Open Transcripts

Collusion episode 3: Food

presented by Luiza Prado, Zara Rahman

Food has always been tightly intertwined with culture and identity. As a result, it’s also been a common target of colonialism. Colonizers understood that by wiping out people’s food traditions, it would be easier to wipe out their origins, their identity, and their history. This kind of trend isn’t only in the past, though. In many areas of the world, dietary habits are changing, food inequality is rife, and somehow both obesity and hunger are on the rise on a global scale.

Collusion episode 2: Water

presented by Luiza Prado, Zara Rahman

Throughout the colonies of the various European powers, water engineers used dams, ditches, and sluices to control the flow of water. They claimed that their approach to water management was more rational and efficient than existing indigenous approaches.

Collusion episode 1: Seeds

presented by Luiza Prado, Zara Rahman

In this episode, we’ll take a broad understanding of the term “technology” and look at how processed and techniques have affected the way in which societal benefits from certain types of seeds have spread across the world, from indigenous knowledges, to biotechnology, and patenting and privatization of seeds.

Collusion pilot episode

presented by Luiza Prado, Zara Rahman

We firmly believe that no technology is neutral, and that power and technology are inextricably interlinked. In this podcast, we want to explore this relationship further, thinking about the power dynamics that are, and have been in the past, created by technology.

Nobody Knows a Damn Thing

presented by Luke Dormehl

I’ve always been really interested in this idea of whether or not we can predict hits. You speak to anyone who works in the entertainment industry, and everyone has their was stories of that film they were sure was going to become a hit which somehow became a miss. There are niche films which appeal to everyone, and perhaps more likely, films that are designed to appeal to everyone which somehow appeal to no one.

Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots

presented by Allison Parrish

I’ve made it my goal as a computer poet not to imitate existing poetry but to find new ways for poetry to exist. So what I’m going to do in this talk is take this metaphor of exploring literature to its logical conclusion.

No Neutral Ground in a Burning World

presented by Eleanor Saitta, Quinn Norton

Geek culture and hacker culture used to be relatively apolitical, but now every action that you take and every piece of code that you write has political effects. You may may intend some of these effects, you may not intend most of these effects, but they’re there and we need to start thinking about and understanding these changes.

Virality, Uncreativity and the End of Self-Expression

presented by Rob Horning

With social media, the compelling opportunities for self-expression outstrip the supply of things we have to confidently say about ourselves. The demand for self-expression overwhelms what we might dredge up from the inside, from our true selves. So the self that we’re expressing in social media has to be posited elsewhere. We start to borrow from the network. We start to borrow from imagined future selves that we can project. We start to borrow from the media themselves and from other kinds of content circulating there that we can now constitute ourselves with.

Meme Warriors and Media Viruses: Theorizing the Persuasive Political Power of the Web

presented by Joel Penney

[The] persuasion model advanced by Rushkoff and Lasn is particularly useful for thinking critically through a variety of recent politically-oriented web phenomena like profile picture changing campaigns, political viral videos, hashtag activism and the like.

Lulz Will Find a Way: How Meme Culture is Empowering civic Engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

presented by Patrick Sharbaugh

Among other things [The Cute Cat Theory] suggests that ordinary online tools and platforms, the kind that people commonly use to share innocuous content such as cute pictures of cats make it possible for non-activist users to create and disseminate activist content online.