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The City as an Individual Organism

presented by Rob Jameson

In the begin­ning, I thought that the goal would’ve been to focus on col­lec­tive hap­pi­ness. But what I found was you can actu­al­ly give some­one every­thing that you would think that they need to be hap­py and they’ll find ways to be unhap­py.

The Nexus Institute ​“The Battle Between Good and Evil” con­fer­ence keynote

presented by Marilynne Robinson

Modern Western soci­eties are not organ­isms that thrive or per­ish as one thing, one mind, one expe­ri­ence. They are com­pacts, based on the expec­ta­tion that those charged with respon­si­bil­i­ties will car­ry them out in good faith, and cru­cial­ly that those who are rel­a­tive­ly pow­er­ful will not seri­ous­ly abuse, exploit, or sim­ply neglect those who are rel­a­tive­ly vulnerable. 

From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes

presented by David Graeber

I think we need to real­ly think hard about what has been hap­pen­ing to social class rela­tions. And the con­clu­sion that I came to is that essen­tial­ly the left is apply­ing an out­dat­ed par­a­digm. You know, they’re still think­ing in terms of boss­es and work­ers and a kind of old-fashioned indus­tri­al sense. Where what’s real­ly going on is that for most peo­ple the key class oppo­si­tion is care­givers ver­sus man­agers. And essen­tial­ly, left­ist par­ties are try­ing to rep­re­sent both sides at the same time, but they’re real­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the latter.

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.

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. 

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 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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