Open Transcripts

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 And the conclusion that I came to is that essentially the left is applying an outdated paradigm.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.