Open Transcripts

Geek of the Week: Marshall T. Rose

presented by Carl Malamud, Marshall T. Rose

It’s kind of like we could have the Congress of the United State pass a law with regards to time trav­el, but let’s face it you know, no one has a time trav­el machine so what’s the point of it? You can’t change phys­i­cal laws by mak­ing admin­is­tra­tive pol­i­cy. Why should you think you can stan­dard­ized com­pli­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy with­out under­stand­ing it?

Geek of the Week: Radia Perlman

presented by Carl Malamud, Radia Perlman

The peo­ple that invent­ed Ethernet did a real good thing. Ethernet is good tech­nol­o­gy. But they did a real­ly bad thing because they called it a net. And they should­n’t have called it Ethernet, they should’ve called it ​“Etherlink.”

Not Data but Trust is the New Oil

presented by Eva Pascoe

When we start­ed in 1994, Internet was an incred­i­bly inno­cent lit­tle crea­ture. We were ter­ri­bly keen on shar­ing, con­nect­ing, and bring­ing the good­ness to the world. Mainly because I was teach­ing nurs­es com­put­ing, and one thing I real­ized, that the best way to teach that is to bring peo­ple togeth­er to share it in the same space. So not giv­ing them exer­cise to go home but bring­ing togeth­er.

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 1: The Right Stuff

presented by Ashley Shew, Brenda J. Child, Brian Nord, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lucianne Walkowicz

In this first pan­el we’ll be talk­ing about how nar­ra­tives of space explo­ration influ­ence our mod­ern ideas about who can explore space, and what it means to real­ly have the right stuff, and how that mean­ing might evolve, and how we could change it.

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 2: Mars on Earth

presented by Bobak Ferdowsi, Dana Burton, Lucianne Walkowicz, Margaret Huettl, Nathalie Cabrol

Our sec­ond pan­el today…deals with the inter­sec­tions between Mars as a plan­et, a real phys­i­cal space, and the way that we think about envi­ron­ments in Earth his­to­ry. And nowa­days we know more than we ever have before about the Martian envi­ron­ment and some of the his­to­ry there. But as I men­tioned this morn­ing, in many ways, we’ve still just scratched the sur­face. And so, we want to look in this pan­el at what we can do to think about the explo­ration of oth­er worlds, or human beings liv­ing off-world, in light of the his­to­ry that we’ve had here on our own plan­et.

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 3: Alternative Futurisms

presented by D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Lucianne Walkowicz, William Lempert, Ytasha Womack

The overview of this par­tic­u­lar pan­el, if you’ll notice in the pro­gram is called ​“Alternative Futurisms.” And this, as should prob­a­bly be evi­dent by now is cen­tered on sci­ence fic­tion and the imag­i­na­tion. It real­ly has a pow­er to inspire and instruct us as we envi­sion the future, but it’s also long been a vehi­cle for myths of Manifest Destiny. And so, we want­ed to start today by talk­ing about the view­points of humanity’s future that are alter­na­tive to some of these main­stream nar­ra­tives, and how we might con­cep­tu­al­ize life off-world in rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ways.

What Could be Unsettling about New Settlements?

presented by Andrés Martinez, Armstrong Wiggins, Bina Venkataraman, Russell Shorto

I think we’re already mov­ing into a very—uncom­fort­ably for most of us, into a place where nation-states, gov­ern­ments, are being forced to cede author­i­ty to cor­po­ra­tions. And that is going to, I assume, hap­pen faster and faster. And if you throw in space, if you throw in the lim­it­less­ness of space, then I mean…the sky’s the lim­it so to speak. I don’t know what the…where that takes us.

Law & Order, or Game of Thrones? The Legal Landscape of Space Exploration

presented by Amanda Nguyen, Erika Nesvold, Henry Hertzfeld, Yuliya Panfil

I per­son­al­ly am not wor­ried about set­tle­ments. I think they’re so far in the future that we can’t pre­dict what they’ll look like. We can’t even keep human beings, par­tic­u­lar­ly a lot of human beings, alive in space or have real set­tle­ments, the way we envi­sion a colony or a set­tle­ment. I don’t think the lack of sov­er­eign­ty is going to hurt any of this.

What Do Community and the Social Landscape Look Like in Space?

presented by Alex MacDonald, Craig Calhoun, Erika Nesvold, Fred Scharmen

Community is always part of a sys­tem that we some­times can or can­not see or rec­og­nize. And in Gerard O’Neill’s pro­pos­als for these islands in space, those communities…were sup­posed to per­form a very spe­cif­ic func­tion in a larg­er sys­tem. They were sup­posed to be exper­i­ments.

More-Than-Human Centred Design

presented by Anab Jain

I think it’s impor­tant to say that one thing about our work is that we are not fix­at­ed on the future as a strict lin­ear pro­gres­sion. We start by acknowl­edg­ing the fact that the future is not a fixed des­ti­na­tion but a constantly-shifting and unfold­ing space of diverse poten­tial.

ASU KEDtalks: Solving the Unsolvable Problem

presented by Nadya Bliss

Today we face many high­ly com­plex chal­lenges both nation­al­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly. From secu­ri­ty of our infor­ma­tion net­works, to plan­ning for and man­ag­ing nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, to emer­gence of new infec­tious dis­eases, to social and polit­i­cal con­flict through­out the world, these chal­lenges are messy, and high­ly inter­con­nect­ed.

AI Blindspot

presented by Dan Taber

AI Blindspot is a dis­cov­ery process for spot­ting uncon­scious bias­es and struc­tur­al inequal­i­ties in AI sys­tems.

Kaleidoscope: Positionality-aware Machine Learning

presented by Elizabeth Dubois

Positionality is the spe­cif­ic posi­tion or per­spec­tive that an indi­vid­ual takes giv­en their past expe­ri­ences, their knowl­edge; their world­view is shaped by posi­tion­al­i­ty. It’s a unique but par­tial view of the world. And when we’re design­ing machines we’re embed­ding posi­tion­al­i­ty into those machines with all of the choic­es we’re mak­ing about what counts and what does­n’t count.

Watch Your Words

presented by Bernease Herman, Erich Ludwig, Joseph Williams, Walt Frick

The premise of our project is real­ly that we are sur­round­ed by machines that are read­ing what we write, and judg­ing us based on what­ev­er they think we’re say­ing.

Surveillance State of the Union

presented by B Cavello, Carl Governale

We want­ed to look at how sur­veil­lance, how these algo­rith­mic deci­sion­mak­ing sys­tems and sur­veil­lance sys­tems feed into this kind of tar­get­ing deci­sion­mak­ing. And in par­tic­u­lar what we’re going to talk about today is the role of the AI research com­mu­ni­ty. How that research ends up in the real world being used with real-world con­se­quences.

ASU KEDtalks: Change Everything, All At Once

presented by Christopher Warton

We live in a world of wild, dam­ag­ing, unsus­tain­able excess. We’re sur­round­ed by unhealthy food options. We live in places built for cars, not for walk­ing or bik­ing. We’re buried in our screens 24⁄7. We face calls to buy stuff, end­less­ly. And we live in a con­sumer cul­ture that is depen­dent on the notion of dis­pos­al. But here’s the thing. These excess­es are so ful­ly nor­mal­ized, they so ful­ly meet our expec­ta­tions of how every­day life ought to look, that we no longer real­ly see them as exces­sive at all.

ASU KEDtalks: Carbon is a Terrible Thing to Waste

presented by Klaus Lackner

For this the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist here it seemed actu­al­ly very sim­ple. It’s a con­ser­va­tion law. If you take car­bon out of the ground and you put it into the sys­tem it will stay there unless you take it back out. From a soci­etal per­spec­tive, this is much much more com­pli­cat­ed because as we fix it there will be win­ners and losers.

ASU KEDtalks: Staying Ahead of Cyberattacks

presented by Paulo Shakarian

What if cyber attacks could be pre­dict­ed? What if before a major attack occurred, we would know pre­cise­ly the right pre­cau­tions to take?

The Web is Agreement

presented by Jeremy Keith

Web stan­dards are a col­lec­tion of intan­gi­bles that we col­lec­tive­ly agree to be true. They’re our sto­ries. They’re our col­lec­tive, con­sen­sus real­i­ty. They’re what web browsers agree to imple­ment and what we agreed to use. The Web is agree­ment.

Data & Society Databite #119: Mary L. Gray on Ghost Work

presented by Dean Jansen, Mary L. Gray

I’m just going to say it, I would like to com­plete­ly blow up employ­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion as we know it. I do not think that defin­ing full-time work as the place where you get ben­e­fits, and part-time work as the place where you have to fight to get a full-time job, is an appro­pri­ate way of address­ing this labor mar­ket.

ASU KEDtalks: Preventing Predictable Disasters

presented by Duke Reiter

We could be learn­ing from the lived expe­ri­ence of peo­ple in the I‑10 cor­ri­dor. We should be lis­ten­ing to their sto­ries, record­ing them, and respond­ing to the issues in their com­mu­ni­ties.

ASU KEDtalks Podcast: Preventing Predictable Disasters

presented by Duke Reiter

The Ten Across project is…a twenty-four-hundred mile-long stretch of high­way, obvi­ous­ly on the I‑10, that goes from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and all the major cities in between. Looking at those cities, Phoenix includ­ed of course, the Phoenix metro area, we think we see a lab­o­ra­to­ry for the future in those places.

The Emperor’s New Codes — Reputation and Search Algorithms in the Finance Sector

presented by Frank Pasquale

The study of search, be it by peo­ple like David Stark in soci­ol­o­gy, or econ­o­mists or oth­ers, I tend to sort of see it in the tra­di­tion of a real­ly rich socio-theoretical lit­er­a­ture on the soci­ol­o­gy of knowl­edge. And as a lawyer, I tend to com­ple­ment that by think­ing if there’s prob­lems, maybe we can look to the his­to­ry of com­mu­ni­ca­tions law.

Occupy Algorithms: Will Algorithms Serve the 99%?

presented by Moritz Hardt

More than sort of a dis­cus­sion of what’s been said so far this is a kind of research pro­pos­al of what I would like to see hap­pen­ing at the inter­sec­tion of CS and this audi­ence.

Problematic Predictions: A Complex Question for Complex Systems

presented by Tal Zarsky

When you make a deci­sion to opt for an auto­mat­ed process, to some extent you’re already by doing so com­pro­mis­ing trans­paren­cy. Or you could say it the oth­er way around. It’s pos­si­ble to argue that if you opt for extreme­ly strict trans­paren­cy reg­u­la­tion, you’re mak­ing a com­pro­mise in terms of automa­tion.

What Sci-Fi Futures Can (and Can’t) Teach Us About AI Policy, open­ing and clos­ing com­ments

presented by Ed Finn, Kevin Bankston

AI Policy Futures is a research effort to explore the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence fic­tion around AI and the social imag­i­nar­ies of AI. What those social mea­sures can teach us about real tech­nol­o­gy pol­i­cy today. We seem to tell the same few sto­ries about AI, and they’re not very help­ful.

The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop

presented by Kevin Bankston

We’re here because the imag­i­nary futures of sci­ence fic­tion impact our real future much more than we prob­a­bly real­ize. There is a pow­er­ful feed­back loop between sci-fi and real-world tech­ni­cal and tech pol­i­cy inno­va­tion and if we don’t stop and pay atten­tion to it, we can’t har­ness it to help cre­ate bet­ter fea­tures includ­ing bet­ter and more inclu­sive futures around AI.

AI in Reality

presented by Elana Zeide, Kevin Bankston, Lindsey Sheppard, Miranda Bogen, Rumman Chowdhury

When data sci­en­tists talk about bias, we talk about quan­tifi­able bias that is a result of let’s say incom­plete or incor­rect data. And data sci­en­tists love liv­ing in that world—it’s very com­fort­able. Why? Because once it’s quan­ti­fied if you can point out the error you just fix the error. What this does not ask is should you have built the facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy in the first place?

How Sci-Fi Reflects Our AI Hopes and Fears

presented by Kanta Dihal

We came up with the idea to write a short paper…trying to make some sense of those many nar­ra­tives that we have around arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and see if we could divide them up into dif­fer­ent hopes and dif­fer­ent fears.

AI in Sci-Fi

presented by Andrew Hudson, Chris Noessel, Damien Williams, Kanta Dihal, Lee Konstantinou, Madeline Ashby

What I hope we can do in this pan­el is have a slight­ly more lit­er­ary dis­cus­sion to try to answer well why were those the sto­ries that we were telling and what has been the point of telling those sto­ries even though they don’t now nec­es­sar­i­ly always align with the pol­i­cy prob­lems that we’re hav­ing.

Untold AI — What AI Stories Should We Be Telling Ourselves?

presented by Chris Noessel

How peo­ple think about AI depends large­ly on how they know AI. And to the point, how the most peo­ple know AI is through sci­ence fic­tion, which sort of rais­es the ques­tion, yeah? What sto­ries are we telling our­selves about AI in sci­ence fic­tion?

Bridging AI Fact and Fiction

presented by Ed Finn, Kristin Sharp, Malka Older, Molly Wright Steenson, Stephanie Dinkins

This is going to be a con­ver­sa­tion about sci­ence fic­tion not just as a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, or a body of work of dif­fer­ent kinds, but also as a kind of method or a tool.

Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias

presented by Gideon Lichfield, Joy Buolamwini, Justine Cassell

I think the ques­tion I’m try­ing to for­mu­late is, how in this world of increas­ing opti­miza­tion where the algo­rithms will be accu­rate… They’ll increas­ing­ly be accu­rate. But their appli­ca­tion could lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion. How do we stop that?

What We Really Mean When We Say ​“Ethics”

presented by Molly Wright Steenson

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University has some real­ly use­ful think­ing and cur­ric­u­la around ethics. One of the things they point out is that what ethics is not is eas­i­er to talk about than what ethics actu­al­ly is. And some of the things that they say about what ethics is not include feel­ings. Those aren’t ethics. And reli­gion isn’t ethics. Also law. That’s not ethics. Science isn’t ethics.

John Perry Barlow’s Usenix 1994 Keynote Address

presented by John Perry Barlow

I hon­est­ly believe with­out hyper­bole that peo­ple in this room are doing things which will change the world more than any­thing since the cap­ture of fire, in terms of what it is to be a human being. And I’ll jus­ti­fy that very broad state­ment here as I go along.

The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times

presented by Guy Standing

In a book that I wrote in 2011, on page one I said that unless the inse­cu­ri­ties, and the fears, and the aspi­ra­tions of the pre­cari­at were addressed as a mat­ter of urgency, we would see the emer­gence of a polit­i­cal mon­ster. You will not be sur­prised that in November 2016 I received a lot of emails from around the world from peo­ple who said, ​“The mon­ster has arrived.”

The Case Against Computers: A Systemic Critique

presented by Chet Bowers, Jerry Mander, Richard Sclove, Ted Roszak

We all know there’s a com­put­er rev­o­lu­tion. But very few peo­ple are ask­ing whether it’s a right-wing rev­o­lu­tion or a left-wing rev­o­lu­tion. In fact this rev­o­lu­tion is unlike most ear­li­er ones because all facets of the body politic are in gen­er­al agree­ment. They all think it’s good.

Can We Talk Long-Distance? Removing Impediments to Secure International Communications

presented by A. Michael Froomkin, Ira Rubinstein, Phil Karn, Ron Lee, Stephen Walker, Stewart Baker, Tim May

So, here we are to talk about this prob­lem. How do we do it? How do we talk secure­ly with peo­ple abroad? And in par­tic­u­lar what can we do…what’s fea­si­ble to do, to progress mat­ters from where we are today? And with the help of some of the mem­bers of the pan­el, I draft­ed the three ques­tions.

Transaction Records in Interactive Services: Who Watches the Servers?

presented by Alan Westin, Charles Marson, Janlori Goldman, Michael Stern, Ron Plesser

First of all, let’s rec­og­nize that the pri­va­cy of trans­ac­tion records is not a brand new issue at all. We have many decades of expe­ri­ence, and I think it helps to under­stand that we have two types of con­sumer trans­ac­tion records that we’re talk­ing about.

His Master’s Voice

presented by Geoff Sears, Kathleen Watkins, Ross Stapleton-Gray

What we’ll be cov­er­ing is just the gen­er­al issue of polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the net. And actu­al­ly I think prob­a­bly all three of us are in some­what agree­ment that the gov­ern­ment on the net is maybe the least best-poised to make use of this, or the most chal­lenged by polit­i­cal speech on the net, the pol­i­tics of the infor­ma­tion flow­ing around the net.

A Net for All: Where are the Minorities?

presented by Armando Valdez, Art McGee, Cynthia Harvey, Deborah Runkle, Randy Ross

It’s an his­toric moment. I think it’s very impor­tant that we look and we think about the kind of infor­ma­tion soci­ety we would like to par­tic­i­pate in and that we would like to cre­ate. And that to me is why this con­fer­ence is so impor­tant. I think we need to not make assump­tions but rather be crit­i­cal of where we are as a soci­ety, be crit­i­cal of what we are as indi­vid­ual pro­fes­sion­als, as well as indi­vid­ual mem­bers of the soci­ety.

Greta Thunberg’s World Economic Forum 2019 Special Address

presented by Greta Thunberg

At places like Davos, peo­ple like to tell suc­cess sto­ries. But their finan­cial suc­cess has come with an unthink­able price tag. And on cli­mate change, we have to acknowl­edge that we have failed. All polit­i­cal move­ments in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to cre­ate broad pub­lic aware­ness. But Homo sapi­ens have not yet failed.

Decentralize, Democratize, or Die

presented by Cory Doctorow

You might be more com­fort­able think­ing about deploy­ing math and code as your tac­tic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tac­tics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a frame­work that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.

We Need to Tell a Better Story Than Cyberpunk

presented by Pawel Ngei

We have a lot of pro­pos­als on how tech­nol­o­gy should work in this soci­ety, how we want to avoid all the dan­gers we can see that oth­ers can­not see. But we do a very very bad job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing it.

Automating Inequality
How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

presented by Virginia Eubanks

I start the sto­ry in 1819 rather than 1980. And that allows me to do some very spe­cif­ic work, which is to talk about what I think of as the deep social pro­gram­ming of the tools that we’re now using in pub­lic ser­vices across the United States.

Disposable Life: Zygmunt Bauman

presented by Zygmunt Bauman

In pre-modern soci­eties there was no idea of waste; every­thing was going back into life—recycled, as we would say today. If there were more chil­dren com­ing into the world in a fam­i­ly, then obvi­ous­ly there was room for them, and extra work some­where in the farm­yard, in the field, in the sta­ble. And of course a place around the table. So the idea of being redun­dant, hav­ing no place in soci­ety, sim­ply did­n’t occur.

Disposable Life: Slavoj Žižek

presented by Slavoj Žižek

Under cap­i­tal­ism, the prob­lem is not there are evil peo­ple here and there. The prob­lem is the basic log­ic of the sys­tem as it was devel­oped by Zygmunt Bauman and many oth­ers. Some peo­ple even claim that if you look in a non­hu­man­i­tar­i­an way just at the pure log­ic of today’s glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, you arrive at a ratio even some peo­ple claim of 20–80%.

Disposable Life: Saskia Sassen

presented by Saskia Sassen

Disposable life. What comes to my mind is a set of dynam­ics, I think, that are mark­ing the cur­rent peri­od, that are mark­ing a dif­fer­ence in the cur­rent peri­od. And it is the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of expul­sions. And once some­thing is expelled (and I’ll elab­o­rate) it becomes invis­i­ble. And that is part of the tragedy, I think.

Disposable Life: Richard Sennett

presented by Richard Sennett

In the world of labor and work, the phrase ​“dis­pos­able life” refers to a new wrin­kle in neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism. And that wrin­kle is that it’s cheap­er to dis­pose of work­ers in Europe and America than it’s ever been in the past.

Disposable Life: Max Silverman

presented by Max Silverman

My approach to the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives is this: In an age of late cap­i­tal­ism, advanced tech­nol­o­gy, and mass media, are lives eas­i­er to dis­pose of now than in the past? And my response is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, yes it is eas­i­er now. And this isn’t sim­ply because of the tech­nol­o­gy that is avail­able today that sim­ply was­n’t avail­able in the past.

Disposable Life: Jean Franco

presented by Jean Franco

I sup­pose Foucault has to be cred­it­ed with talk­ing about dis­pos­able life. And it’s inter­est­ing to me that at the very moment when he was giv­ing the lec­tures on this top­ic, Henry Kissinger in the United States was admit­ting, or pub­lish­ing, the results of the com­mis­sion on ster­il­iza­tion. The idea was that ster­il­iza­tion should be encour­aged in Third World coun­tries in order to reg­u­late the pop­u­la­tion.

Disposable Life: Gustavo Esteva

presented by Gustavo Esteva

It is very per­ti­nent to talk asso­ci­at­ing this with the Zapatistas. Twenty years ago in January 1st, 1994, we had the begin­ning of the Zapatista upris­ing. And to under­stand it we need to see what was hap­pen­ing with these peo­ple before the upris­ing, how they came to that ter­ri­ble deci­sion of start­ing an armed upris­ing.

Disposable Life: Griselda Pollock

presented by Griselda Pollock

At the inter­sec­tion of the pol­i­tics of art or lit­er­a­ture or film and polit­i­cal the­o­ry, I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life through a num­ber of lens­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly through work on the Holocaust and work that I’ve been doing with Max Silverman on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent ele­ment of it called ​“con­cen­tra­tion­ary mem­o­ry.”

Disposable Life: Gil Anidjar

presented by Gil Anidjar

In usages of dis­pose, dis­po­si­tion, dis­pos­ing, there is always a ques­tion of putting in order, and putting things in their place. Which also means of course hav­ing the pow­er to do so.

Disposable Life: Étienne Balibar

presented by Étienne Balibar

It’s not the case of course that any con­tem­po­rary philoso­pher or pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy has been par­tic­u­lar­ly deal­ing with ques­tions of polit­i­cal the­o­ry. I nev­er thought about vio­lence. But I want to recall the moment in which I specif­i­cal­ly start­ed to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly work on that.

Disposable Life: David Theo Goldberg

presented by David Theo Goldberg

I’m not here going to think aloud about these var­i­ous con­tes­ta­to­ry forms of evidence-giving, although much might be said about that in rela­tion to think­ing about vio­lence. But rather to think about the Michael Brown shoot­ing in Ferguson, Missouri and the kinds of police response to it in rela­tion to the his­to­ry of vio­lence and the way in which race shapes said his­to­ry of vio­lence in a coun­try like the United States…

Disposable Life: Cynthia Enloe

presented by Cynthia Enloe

When I think about dis­pos­abil­i­ty, I think about name­less­ness. I think about whose pic­tures are tak­en in refugee camps. Or whose stones with­out names you look at at a mass grave, or just a ditch for that mat­ter. To be dis­pos­able is to be name­less in some­body’s eyes.

Disposable Life: Carol Gluck

presented by Carol Gluck

I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life and the mean­ing that might have in soci­eties today. And I decid­ed that the kind of dis­pos­able life that most con­cerns me is the kind that we either res­olute­ly don’t see, ignore, or neglect. Or the kind that we do see but can’t seem to deal with.

Disposable Life: Ananya Roy

presented by Ananya Roy

I think what is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing about the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives in the 21st cen­tu­ry is what seems to be a new glob­al com­mon sense about pover­ty, the ways in which pover­ty and par­tic­u­lar­ly poor oth­ers have become vis­i­ble. And how that in turn, par­tic­u­lar­ly for mil­len­ni­als in the Global North—college stu­dents, young pro­fes­sion­als, so-called ordi­nary glob­al cit­i­zens of the world—how this has mobi­lized them to action.

Knutepunkt 2017 Keynote: Present, by Eleanor Saitta

presented by Eleanor Saitta

I think of larp in a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as sto­ry­telling for the net­work age. This is sto­ry­telling in the first-person present tense plur­al, and it is not very often that human­i­ty comes up with a new tense in which to tell sto­ries. That’s actu­al­ly kind of a big deal.

The Conversation #65 — Rebecca Solnit

presented by Aengus Anderson, Neil Prendergast, Rebecca Solnit

There’s a lot of beau­ti­ful things. And I think if there’s one thing I’m most deeply dis­qui­et about it’s…power. Why are we doing almost noth­ing about cli­mate change? It’s because despite the fact that most peo­ple on earth and many gov­ern­ment on Earth do, the oil cor­po­ra­tions and the gov­ern­ments most close­ly allied to the oil cor­po­ra­tions, notably ours, don’t want to do any­thing.

We Need A New Image of Africa

presented by Wanuri Kahiu

To have the hunter tell it, Africa is full of meek sto­ries about des­per­a­tion and despair. So when artists like myself offer an alter­nate vision, often we’re asked to defend our imag­i­na­tion. Why do we feel we have the lux­u­ry to cre­ate? Shouldn’t we be deal­ing with more impor­tant issues like cor­rup­tion, or war, or AIDS, or pover­ty?

The Oppenheimer Moment

presented by Alan Cooper

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good inten­tions.

 

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