Free Speech Alliance. He is the Executive Producer of the film “An Initiation to Game B.” He is also the creator of Network Wars, the popular mobile game. He is past Chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. He was CEO of Network Solutions, which operated the .com, .net, and .org domain namespaces on the Internet until its acquisition by Verisign in 2000. Jim was the first CTO of Thomson-Reuters. He was Chairman of the computer chip design software company Analog Design Automation until its acquisition by Synposis in 2004. The mother lode there in the just pre-internet period, AOL and its precursors… they actually created for Commodore first, and then for TRS-80, and then they had a deal to build Apple’s network, a private network branded and run by Apple, for Apple users. And Apple canceled the project, but as an escape valve to get out of the contract, they let AOL keep all the technology. And so AOL launched the AOL service on a technology base that was gonna be Apple’s private network private network. And the rest, as they say, is history. AOL became the big behemoth just before the Internet, and then they misplayed the transition TO the Internet. And you know what happened after that…

Before the Internet changed the way we experienced movies, dark theaters, and late night tv were the sole venues where sci-fi and horror fans could get a regular fix of cheap movie thrills. This time, on the Plutopia podcast, Jon, Scoop and Maggie discuss their favorite classic films, from the golden age of sci-fi and horror. Jon: They had Kid Shows then, on Saturday morning. So you’d go down Saturday morning, and take your milk carton, or whatever mordido that you used to get into the movie. Where, as Scoop will remember, all you had to have was your Gandy’s half-gallon milk carton (laughter). Empty half-gallon milk carton… Scoop: My Mom asked what happened to the milk on Saturday morning, when I was headed off to the movie. I just told her I drank all the milk! Jon: You didn’t pour it down the sink, did you? Scoop: Of course, I did! I wasn’t that big a milk fan. Jon: Yeah, I mean – this was a great thing about that era. I don’t know that there’s anyplace in the world that they do this now. Maggie: Well, you guys had that story of the theater… for me, I’m about ten-ish years behind y’all. You know, so it was late 60s or early 70s for me. And we didn’t have the theater thing, but we had a really great UHF station in the D.C. area. It was always this thing, like, in the morning you would have Saturday morning cartoons, which is great, and I could have my Quisp or my Quake cereal, and then in the afternoon, it was all the old sci-fi and horror movies. So I have this fondness for that time, it was so cool… scared the crap out of me! Also check out Jon L.’s blog post, “Monsters from the Id.” More or less weekly, Plutopia posts a Sci-Fi Saturday tweet: Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday: "Queen of Outer Space"! Interstellar energy beam destroys a space station and zaps a rocket to crash land on Venus, where women have killed most men, not good news for the four male earthling astronauts. https://t.co/GtZaV2GW2W — Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) May 14, 2022 Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday: "The Earth Dies Screaming" as aliens kill all but a few humans, sending malign robots to kill survivors and activate corpses as dead-eyed zombies. Score by composer Elisabeth Lutyens. The title was a joke that stuck. https://t.co/6yQGdZq4x1 — Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) May 21, 2022 Plutopia News Network Sci-Fi Saturday – "The Monster That Challenged the World": giant mollusks from beneath the ocean floor "out of the nightmare of time" raise a ruckus in the Salton Sea, attacking livestock, lovers, and rabbits. https://t.co/n8KNN2wbP4 — Plutopia News Network (@plutopia) March 12, 2022

Philosopher Charles Herrman interviews Michael Webb, an advocate for the practice of meditative inquiry. They discuss interviewing and questioning, stillness, truth, centering, and much more. Michael Webb: Truth isn’t necessarily instrumental. A lot of people might think that, ‘I want to know something because I want to use it in order to achieve something else.’ Charles Herrman: Instrumental? MW: Yes. Whereas I think we can almost look at truth as a motivator in itself. Almost like an end in itself, in away. CH: When people refer to truth, I would say that they directly imply that beyond the truth lies a solid foundation, a ground, some justification for it. I would say that when we think we’re telling the truth, that is essentially what we’re saying in the background. So ultimately, we can justify truth in terms either of facts or a priori common sense justifications. That is to say, those truths that are true in and of themselves, not requiring any further evidence. Charles Herrman is a published philosopher and author of four unpublished book manuscripts, four articles in the journal Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, and four articles at openDemocracy, an internet journal of foreign affairs. Michael Webb has been a music teacher, a language teacher, a textbook editor, a tech writer, and a software engineer. He got a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology in a program that emphasized integrating Asian perspectives, which dovetailed nicely with his several decades of experience studying and practicing meditation. He’s currently working to launch a podcast about the role of communication in evolution. Photo: Photo by Marek Okon on Unsplash

In this episode, Jon and Scoop talk to Alexandra Alvarez about her new company “Love x Alex,” her activity supporting the “Free Britney” movement, which was seeking an end to Britney Spears’ court-ordered guardianship. The movement helped jump-start her line of fashion and pop culture goodies. We talk about her move from major studio casting to independent designer, marketer, and entrepreneur. Alexandra Alvarez: I think the timing was with us, as well. I had the “Free Britney” stuff there, but – this is crazy – I went to the termination hearing on November 12. We had no idea if they were going to terminate the conservatorship that day, it was just another court hearing. But I had created an entire line that said, past tense, “We Freed Britney.” And I brought it with us. I brought, like, three sweatshirts and a hoodie, just in case. They were in my backpack. And then, I had my laptop with me, too, at this court hearing. And then probably like 45 minutes into the hearing we were all outside the Stanley Moss Courthouse, there was probably – MTV was there, all of the news stations were there, a huge deal at this point, because the documentaries had already come out. And they made the announcement that the conservatorship had been terminated. And I literally grabbed the t-shirts out of the backpack. I threw them at my friend, and I threw mine on, and I hit live on the website. And when I hit that button, the product was emailed out to everyone. And it said “We freed Britney,” a huge celebratory thing. And I remember the news stations running up to me, and they were like “How do you guys already have merchandise, how did you guys know?” That event catapulted my followership and my business.