Plutopia News Network

With Dr. Michael Edward “Ed” Lenert, Plutopians discuss communications and democracy: the Fairness Doctrine, hate speech, cancel culture, and much more. Ed’s work is at the intersection of communication theories and democratic practices. He has 25 years of experience teaching law, communications, and journalism at the university level, including MA and PhD-level students. He is a...

Doc Searls joins the Plutopians to discuss social media’s impact on the Internet, mass media’s changes in the digital age, streaming music, movies, and much more. “Social media enhances conviviality enormously. Suddenly you’re in touch with people from high school, relatives you haven’t seen in a long time, and I thought it retrieved gossip. Gossip is enormous there....

Plutopian discussion with visionary culture hacker Jean M. Russell , focusing on thrivability, healthcare, twisting language for political gains, social media, and much more. Jean engages in a social ecosystem design, culture hacking, and facilitation as a visionary but also a pragmatist. She acted as project lead for the Holo ICO , which raised 30,000 ETH (valued at $22M at that time). In 2016 wi...

In this episode of the podcast, Scoop and Jon talk to author Carol Flake Chapman about politics, the religious right, Covid-19, grieving, and poetry. Carol is a distinguished journalist and editor. She was a founding editor of Vanity Fair , horse racing correspondent for The New Yorker , rock critic for The Village Voice , and Texas stringer for US News and World Report . She was an editor and col...

Ruth Glendinning and Kent Dahlgren discuss The Anti-Fragile Playbook and the power of soft capital. The Playbook outlines strategies for underserved people and communities to start an economic and social revival. Ruth: What we’ve been talking about, and this is a big thing in Austin and everywhere, is affordability vs. ability to afford. Those on the surface might sound similar, but which on...

Members of the Plutopia team discuss social media (including Clubhouse and Facebook ), streaming entertainment, cancel culture , cartoons, gurus, and cults. What is social media for? What is it good for? If data is the new oil, where are our mineral rights? Including the history of the term and concept “social media” and how user attention and data became the product.

“It’s not just robust, it’s not just resilient, but we will be stronger on the other side of adversity. So we went into the pandemic expecting to come out a more robust institution. If you went into the pandemic thinking you’d weather the storm, but that it was a storm, and it would pass – I had colleagues that thought this was like a long spring break … well, t...

Joseph Rowe is a musician, composer, writer, storyteller. He is also an author and translator, and a meditator and teacher. He performs sacred music and conducts workshop with Catherine Braslavsky. In this, his second visit to the Plutopia podcast, Joseph discusses Covid-19 and vaccines, postmodern madness, relativism and absolutism, moral perception, spirituality, beauty, the Tao, the overlooked...

Scoop and Jon, both based in Texas, talk about their experience of extreme winter weather in the week following Valentine’s Day 2021, during Winter Storm Uri . The storm caused a power crisis in Texas . For more, see Jon’s blog post, “Heavy Weather in Texas.”

Emily Gertz is Senior Editor at Drilled News. She is also a journalist who reports on the intersections of climate, environment, science, technology and society. Emily, a regular Plutopia News Network guest, discusses the state of climate change policy, with a new president recommitting the USA to climate change goals.

January 14 Plutopia Livestream with guest Tom Jennings ! Jon, Scoop and Suzy talk to Tom about some of the history of network communications, as well as about current events. Tom is a Los Angeles-based artist and technician, known for his work on FidoNet , the first message and file networking system for BBSes. He also built Wired magazine’s first internet presence, wrote the portable BIOS t...

In this recording of the October 13, 2020 EFF-Austin meeting, Ritika Gopal discusses the current state of copyright law, and its ability to address modern-day forms of artistic expression. In a time when brick-and-mortar venues are closed, consumers rely on digital platforms for entertainment, communication, and human connection. Streamed content from DJs and other artists, through platforms such...

Photo: Jordan Reznick Sandy Stone is a cultural theoretician, audio engineer, computer hacker, filmmaker and performance artist; founding director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) at the University of Texas at Austin; Fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute; a founder of the academic discipline of Transgender Studies ; and recipient of the...

Robert Matney is Managing Director of Government Affairs at Yonder . Yonder was originally called New Knowledge, and was known for its role in developing the authoritative report on Russian influence operations targeting US elections from 2015 forward for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The report leveraged data from Alphabet (Google), Twitter, and Facebook. In his role at Yond...

In this episode, we discuss complexity, post-Covid foresight, climate change, and building capabilities to evolve and survive with Zaid Hassan. Zaid is a strategist, facilitator, social innovator and writer. He is the co-founder of several ventures, most recently 10-in-10 and Complexity University. Zaid has 20 years of experience tackling complex social challenges, working all over the world. His...

Justin Hall has a two decade history pushing the limits of networked media. His website J ustin’s Links from the Underground launched in 1994. The site grew to thousands of hand-coded pages. The New York Times referred to Justin as “perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging,” and he was the focus of the Doug Block documentary “Home Page.” He’s worked on...

Dr. Sharon Strover discusses how disinformation has mushroomed in the U.S. around a variety of subjects and from a variety of sources. Her research group at TIPI has looked over some of the Russian-placed social media disinformation and investigated the possible tactics behind it. They have analyzed why some people in the U.S. responded to propaganda messages, and how the press has dealt with thos...

Alexandra Alvarez, also known as Alex, found she has a talent for finding talent. She’s from Austin originally, but she currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a casting coordinator for Walt Disney Studios and 20th Century Fox. She’s also an independent casting director for CBS television. Her previous work includes extras casting and both studio and post production. In her Plutopi...

“We live in a paradox in which digital tech alleviates social isolation in some ways even as it worsens it in others. It may be fashioning wholly new brain pathways for good or ill in ways we neither notice nor can predict. While we are technically more connected to one another than ever before, we bond on media platforms engineered to make outrage and indignation infectious. They exploit th...

Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for 40 years. He’s written about Texas music, and hosts the weekly Texas Music Hour of Power on Saturday nights. In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we talk about the Fort Worth 60s-70s blues scene and his latest book, The Ballad of Robert Ealey and his Five Careless Lovers, an oral history of Fort Worth blues in the 70s. Joe Nick...

Participatory Medicine is a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners. In 2006 Tom Ferguson, MD asked Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky to attend a retreat with a group of physicians and others. This group, referred to as the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, had been w...

Cory Doctorow returns! Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book, which we’ll be discussing today, is Attack Surface, a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother. He’s written many other books, including Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction; How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; In Real Life, a graphic n...

Plutopia News Network’s Jon Lebkowsky gave this talk on “truth in the time of the Internet” on November 3, 2020, at a virtual EFF-Austin meeting. Jon had been thinking about the 1960s slogan “question authority,” and how in the 21st century era of mainstream internetworking and proliferation of media and news sources, we don’t know where to look for an authorita...

Covid-19, as a novel coronavirus, has been known to cause various degrees of illness, diverse symptoms, and long recoveries. Last summer, we discussed “E-Patients and Covid-19” with e-Patient Dave deBronkart and Dr. Marge Benham-Hutchins. . In this episode, we talk to Austin-based consultant, strategist, and investor, Matt Cohen, about his long-haul Covid-19 experience. Matt became ill...

David Weinberger joins Jon and Scoop to discuss how the Internet and machine learning impact our lives and beliefs. We discuss the current state of the Internet, the web, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more… David is an insightful author, speaker, and influencer. He explores the effect of the technology on our lives, businesses, and ideas. He has written about new rules for o...