Plutopia News Network

The Plutopia News Network team takes a wide-ranging look at the changing political landscape in Texas, using Jon Lebkowsky’s experience as a delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention as a springboard for a broader discussion of democracy, public policy, and the state’s future. The conversation explores Democratic efforts to compete statewide by expanding voting access, supporting public educatio...

Peter Richardson joins Plutopia to discuss Brand New Beat, his history of Rolling Stone’s first decade and its roots in San Francisco counterculture, Ramparts, and the Bay Area music scene. The conversation covers Richardson’s access to Rolling Stone’s private archives, the magazine’s founding by Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason, its early tension between rock journalism and radical politics, its...

Former SXSW co-president and chief programming officer Hugh Forrest joins Plutopia to reflect on nearly four decades helping shape South by Southwest, its growth alongside Austin, and the challenges of scaling creative communities without losing authenticity. Forrest discusses how SXSW succeeded by bringing diverse creative people together, but also how rapid growth created problems of cost, acces...

In this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and evolution of cryptography. He also shares advice from his new book Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself...

Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storyt...

Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language mod...

In this hosts-only “Plutopians Gone Wild” episode, Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman range freely across early online culture, disaster response, politics, surveillance, AI, advertising, podcasts, and pop culture. They reflect on the early internet’s topic-centered communities, The WELL, AOL, Genie, ham radio, and the cooperative spirit that emerged during crises like the Loma Priet...

Cindy Cohn joins Plutopia to discuss her new book, Privacy’s Defender, and reflects on her decades of work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from the landmark Bernstein encryption case to fights against NSA mass surveillance and national security letters. She argues that privacy limits the power of governments, corporations, and individuals, and that winning the battle to free encryption wa...

David Miles discusses his book Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold , arguing that “the common cold” is best understood as a broad category of respiratory viral illness that can include influenza and COVID-19, because the same kinds of viruses can cause anything from mild symptoms to severe disease. The conversation covers COVID immunity, Omicron, rhinovirus, hantavirus, virus transm...

Nathan Schneider joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss cooperatives, platform ownership, and the dangers of “implicit feudalism” online, arguing that many digital spaces train users to choose between powerful admins or platforms rather than practice democratic governance. He describes the unrealized potential of co-ops, from rural electric cooperatives and credit unions to newsrooms, platform co-o...

Dr. Edward Lenert returns to Plutopia to discuss his year-long, million-word engagement with large language models and what that experience reveals about AI, thought, trust, creativity, and danger. The conversation explores AI as collaborator, sophist, orchestra, and sometimes unruly engine—capable of useful synthesis, persuasive narrative, memory, and error correction, but still dependent on huma...

In this Plutopia podcast episode, journalist and author Helen Pearson discusses her book Beyond Belief, which traces the rise of evidence-based decision-making in medicine, government, education, conservation, and other fields, arguing that evidence-based practice is both more recent and more fragile than many people realize. Pearson explains how pioneers of evidence-based medicine challenged “emi...

In this Plutopia News Network episode, science and technology journalist Tereza Pultarova discusses her path from covering space exploration to reporting on defense technology after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, explaining how her Eastern European background shaped her understanding of the war’s stakes. She describes Ukraine as a fast-moving laboratory for military innovation, especiall...

Stephen Dulaney, a UX strategist turned AI builder, describes how losing his job pushed him to reinvent himself by collaborating with large language model–based AI agents to design, code, test, and refine applications, even without being a traditional programmer. In the interview, he argues that AI should be approached as a powerful but risky partner: useful for amplifying human creativity, planni...

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 writ...

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 gen...

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 internationa...

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 wa...

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 scien...

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,...

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 produ...

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...

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...

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 sci...

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 unsuppo...