Open Transcripts

Data & Society Databite #102: Everybody Runs

presented by Ingrid Burrington

I’ve been trying to get as many weird futures on the table as possible because the truth is there are these sort of ubiquitous futures, right. Ideas about how the world should or will be that have become this sort of mainstream, dominating vernacular that’s primarily kind of about a very white Western masculine vision of the future, and it kind of colonized the ability to think about and imagine technology in the future.

The Conversation #52 — Walter Block

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Neil Prendergast, Walter Block

Benevolence isn’t inefficient and I’m a big fan of benevolence. It’s just that it’s not enough. It’s okay for a group of twenty-five or fifty people where everyone knows everyone. But when you have 300 million in the US or 7 billion in the world, if we were self-sufficient and we had to produce everything for ourselves we’d all die, or 99% of us would die. So we have to cooperate with each other. But the only way to cooperate with each other in such large numbers is through markets.

Data & Society Databite #102: Inform/Transform: Translating Critical Tech Perspectives

presented by Zara Rahman

Over the past couple of years, it feels like civil society has been almost overwhelmed with promises of how technology can suddenly magically solve the problems that we’re trying to address. Some coming from tech giants who say they’ve developed some semblance of social conscience suddenly. Some from startups who see a problem and think that technology can help without thinking about the systemic issues underlying it.

Data & Society Databite #102: The Entropy of a System

presented by Tega Brain

I’m particularly concerned with how to design from the dystopian position of the Anthropocene. How to make creative work that is simultaneously critical and generative. What does it mean to have augmented the atmosphere and the ocean’s capacity to absorb heat? And to be rapidly increasing the entropy of those systems?

Where Are The Black Designers?

presented by Maurice Cherry

How many black designers do you know? If you find that there’s not many or you don’t know any at all, that’s actually perfectly okay. That’s fine. And part of the reasoning I think behind this is that you know, we don’t really know where they are. We don’t see them because they’re not reflected in our design media.

Defying Faith

presented by Eric Salobir, Jonathan Zittrain, Maria Zuber

The challenge for the Church and for the theologians was to say okay, perhaps that’s what is written. But for example if you consider that God has delivered the Creation in seven days, knowing that nowadays Amazon can deliver everything on Earth overnight, it means that Jeff Bezos has defeated God? Or does it mean something different? And I think it means probably something different.

Loving Out Loud in a Time of Hate Speech

presented by Jillian C York

Dangerous speech, as opposed hate speech, is defined basically as speech that seeks to incite violence against people. And that’s the kind of speech that I’m really concerned about right now. That’s what we’re seeing on the rise in the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere.

Ex Oriente Make
The Future of Maker Culture is Made in China

presented by Silvia Lindtner

Making took rise at a moment when people began— Not just scholars but also media—public media and people working in the tech industry—began critiquing earlier visions and ideas of the knowledge economy and saying the knowledge economy, or ideas like the creative class as propagated by Richard Florida, were sharply critiqued because they did not deliver what they had originally promised.

The Conversation #51 — Phyllis Tickle

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Phyllis Tickle

Historians get really nervous about patterns. That’s changing a bit now. And the truth of it is there’s not much way to avoid the 500-year cycle. You almost have to work too hard to unsay it, it’s so obviously there in every way. And if you say every 500 years we go through one, then you immediately say we’re in the 21^st century and baby are we going through one.

Define American

presented by Jose Antonio Vargas

The reality is we have been so busy calling people names, obsessing over borders and walls, and spreading misinformation that we haven’t even asked hard questions like why do people move? What does US foreign policy and US trade agreements have to do with migration patterns? Remember when those children started walking from Central America to here, and CBS News and a lot of organizations called them “illegal immigrant” children instead of calling them the refugees that they are? What did we do to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala so that their countries got so violent that they have to come here? Who started the drug war? What did NAFTA do not only to the United States but to Mexicans, right?