Open Transcripts

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

presented by Jaron Lanier, Luke Robert Mason

So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super-open, absolutely non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.

The Conversation #54 — Charles Bowden

presented by Aengus Anderson, Charles Bowden, Micah Saul

I don’t understand the fear. And that’s the biggest threat. And the reason it’s a threat is it makes your judgment bad. You never make good decisions when you’re afraid. And it destroys your ability to clearly look at the facts and do something. You choke, in other words.

The Conversation #53 — Carlos Perez de Alejo

presented by Aengus Anderson, Carlos Perez de Alejo, Micah Saul

I personally think that we need to move beyond this sort of grow or die motivation that exists within the current economy. And I think that the cooperative model is suited to addressing those concerns, especially because the co-op model is geared toward serving member needs and not driven by profit at the end of the day. That is something that bodes well for the model in terms of sustainability.

The Misfit Economy

presented by Kyra Maya Phillips

I’ve spent about four years exploring the dark side of innovation, trying to convince people that there’s actually a lot that we can learn from those who work in the unseen corners of the world. You know, so-called misfits. Pirates, hackers, gangsters, con artists, pranksters, ex-prisoners.

The Internet of Agreements

presented by Vinay Gupta

I was looking for the tools that you could use to solve global problems in an environment when the nation-state has turned out to be a very very ineffective set of machinery at all. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the technology. I’m going to talk a little bit about what it does and where it’s going. And then I’m going to try and tell a story about the kind of global long-term picture that we could get if this stuff actually works.

Biases Abound

presented by Brendan Nyhan

I’ve experienced first hand the challenges of trying to correct misinformation, and in part my academic research builds on that experience and tries understand why it was that so much of what we did at Spinsanity antagonized even those people who were interested enough to go to a fact-checking web site.

The Science of Why We Deny Science and Reality

presented by Chris Mooney

What is it about our brains that makes facts so challenging, so odd and threatening? Why do we sometimes double down on false beliefs? And maybe why do some of us do it more than others?

Kai Wright on Elusive Objectivity

presented by Kai Wright

I actually come at this with a set of questions for folks here. Because before we get to the action question I have questions about the broader problem, right. So when we’re talking about truth and truthiness and in media, I think we first have to ask whose truth matters, and what are its boundaries.

Emily Bell on Elusive Objectivity

presented by Emily Bell

This idea of control is so baked into the journalistic psychology that actually this articulation, done in a highly-controlled environment with an advertising agency, is one which even though it’s not new to the open Web is still very very very new to journalism. And what we don’t have at the moment is anything like a balancing investment in the kinds of things which allow us to participate in the crowd.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Elusive Objectivity

presented by Kathleen Hall Jamieson

The danger is that we are taking the agenda that is being set by those who are the political players, and by checking within it ignoring the things that are consequential that we ought to be debating, that to some extent exist in another world which is a world about what is desirable and good, and what the trade-offs actually are and how we should arbitrate those track trade-offs.