Plutopia News Network

Nicole Ozer, the new Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss protecting privacy, free expression, and digital rights, and civil liberties as AI expands the power of governments and corporations. She explains how interconnected surveillance systems threaten vulnerable communities and argues that AI should be evaluated by the problems it a...

Filmmaker J. M. (Josh) Logan joins Plutopia to discuss how his experience in special effects, sound, and post-production shapes his approach to directing. Exploring his feature “The Relic: Dragon,” he describes combining Texas history, Norse mythology, and cosmic horror in a story about estranged sisters, buried treasure, and the destructive power of greed. Josh explains his preference...

On the Plutopia News Network podcast, former Republican strategist Jen Thompson discusses her memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, and the near-fatal car crash that prompted her to question her beliefs, ambitions, and identity. Raised in a conservative Christian household that prized conventional success, Jen describes how her pursuit of power and approval led her into politi...

Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and the struggle over who controls technology in the workplace. He distinguishes between “centaurs,” workers who use machines to enhance their skills, and “reverse centaurs,” people forced to serve automated systems while absorbing the blame for their failures. Cory argues that AI’s immediat...

Technology journalist Paulina Borsook returns to Plutopia to discuss the republication of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, her 2000 critique of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture and its failure to acknowledge dependence on public investment and social cooperation. She reflects on the industry’s shift from collaborative engineering toward finan...

Journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, exploring how the Linotype transformed printing and helped launch mass media. Through stories of inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler, printers’ unions, and Twain’s disastrous investment in a competing machine, Jarvis traces the connection...

Broadcaster Richard Wolinsky joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss Spaceships, Ray Guns, Martian Octopods, his oral history weaving decades of interviews with science fiction writers, editors, and fans into a portrait of the genre’s formative years. He describes the financial struggles of pulp writers, the influence and contentious politics of editors, and the friendships, rivalries, and corr...

The Plutopia team examines the rapid expansion of AI and cryptocurrency data centers, focusing on growing bipartisan opposition in Texas to their enormous demands for electricity, water, land, tax subsidies, and transmission infrastructure, as well as the threat of eminent domain to rural communities. They question whether the AI boom can justify this costly construction—or will leave behind aband...

Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council, joins Plutopia to explain how dominant technology companies degrade digital products by exploiting monopoly power, locking users into services, harvesting personal data, and using manipulative design to maximize attention and advertising revenue. He warns that generative AI may accelerate this “enshittification,” particula...

Peter Wang, Anaconda’s co-founder and Chief AI Innovation Officer, argues that AI’s greatest dangers are less likely to resemble a violent science-fiction takeover than an unobtrusive erosion of human autonomy through surveillance, persuasion, unequal access, and algorithmic manipulation. Drawing on a Vatican summit about AI and nuclear weapons, he warns against using poorly understood, probabilis...

Dr. Leonie Tanczer discusses how smartphones, connected household devices, surveillance tools, location trackers and AI can be repurposed to facilitate domestic abuse, allowing perpetrators to monitor, manipulate and intimidate victims through ordinary technologies designed for convenience or protection. She argues that cybersecurity must protect people as well as systems, particularly in shared-d...

Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case argues that technology should quietly support human life rather than dominate our attention. Contrasting clock-driven “Chronos” time with meaningful “Kairos” time, she explains how smartphones, unstable interfaces, and AI can disconnect us from our bodies, surroundings, creativity, and direct experience while requiring constant maintenance. Through calm technology&...

In this Plutopia podcast interview, entrepreneur and author Brett Hurt presents the optimistic thesis of his book Love Conquers Fear: humanity can use AI and other rapidly advancing technologies to create broad abundance, cure disease, and expand access to energy and knowledge, but only if it replaces fear, tribalism, materialism, and profit-driven exploitation with love, cooperation, and concern...

Dr. Rob van Eijk discusses how Europe treats privacy as a fundamental right under the GDPR, contrasting it with the United States’ largely consumer-protection approach. He explains the distinction between pseudonymized and truly anonymous data, the principles of data minimization and purpose limitation, and how European authorities audit and penalize organizations for unlawful collection, tracking...

In this Plutopia News Network interview, Dallas, Texas counselor and longtime LGBTQ advocate Candy Marcum reflects on more than four decades of providing affirming mental health care, her activism during the AIDS crisis, and her belief that LGBTQ people need support in accepting themselves amid discrimination and social pressure. She discusses growing up gay in West Texas, the influence of her med...

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...