Open Transcripts

Ellen Miller on Interventions for Institutions

presented by Ellen Miller

I’ve long had this fantasy in my entire career, which has mostly been in the field a money and politics, to be able to find one place where you could enter a search term like this one, “General Electric,” and see everything you could find out about a company, a corporate profile—what they do in Washington, what they do at the state level.

Micah Sifry on Combatting Institutions That Promote Misinformation

presented by Micah Sifry

I actually want to go beyond the way we think about the Internet to think about this whole question we’ve been wrestling with, which is you know, our information system, and to take a metaphor that my friend Craig Newmark likes to say, which is that the press or the media is the immune system of democracy.

Gilad Lotan on Interventions for Individuals

presented by Gilad Lotan

Lo and behold humanity is fairly consistent. We would mention mornings in the mornings. We get tired sort of towards the evenings. Talk about coffee more frequently in the morning. These are the sort of normal diurnal patterns that we see on Twitter, right. As expected. But when interesting events happen and events that are out of the ordinary happen it’s very clear that they happen.

Virtual Futures Salon: Fucking Machines

presented by Dan O'Hara, Ian Pearson, Kate Devlin, Luke Robert Mason, Trudy Barber

We are here to talk about fucking machines. In London, on a foggy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet another debate about fucking machines. Another curated discussion underlined by our own human insecurity about versions of us in silica. Fucking anthropomorphic fucking machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fucking us, or so we seem to be told.

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

presented by Luke Robert Mason, Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.

The Conversation #55 — Ed Finn

presented by Aengus Anderson, Ed Finn, Micah Saul

The Center, one of our core goals, our mission statement, is to get people thinking more creatively and ambitiously about the future. What I mean when I talk about that is that we need to come up with better stories about the future. If you want to build a better world you have to imagine that world first.

Interventions for Individuals to Fight Spin

presented by Panagiotis Takis Metaxas

I will tell to you a few things about the first Twitter bomb that with my colleague we found a couple years ago. And there it was a case in which somebody was attacking the candidate Martha Coakley in the last Massachusetts elections. We found out that actually it was easy to detect this kind of attack.

Invisible Images of Surveillance

presented by Trevor Paglen

One of the things I really want out of art, what I see the job of the artist to be is to try to learn how to see the historical moment that you find yourself living in. I mean that very simply and I mean it very literally. How do you see the world around you?

Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai on Tools for Truth Empowerment

presented by Christian Sandvig, Eszter Hargittai

[Stefik’s] four ideas about the Internet is that we think about Internet, number one as a library. And this was the 90s and we had this electronic library, the digital library. That doesn’t mean that we digitized libraries, it means that that’s the metaphor we used to think about the Internet, as a place that has information that we can look up. His second was we think of it as the mail. Or you could say the telephone. And so that’s more about individuals and interpersonally communicating in some way. The third is that we think of it as a virtual world. And the fourth is that we think of it as a marketplace.

Political Thought on the Just Rebellion, parts 9 & 10

presented by Stephen Chan

We’ve talked about just war, and we’ve used just war theory as a template for discussing just rebellion. And we’ve talked about the justice that enables a rebellion to take place. And we’ve also talked about what is just conduct within that rebellion, in both cases borrowing from just war theory. What happens, however, if rebellion uses war as one of its instruments to achieve its aims?