Open Transcripts

Cyborg Anthropology and the Evaporation of the Interface

presented by Amber Case

When you look at your online profile, is that really you? It’s a representation of you that can be acted on when you’re not there. But where do you end and the machine begins? The thing is that humans and technology have coevolved with each other over time, being very very cocreative. We have survived because of technology, and technology has survived because of us.

Making Conservation Proactive

presented by Shah Selbe

We’re living in this amazing time. The speed of innovation has created technologies that have literally reimagined industry after industry. Technology has improved almost every tool that we use on a daily basis, and it’s time to start bringing this technology to use for good.

Social Contagion

presented by Sinan Aral

The reason that I am interested in behavioral contagions is that I firmly believe that if we can understand how behaviors spread in a social network and thus in a population from person to person to person to person, that we could potentially promote behaviors like…condom use, or tolerance.

Maria Popova with John Maeda at PopTech 2014

presented by John Maeda, Maria Popova

I think reading and writing are really two forms of the same act, which is a discourse with one’s own mind, and ideally a discourse with another mind. As a reader it’s the author’s, and as a writer it’s the reader’s, you know. But the two sort of feed into each other, and for me writing is just and record of my own becoming.

The Conversation #34 — Douglas Rushkoff

presented by Aengus Anderson, Douglas Rushkoff, Micah Saul

I would say a better place looks like…having dinner with the person who lives next door to you. Knowing who they are. A better place is sharing the same snowblower on your block. The better place is easiest to imagine, and ultimately get to, if we look at it in terms of our incremental moment-to-moment choices.

The Conversation #33 — Priscilla Grim

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Priscilla Grim

I was at a party one time where I was talking to some guy who had been profiled by Adbusters because he was a big climate change guy. And he basically told me…that I needed to be making my own food, I needed to be making my own clothes. So you’re telling me that as a working mother going to school full-time, along with those responsibilities in which I am at home studying most the time, I should be making my daughter’s clothes. I should be whipping up meals from scratch. Um…no.

The Conversation #32 — The Conversation and the Election

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul

It’s like we’ve got all these proxy wars going, where people are fighting bitterly over these things. And if you could sort of go back to the original global conflict almost, of ideas, I think you’d get to some interesting arational assumptions. Some of which would be different. Some of which might be very similar. And then you’d wonder why the hell are these proxy wars going on?

The Conversation #31 — Claire Evans

presented by Aengus Anderson, Claire Evans, Micah Saul

I think if there are people who are able to take a step backwards, take that proverbial zoom out, and realize that everybody’s kind of doing the same thing in different ways, and be able to step from one perspective to the other and ask different kinds of questions based on where they are at any given moment time, then it just becomes a game. I think it becomes joyful and engaging. I mean, I’m not interested in finding the answer to anything. I don’t think there is the answer to anything.

Studying Harm

presented by Fiery Cushman

One of the most recent paradigms that we’ve used to try to get this under experimental control is to ask people to act out pretend harmful actions. So for instance, we’ll give them a disabled handgun. We’ll show them that it’s fake. That it couldn’t possibly harm a fly. We put it in their hands and then we ask them to shoot us in the head.

Our Faces

presented by Sharrona Pearl

The French philosopher Immanuel Levinas has taught us that it is through our interactions with the face of somebody else, it is through encountering the face of another, that our responsibilities to someone else arise. You cannot look at somebody else, truly look at them, and then walk away without having some kind of sense of a relationship towards that person. But what if the other has no face? What then? Or what if the face of the other is actually the face of another person entirely?