Plutopia News Network

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...

Gareth Branwyn contributes regularly to “Boing Boing,” “Adafruit,” and “HackSpace Magazine” and publishes a weekly newsletter, “Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales.” He is also working on volume 2 of his best-selling 2018 book, Tips and Tales from the Workshop.   Gareth is a well-known writer and editor, and a pioneer of both online culture an...

Patrick Lichty is a media artist, writer, futurist, curator and designer of over 30 years. He’s currently a professor of media design at Zayed University in Dubai, where he is the Director of the Immersive Media Research Cluster. As an activist and artist, he was part of or worked with the collectives RTMark, Pocha Nostra, The Yes Men, Terminal Time, Second Front, Shared Universe, and Critic...

Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She’s a professor in the English department of Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism . She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo , and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Oliv...

In 2014, Plutopian Maggie Duval produced a great EFF-Austin party and event called Cyberpunk 2014 Retrofest during SXSW. A highlight of the event was an ambitious panel about cyberpunk as a literary subgenre and, even more so, as the movement that followed. It featured science fiction authors Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and Christopher Brown, and editor Gareth Branwyn, who in the 1990s assemble...

John D. Marks was the unlikely featured speaker at the 1977 Libertarian Party National Convention in San Francisco. Marks, the former staff assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in The State Department and Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote the controversial 1974 book, The C.I.A. and The Cult O...

Jon and Scoop interview science fiction author and attorney Christopher Brown about his latest book, Failed State, his second “dystopian lawyer” novel. The book is set just after the Second American Revolution. Protagonist Donny Kimoe, a good lawyer in a bad time, looks for a kidnap victim while trying to broker a truce between bright green rebels and their capitalist adversaries. If h...

Maggie and Scoop interview Jeanne Mozier , a popular astrologer and speaker. Her understanding of both politics and astrology inform her wide-ranging predictions. Jeanne holds degrees in political science from Cornell and Columbia universities. Her professional background includes research, planning and electoral politics. She has worked through the years for both Republican and Democratic candida...

Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. She carefully researches initial parameters of each work, which evolve as a result of interaction with people, time, and weather. Her latest environmental art project, “All the Way to Hell,” has appeared in the New York Times, Art in...

In this episode, we talk about e-Patients, participatory medicine, and Covid-19. We also talk about “long haulers,” people who have Covid-19 as more of a chronic condition. Their symptoms extend long after recovery. Our guests are e-Patient Dave deBronkart and Dr. Marge Benham-Hutchins. Dave is a cancer survivor and international speaker on healthcare. He focuses especially on patient...

Joseph Rowe joins Scoop and Jon in a discussion of spiritual community, evolution, and awakening. Joseph 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. Before our session, Joseph wrote in an email “I have this notion that there are vastly unexplored skill...

Renshin Bunce is a hospice chaplain and Zen priest. She was ordained at San Francisco Zen Center in 2003, and received dharma transmission in April of 2013. She later began training as a chaplain at the Sati Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy Training in Redwood City in 2007. A one year hospital residency in Clinical Pastoral Education followed. She moved out of Zen Center in 2008 and has been employed...

Mark Frauenfelder, Research Director of Institute for the Future, discusses his life as editor, blogger, maker, and influencer. Mark has been a vital part of the mainstreaming of the Internet. He was associate editor of Wired Magazine, and he was editor-in-chief at Wired.com and Make Magazine. He was aslo founder of the popular boingboing zine and blog. . Mark has illustrated a number of books for...

Nate Wilcox is host of “Let It Roll,” a podcast with a series of in-depth interviews with music writers. Nate and his collaborators are assembling a history of popular music in America with a focus on the social, technological and business forces that drive the culture. Rock journalist Ed Ward’s History of Rock and Roll inspired the podcast, and Ed has been a regular guest and ke...

Bijoy Goswami and Robert Matney work with Jon and Scoop to create a “cult of punditry.” This freewheeling conversation covers cults, conspiracies, gurus, toxic soup, science (and the lack of scientific thinking), Buddhism and the power of positive freaking.

Robert Matney is Managing Director of Government Affairs at Yonder. Yonder is a company that discovers who controls and amplifies narratives across the internet. It uses AI to identify influential groups, called factions, making them visible to Yonder’s clients. Rob has his finger on the pulse of emerging online narratives, which puts him in a great position to understand conspiracy theories...

Jasmina Tešanović is a Feminist and political activist, originally from Serbia. She is also author of 15 books, a journalist, musician, translator and film director. More recently, she was one of the founders of Casa Jasmina, smart home of the future, in Turin, Italy. She is the author of the manifesto and movement “Internet of Women Things.” She writes in three languages and lives bet...