Open Transcripts

Is Digital Culture Responsible for Post-Truth Politics?

presented by Eliane Glaser

I’m going to argue today that even while we know post-truth politics is having a terrible effect on our political culture and our role as citizens, it’s curiously difficult to combat it because of a set of beliefs about what politics is, and about the Internet and the way it enables ordinary people to have a voice. And these beliefs intersect with a prevailing anti-intellectual anti-elitism which associates knowledge, discernment, and truth with snobbery and power.

Roger Scruton on Alternatives to Idealism

presented by Roger Scruton

The 20^th century was created by idealism. Communism and fascism and Nazism are all based on idealized systems, what the world should be ideally, and how it isn’t what it should be, and therefore we’re entitled to change it radically and take control of it in order to do so.

Film is Evil, Radio is Good

presented by Richard Nash

By and large images tend to always be in the lead, always running ahead because of ease of consumption, because it requires less brain processing on our parts. But text is never obliterated.

Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic

presented by Allison Parrish

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that many of us here today like to see our work as a continuation of say the Tech Model Railroad Club or the Homebrew Computer Club, and certainly the terminology and the values of this conference, like open source for example, have their roots in that era. As a consequence it’s easy to interpret any criticism of the hacker ethic—which is what I’m about to do—as a kind of assault.

Grinder Perspective on Gene Editing Tech

presented by Tim Cannon

I think when you start using this technology for enhancement, that’s when you start to get into the domain of biohacking and kind of human augmentation. Well, I believe that this is a very fertile ground for people to explore, and I think that this involves willing participants who are trying to find out more about the world around them and trying to enhance the human experience. And I think we need to allow that innovation to take place.

Forbidden Research: Why We Can’t Do That

presented by Alexandra Elbakyan, J. Nathan Matias, Karrie Karahalios

Quite often when we’re asking these difficult questions we’re asking about questions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in other cases, when researchers work to advance public knowledge, even on uncontroversial topics, we can still find ourselves forbidden from doing the research or disseminating the research.

Parag Khanna on the Ideal World

presented by Parag Khanna

For most people on an individual level most the time, their future still feels very different from that of other people. We live in a world, for example, of enormous income inequality, right. So even though there is a global economy, it certainly doesn’t feel like one’s sort of day-to-day fate or destiny is linked to those of people around the world, even if it is in very invisible kinds of ways.

Beyond Legal Talismans

presented by Kendra Albert

Once we understand that legal talismans are protective invocations, we have to be critical of them. Even the ones we like. The shorthand is not comprehensible to users. And the shorthand is not comprehensible to people more generally.

Steven Pinker on Why Doom is not Inevitable

presented by Steven Pinker

I don’t think that anything will save the world in the sense of bringing Utopia to Earth. But I think the world could be improved, and that would be the version of the question that I’m very much interested in.

Margaret Atwood on Fiction, the Future, and the Environment

presented by Margaret Atwood

We have already changed the world a lot, not always for the better. Some of it’s for the better, as far as we human beings are concerned. But every time we invent a new technology, we like to play with that technology, and we don’t always foresee the consequences.