Open Transcripts

Creative Resistance: The Role of the Artist

presented by Paola Mendoza

Today, in this country, we are suffering from a mass contraction of the heart. And I firmly believe that it is artists that can reopen the heart of America. It is our duty and our responsibility to do this. The day after the election I was terrified. I didn’t want to get out of my bed. I sat in my bedroom crying. But I remembered the young women that I had told just the night before that it was going to be okay. So I did the only thing that I could do. I got up and I got to work.

Virtual Futures Salon: Radical Technologies, with Adam Greenfield

presented by Adam Greenfield, Luke Robert Mason

I am profoundly envious of people who get to write about settled domains or sort of settled states of affairs in human events. For me, I was dealing with a set of technologies which are either recently emerged or still in the process of emerging. And so it was a continual Red Queen’s race to keep up with these things as they announce themselves to us and try and wrap my head around them, understand what it was that they were proposing, understand what their effects were when deployed in the world.

Tim Hwang on New Media 360

presented by Tim Hwang

We identified a group of users on Twitter and we said as a coding challenge, like social battlebots, write a bot that will embed itself in this network and we will score you based on how well these bots are able to achieve some kind of social change, either in the pattern of connections between people or in the things that people talk about.

Filippo Menczer on Truthy Tweeting

presented by Filippo Menczer

I’m here to tell you little bit about a few examples of truthy memes that we’ve uncovered with the system that we have online. It’s a web site where we track memes coming out of Twitter and we try to see if we could spot some signatures based on the networks of who retweets what, basically, and who mentions whom.

Melanie Sloan on New Media 360

presented by Melanie Sloan

As Executive Director of each of these organizations what Mr. Berman does is he contracts with his own public relations firm, Berman and Company. And all of the staff of Berman and Company then serve as the staff of these different organizations, and they will often have very different titles in all of these different organizations but it’s the same group of about four people.

Money, Power, and the Networked Public Sphere

presented by Yochai Benkler

Bill Keller ends his story in the end in The New York Times Magazine as, “If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the US, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious?”

Good question. Who’s responsible? Half an article before, Keller says, “I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson movie.

Wendell Potter on Deadly Spin

presented by Wendell Potter

Today, because of the digital media, big companies are able to get their propaganda directly to their target audiences, as I was able to do. They can and they do publish and disseminate their own press releases, and their own studies, and their own position papers. All this means that the consumer is often, if not most of the time, at a big disadvantage.

Welcome to the Entreprecariat — Disrupting Precarization

presented by Silvio Lorusso

The reciprocal influence between an entrepreneurialist regime and pervasive precarity, their ambivalent coexistence, is what the concept of the entreprecariat refers to. To articulate some of the ways in which this mutual influence takes place, I’d like to introduce what I would call a postulate of the entreprecariat. So here it is: The more precarity is present, the less entrepreneurialism is voluntary.

Biohacking: The Moral Imperative to Build a Better You

presented by Tim Cannon

I think that we have a moral imperative to change the human being, given the fact that we are built so flawed and built for a time that we no longer live in. There’s a pretty pervasive belief that we kind of stopped evolving from the neck up. And that we don’t have behaviors that are actually stuck inside the human being, and ways in which we’re in this sort of evolutionary lockstep with what we used to be, and not what we are and what we’ve become.

You Are Not a Digital Native (and that’s OK)

presented by Cory Doctorow

You may have heard people come up to you and say like, “Hey, you’re young. That makes you a digital native.” Something about being born after the millennium or born after 1995 or whatever, that makes you sort of mystically tuned in to what the Internet is for, and anything that you do on the Internet must be what the Internet is actually for. And I’m here to tell you that you’re not a digital native. That you’re just someone who uses computers, and you’re no better and no worse than the rest of us at using computers.