Podcasts about utopian

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villain-Venice-Steampunk-Adventure-Expanded/dp/B0GYVW1ZM3?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE notes from wiki This article is about the novel. For the 1997 film, see Starship Troopers (film). For other uses, see Starship Troopers (disambiguation). Starship Troopers First edition hardcover Author Robert A. Heinlein Cover artist Jerry Robinson Language English Genre Military science fiction Philosophical fiction[1][2][3] Publisher G. P. Putnam's Sons Publication date November 5, 1959[4] Publication place United States Media type Print (hardcover and paperback) Pages 263 (paperback edition) Award Hugo Award for Best Novel (1960) ISBN 978-0450044496 Online Computer Library Center number"}]]}"> OCLC 2797649 Library of Congress Classification"}]]}"> LC Class PZ7.H368 Su Starship Troopers is a military science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. Written in a few weeks in reaction to the US suspending nuclear tests,[5] the story was first published as a two-part serial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as Starship Soldier, and published as a book by G. P. Putnam's Sons on November 5, 1959.[4] The story is set in a future society ruled by a human interstellar government called the Terran Federation, dominated by a military elite. Under the Terran Federation, only veterans of a primarily military Federal Service enjoy full citizenship, including the right to vote.[6] The first-person narrative follows Juan "Johnny" Rico, a young man of Filipino descent, through his military service in the Mobile Infantry. He progresses from recruit to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between humans and an alien species known as "Arachnids" or "Bugs". Interspersed with the primary plot are classroom scenes in which Rico and others discuss philosophical and moral issues, including aspects of suffrage, civic virtue, juvenile delinquency, and war; these discussions have been described as expounding Heinlein's own political views.[7] Identified with a tradition of militarism in US science fiction,[8] the novel draws parallels between the conflict between humans and the Bugs, and the Cold War.[9] It is also a coming-of-age novel, which criticizes the US society of the 1950s, arguing that a lack of discipline had led to a moral decline, and advocating corporal and capital punishment.[7][10] Starship Troopers brought to an end Heinlein's series of juvenile novels. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960,[3] and was praised by reviewers for its scenes of training and combat and its visualization of a future military.[11][12] It also became enormously controversial because of the political views it seemed to support. Reviewers were strongly critical of the book's intentional glorification of the military,[13][14] an aspect described as propaganda and likened to recruitment.[15] The novel's militarism, and the fact that government service – most often military service – was a prerequisite to the right to vote, led to it being frequently described as fascist.[14][16][17] Others disagree, arguing that Heinlein was only exploring the idea of limiting the right to vote to a certain group of people.[18] Heinlein's depiction of gender has also been questioned, while reviewers have said that the terms used to describe the aliens were akin to racial epithets.[19] Starship Troopers had wide influence both within and outside science fiction. Ken MacLeod stated that "the political strand in [science fiction] can be described as a dialogue with Heinlein".[2] Science fiction critic Darko Suvin wrote that it is the "ancestral text of US science fiction militarism" and that it shaped the debate about the role of the military in society for many years.[20] The novel is credited with popularizing the idea of powered armor, which became a recurring feature in science fiction books and films, as well as an object of scientific research.[21] Heinlein's depiction of a futuristic military was also influential.[22] Later science fiction books, such as Joe Haldeman's 1974 anti-war novel The Forever War, have been described as reactions to Starship Troopers.[23] The story was adapted several times, including in a 1997 film version directed by Paul Verhoeven that satirized what the director saw as the fascist aspects of the novel.[24] Writing and publication The cover of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (November 1959), illustrating Starship Soldier Robert Heinlein was among the best-selling science fiction authors of the 1940s and 1950s, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke; they were known as the "big three" that dominated US science fiction. In contrast to the others, Heinlein firmly endorsed the anti-communist sentiment of the Cold War era in his writing.[25] Heinlein served in the US Navy for five years after graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1929. His experience in the military profoundly influenced his fiction.[26] At some point between 1958 and 1959, Heinlein put aside the novel that would become Stranger in a Strange Land and wrote Starship Troopers. His motivation arose partially from his anger at US President Dwight Eisenhower's decision to suspend US nuclear tests, and the Soviet tests that occurred soon afterward.[5] Writing in his 1980 volume Expanded Universe, Heinlein would say that the publication of a newspaper advertisement placed by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy on April 5, 1958, calling for a unilateral suspension of nuclear weapons testing by the United States sparked his desire to write Starship Troopers.[27] Heinlein and his wife Virginia created the "Patrick Henry League" in an attempt to create support for the US nuclear testing program. Heinlein stated that he used the novel to clarify his military and political views.[28] Like many of Heinlein's books, Starship Troopers was completed in a few weeks. It was originally written as a juvenile novel for New York publishing house Scribner; Heinlein had previously had success with this format, having written several such novels published by that publisher. The manuscript was rejected, prompting Heinlein to end his association with that publisher completely, and to resume writing books with adult themes.[5][19][29] Scholars have suggested that Scribner's rejection was based on ideological objections to the content of the novel, particularly in its treatment of military conflict.[19][30] The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction first published Starship Troopers in October and November 1959 as a two-part serial titled Starship Soldier.[29] A senior editor at Putnam's, Peter Israel, purchased the manuscript and approved revisions that made it more marketable to adults. Asked whether it was aimed at children or adults, he said at a sales conference "Let's let the readers decide who likes it."[31] The novel was eventually published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.[29] Setting Set approximately 700 years in the future,[19] the book depicts an Earth ruled by a world government run by military veterans.[6] The society is depicted as affluent, and futuristic technology shown as coexisting with educational methods from the 20th century.[19] The rights of a full citizen, to vote and hold public office, are not universally guaranteed, and rather must be earned through Federal Service.[18] Those who do not perform this service (of which only military service has been described) retain the rights of free speech and assembly, but can neither vote nor hold public office. People of either sex above the age of 18 are permitted to enlist; only those who complete their service receive the right to vote.[19][32] Important government jobs are reserved for federal service veterans.[6] This structure arose ad hoc after the collapse of the "20th century Western democracies", driven in part by an inability to control crime and juvenile delinquency, particularly in North America, and a war between an alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia, against the "Chinese Hegemony".[33] Two extraterrestrial civilizations are depicted, respectively, as the "Pseudo-Arachnids" (or "Bugs"), and the "Skinnies". The "Bugs" are described as communal beings originating from the planet of Klendathu, and consist of multiple castes; workers, warriors, brains, and queens, similar to those of ants and termites on Earth. The warriors are the only ones who fight, and are unable to surrender in battle.[34] It also is implied that the Bugs are technologically advanced, possessing such technologies as spaceships.[35] The "Skinnies" are depicted as less communal than the Arachnids, yet more so than humans.[36] The events of the novel take place during an interstellar war between the Terran Federation and the Arachnids.[37] At the opening of the story, Earth is not at war, yet such a declaration has come when Rico has completed his training.[5] The "Skinnies" are initially allies of the Pseudo-Arachnids, but switch to alliance with humans, midway through the novel.[36] Faster-than-light travel exists in this future: spacecraft use the "Cherenkov drive", and can travel "Sol to Capella, forty-six lightyears, in under six weeks".[38] Starship Troopers is narrated by the main protagonist Juan "Johnny" Rico, a member of the "Mobile Infantry". It is one of the few Heinlein novels which intersperses his typical linear narrative structure with a series of flashbacks.[5][37] These flashbacks are frequently to Rico's "History and Moral Philosophy" course in school, in which the teacher discusses the history of the structure of their society.[5][18] Rico is depicted as a man of Filipino ancestry. He is from a wealthy family, whose members had never served in the military.[5][19][32] Rico's ancestry is depicted as inconsequential, society having finally abandoned racial and gender-based prejudice.[19] Plot The novel opens with Rico aboard the corvette transport Rodger Young (named after real life Medal of Honor recipient Rodger Young),[39] serving with the platoon known as "Rasczak's Roughnecks". The platoon carries out a raid against a planetary colony held by Skinnies.[19] The raid is relatively brief: the platoon lands on the planet, destroys its targets, and retreats, suffering two casualties in the process. One of them, Dizzy Flores, is rescued by Rico but dies while returning to orbit.[40] The narrative then flashes back to Rico's graduation from high school. Rico and his best friend Carl are considering joining the Federal Service after graduation; Rico is hesitant, partly due to his father's attitude towards the military.[5] Rico makes his decision after discovering that his classmate Carmen Ibañez also intends to enlist.[41] Rico's choice is taken poorly by his parents, and he leaves with a sense of estrangement. He is assigned to the Mobile Infantry, and moves to Camp Arthur Currie (named for Sir Arthur Currie who rose through the ranks to command the Canadian Corps in World War I) on the Canadian prairie for his training under Sergeant Charles Zim.[42] The training is extremely demanding.[43] Rico receives combat training of all types, including simulated fights in armored suits.[44][45] A fellow recruit is court-martialed, flogged, and dismissed for striking a drill instructor who was also his company commander. Rico himself is given five lashes for firing a rocket during a drill with armored suits and simulated nuclear weapons without ensuring that no friendlies were within the blast zone, which in combat would have resulted in the death of a fellow soldier.[46] Another recruit, who murdered a baby girl after deserting the army, is hanged by his battalion after his arrest by civilian police.[46] Disheartened, Rico thinks of resigning when he receives a letter from Jean Dubois, who taught Rico History and Moral Philosophy.[47] Dubois reveals that he was once a lieutenant colonel in the Mobile Infantry, which gives Rico the motivation not to resign.[48] After further training at another camp near Vancouver, Rico graduates with 187 others, of the 2,009 who had begun training in that regiment.[49] The "Bug War" has changed from minor incidents to a full-scale war during Rico's training. An Arachnid attack that annihilates the city of Buenos Aires alerts civilians to the situation; Rico's mother is killed in the attack.[50] Rico participates in the Battle of Klendathu, an attack on the Arachnid's home world, which turns into a disastrous defeat for the Terran Federation.[51] Rico's ship, the Valley Forge, is destroyed, and his unit is decimated; he is reassigned to the Roughnecks on board the Rodger Young, led by Lieutenant Rasczak and Sergeant Jelal.[52] The unit carries out several raids, and Rico is promoted to corporal by Jelal after Rasczak dies in combat.[53] One of his comrades in the Roughnecks suggests that Rico go to officer training school and try to become an officer. Rico ends up going to see Jelal, and finds that Jelal already had the paperwork ready. Rico enters Officer Candidate School for a second course of training, including further courses in "History and Moral Philosophy".[54][55] En route from the Roughnecks to the school Rico encounters his father who has also enlisted and is now a corporal, and the two reconcile. He is also visited in school by Carmen, now an ensign and ship's pilot officer in the Navy, and the two discuss their friend Carl, who had been killed earlier in the war.[56] Rico is commissioned a temporary third lieutenant for his final test: a posting to a combat unit. Under the tutelage of his company commander, Captain Blackstone, and with the aid of his platoon sergeant, his boot camp drill instructor Fleet Sergeant Zim, Rico commands a platoon during "Operation Royalty", a raid to capture members of the Arachnid brain caste and queens.[57] Rico then returns to the officer school to graduate. The novel ends with him holding the rank of second lieutenant, in command of his old platoon in the Rodger Young, with his father as his platoon sergeant. The platoon has been renamed "Rico's Roughnecks", and is about to participate in an attack on Klendathu.[58] Themes Robert Heinlein in 1976 Commentators have written that Starship Troopers is not driven by its plot, though it contains scenes of military combat. Instead, much of the novel is given over to a discussion of ideas.[59] In particular, the discussion of political views is a recurring feature of what scholar Jeffrey Cass described as an "ideologically intense" book.[16] A 1997 review in Salon categorized it as a "philosophical novel".[1] Critics have debated to what extent the novel promotes Heinlein's own political views. Some contend that the novel maintains a sense of irony that allows readers to draw their own conclusions; others argue that Heinlein is sermonizing throughout the book, and that its purpose is to expound Heinlein's militaristic philosophy.[16][18] Militarism Starship Troopers has been identified as being a part of a tradition in American science fiction that assumes that violent conflict and the militarization of society are inevitable and necessary.[8] Although the Mobile Infantry, the force to which Rico is assigned, is seen as a lowly post by the characters in the story, the novel itself suggests that it is the heart of the army and the most honorable unit in it.[43] In a commentary written in 1980, Heinlein agreed that Starship Troopers "glorifies the military ... Specifically the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who places his frail body between his loved home and the war's desolation – but is rarely appreciated ... he has the toughest job of all and should be honored."[13] The story is based on the social Darwinist idea of society as a struggle for survival based on military strength. It suggests that some conflicts must be resolved by force: one of the lessons Rico is repeatedly taught is that violence can be an effective method of settling conflict.[19] These suggestions derive in part from Heinlein's view that in the 1950s the US government was being too conciliatory in its dealings with communist China and the Soviet Union.[17][59][60][61] Heinlein draws an analogy between the human society in the novel, which is well-to-do but needs to be vigilant against the imperialist threat of the Arachnids, and US society of the 1950s. Reviewers have suggested that the Arachnids are Heinlein's analogue for communists. Traits used to support this include the communal nature of the Arachnids, which makes them capable of a much higher degree of coordination than the humans. Bug society is once explicitly described as communist, and is moreover depicted as communist by nature; this has been read as implying that those with a different political ideology are analogous to alien beings.[9][19][62] The related motifs of alien invasion, patriotism, and personal sacrifice during war, are present, as are other aspects of US popular culture of the 1950s.[17] Commentators have argued that Heinlein's portrayal of aliens, as well as being a reference to 1950s communist countries, aims to "reinscribe the ideologies of America's mythic frontier history". The concept of the frontier includes a social-Darwinist argument of constantly fighting for survival, even at the expense of indigenous people or, in the case of Starship Troopers, of aliens. Heinlein suggests that without territorial expansion involving violent conquest of other races, humans would be destroyed.[63] Scholar Jamie King has stated that Heinlein does not address the question of what the military government and Federal Service would do in peacetime, and argues that Heinlein has set up a society designed to be continuously at war, and to keep expanding its territory.[64] Coming of age Starship Troopers has been referred to as a bildungsroman or "coming-of-age" story for Rico, as he matures through his tenure in the infantry. His training, both at boot camp and at officer candidate school, involves learning the value of militarism, thus inviting the reader to learn it as well.[43] This is especially true of the parts of his training that involve indoctrination, such as the claim by one of his instructors that rule by military veterans is the ideal form of government, because only they understand how to put collective well-being above the individual.[43] The story traces Rico's transformation from a boy into a soldier, while exploring issues of identity and motivation,[18] and traces his overall moral and social development, in a manner identified by commentators as similar to many stories about German soldiers in World War I.[65] Rico's transformation has been likened to the common narrative within stories with military themes by scholar H. Bruce Franklin. This typical narrative is that of a sloppy and unfit civilian being knocked into shape by tough officers, whose training is "calculated sadism" but is depicted as fundamentally being on the right side.[32] The letter Rico receives from Dubois, partly responsible for Rico "crossing the hump" with his training, is shown as a turning point in his development.[19] The classroom scenes embedded in the story serve to explain Rico's adventures, and highlight his reactions to events around. A notable example is the execution Rico is forced to witness after a deserter from his unit murders a young girl; Rico is uncertain of his own reaction until he remembers a lecture by Dubois in which the latter argues that "moral sense" derives entirely from the will to survive.[19][66] The concept of the American frontier is also related to the coming-of-age theme. Young protagonists across Heinlein's novels attain manhood by confronting a hostile "wilderness" in space; coming-of-age in a military, alien context is a common theme in Heinlein's earlier works as well.[67] Rico's coming-of-age has also been described as being related to his relationship with his father; the journey "outward" through the novel also contains a search for Rico's childhood and a reunion with his estranged parent.[68] Moral decline Starship Troopers also critiques US society of the 1950s, suggesting that it led young people to be spoiled and undisciplined. These beliefs are expressed through the classroom lectures of Dubois, Rico's teacher for History and Moral Philosophy. Dubois praises flogging and other types of corporal punishment as a means of addressing juvenile crimes. It has been suggested that Heinlein endorsed this view, although the fact that Dubois also compares raising children to training a puppy has been used to argue that Heinlein was making use of irony.[10] The story is strongly in favor of corporal punishment and capital punishment, as a means of correcting juvenile delinquents, part of a trend in science fiction which examines technology and outer space in an innovative manner, but is reactionary with respect to human relationships.[7][23] As with other books by Heinlein, traditional schools are denigrated, while learning "on the spot" is extolled: Rico is able to master the things required of him in military training without undue difficulty.[19] Dubois also ridicules the idea of inalienable rights, such as "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", arguing that people have only the rights that they are willing to fight and die for to protect.[33][66][69] The novel appeals to scientific authority to justify this position; Dubois repeatedly states that his argument is mathematically demonstrable, statements which have led scholars to label the novel "hard science fiction", despite its social and political themes.[70] The "moral decline" caused by this situation is depicted as having caused a global war between an alliance of the US, Britain, and Russia against the "Chinese Hegemony" in the year 1987. Despite the alliance between the US and Russia, this war has been described as demonstrating Heinlein's anti-communist beliefs, which saw "swarming hordes" of Chinese as a bigger threat. The novel draws some comparisons between the Chinese and the Arachnids, and suggests that the lessons of one war could be applied to the other.[69] Reception To Heinlein's surprise,[71] Starship Troopers won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960.[72] It has been acknowledged as one of the best-known and most influential works of science fiction.[2][21] The novel is considered a landmark for the genre, having been described by a 1960 review as one of the ten best genre books of 1959,[73] in a 2009 review as a key science fiction novel of the 1950s,[14] and as the best-known example of military science fiction.[74] The novel has been described as marking Heinlein's transition from writing juvenile fiction to a "more mature phase" as an author.[3] Reviewing the book with others written for children, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction wrote in 1960 that "Heinlein has penned a juvenile that really is not. This is a new and bitter and disillusioned Heinlein". Rating it 2.5 stars out of five for children, 4.5 stars for adults, and "?" for civilians, he believed that the novel would be "of exceptional interest to veterans with battle experience ... but youngsters will find it melancholy and verbose".[75] Conversely, Michael Moorcock described it as Heinlein's last "straight" science fiction, before he turned to more serious writing such as Stranger in a Strange Land.[76] By 1980, twenty years after its release, Starship Troopers had been translated into eleven languages and was still selling strongly. Heinlein nevertheless complained that, despite this success, almost all the mail he received about it was negative and he only heard about it "when someone wants to chew me out".[71] The novel is highly contentious.[3] Controversy surrounded its praise of the military and approval of violence, to the extent that it has frequently been described as fascist, and its implication that militarism is superior to traditional democracy.[3][77] Heinlein's peers were among those who argued over the book; a comparison between a quote in Starship Troopers that "the noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and war's desolation"[78] and the anti-war poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen began a two-year discussion in the Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies from 1959 to 1961, with James Blish, Poul Anderson, Philip José Farmer, Anthony Boucher, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, among those debating Starship Troopers's quality of writing, philosophy, and morality.[79] The writing in Starship Troopers has received varied responses, with the scenes of military training and combat receiving praise. In a 2009 retrospective, science-fiction writer Jo Walton wrote that Starship Troopers was "military SF done extremely well".[18] She went on to argue that "Heinlein was absolutely at his peak when he wrote this in 1959. He had so much technical stylistic mastery of the craft of writing science fiction that he could [tell the story] 'backwards and in high heels' and get away with it."[18] Others referred to it as very readable, and found the military scenes compelling.[3][11][12] Heinlein's descriptions of training and boot camp in the novel, based on his own experiences in the military, have been described as being rendered with remarkable skill.[17] A 1960 review in the New York Herald Tribune praised the "brilliantly written" passages describing infantry combat, and also called attention to the discussion of weapons and armor,[80] which, according to other reviewers, demonstrated Heinlein's "undiminished talent for invention".[19] Scholar George Slusser described the book in 1986 as the "ultimately convincing space-war epic", praising in particular the "precisely imagined" weapons and tactics,[68] while a 1979 science fiction encyclopedia referred to it as the "slickest" of Heinlein's juvenile books.[19] Criticism of the style of the book has centered on its political aspects. Heinlein's discussions of his political beliefs were criticized as "didactic",[11][80][81] and the novel was derided for "exposition [that was] inserted in large indigestible chunks".[80] Author Ken MacLeod's 2003 analysis of the political nature of Starship Troopers stated that it was "a book where civics infodumps and accounts of brutal boot-camp training far outweigh the thin and tensionless combat scenes".[12] Scientist and author Brunner compared it to a "Victorian children's book",[82] while the Science Fiction Handbook published in 2009 said that the novel provided "compelling images of a futuristic military" and that it raised important questions, even for those who disagree with its political ideology. However, it stated that the story was weak as a tale of an alien encounter, as it did not explore alien society in any detail, but presented the Arachnids as nameless and faceless creatures that wished to destroy humanity.[22] Boucher, founder of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, remarked in 1960 that Heinlein had "forgotten to insert a story".[80] A 1979 summary said that though Heinlein's vision might verge on fascism, his tightly controlled narrative made his ideology seem "vibrantly appealing".[19] Criticism of militarism Starship Troopers is generally considered to promote militarism, the glorification of war and of the military.[14] Scholar Bruce Franklin referred to it in 1980 as a "bugle-blowing, drum-beating glorification" of military service, and wrote that militarism and imperialism were the explicit message of the book.[15][83] Science fiction writer Dean McLaughlin called it "a book-length recruiting poster".[84] In 1968 science fiction critic Alexei Panshin called Starship Troopers a militaristic polemic and compared it to a recruiting film, stating that it "purports to show the life of a typical soldier, with a soundtrack commentary by earnest sincere Private Jones who interprets what we see for us." Panshin stated that there was no "sustained human conflict" in the book: instead, "All the soldiers we see are tough, smart, competent, cleancut, clean-shaven, and noble."[85] Panshin, a veteran of the peacetime military, argued that Heinlein glossed over the reality of military life, and that the Terran Federation-Arachnid conflict existed simply because, "Starship troopers are not half so glorious sitting on their butts polishing their weapons for the tenth time for lack of anything else to do."[85] Literature scholar George Slusser, in describing the novel as "wrong-headed and retrogressive", argued that calling its ideology militarism or imperialism was inadequate, as these descriptions suggested an economic motive. Slusser instead says that Heinlein advocates for a complete "technological subjugation of nature", of which the Arachnids are a symbol, and that this subjugation itself is depicted as a sign of human advancement.[83] A 1997 review of the film in Salon stated that the novel could almost be described as propaganda, and was terrifying as a result, particularly in its belief that the boot camp had to be an ingredient of any civilization. This was described as a highly unusual utopian vision.[1] Moorcock stated that the lessons Rico learns in boot camp: "wars are inevitable, [and] that the army is always right".[76] In discussing the book's utility in classroom discussions of the form of government, Alan Myers stated that its depiction of the military was of an "unashamedly Earth-chauvinist nature".[11] In the words of science fiction scholar Darko Suvin, Starship Troopers was an "unsubtle but powerful black-and-white paean to combat life", and an example of agitprop in favor of military values.[81] Other writers defended Heinlein. George Price argued that "[Heinlein] implies, first, that war is something endured, not enjoyed, and second, that war is so unpleasant, so desolate, that it must at all costs be kept away from one's home."[86] Poul Anderson also defended some of the novel's positions, arguing "Heinlein has recognized the problem of selective versus nonselective franchise, and his proposed solution does merit discussion."[87] Complaints were made against Heinlein for the lack of conscription in Starship Troopers. When he wrote the novel, the military draft was still in effect in the US.[88] Allegations of fascism The society within the book has frequently been described as fascist.[14][16][17] According to the 2009 Science Fiction Handbook, it had the effect of giving Heinlein a reputation as a "fanatical warmongering fascist".[6] Scholar Jeffrey Cass has referred to the setting of the book as "unremittingly grim fascism". He has stated that the novel made an analogy between its military conflict and those of the US after World War II, and that it justified American imperialism in the name of fighting another form of imperialism.[89] Jasper Goss has referred to it as "crypto-fascist".[17] Suvin compares Heinlein's suggestion that "all wars arise from population pressure" to the Nazi concept of Lebensraum or "living space" for a superior society that was used to justify territorial expansion.[90] Some reviewers have suggested that Heinlein was simply discussing the merits of a selective versus a nonselective franchise.[18] Heinlein made a similar claim, over two decades after Starship Troopers's publication, in his Expanded Universe and further claimed that 95 percent of "veterans" were not military personnel but members of the civil service.[91] Heinlein's own description has been disputed, even among the book's defenders. Heinlein scholar James Gifford has argued that a number of quotes within the novel suggest that the characters within the book assume that the Federal Service is largely military. For instance, when Rico tells his father that he is interested in Federal Service, his father immediately explains his belief that Federal Service is a bad idea because there is no war in progress, indicating that he sees Federal Service as military in nature. Gifford states that although Heinlein's intentions may have been that Federal Service be 95 percent non-military, in relation to the actual contents of the book, Heinlein "is wrong on this point. Flatly so."[5] Dennis Showalter, writing in 1975, defended Starship Troopers, stating that the society depicted in it did not contain many elements of fascism. He argues that the novel does not include outright opposition to Bolshevism and liberalism that would be expected in a fascist society.[89] Others have responded by saying Showalter's argument is based on a literal reading of the novel, and that the story glorifies militarism to a large extent.[89] Ken Macleod argues that the book does not actually advocate fascism because anybody capable of understanding the oath of Federal Service is able to enlist and thereby obtain political power.[12] Macleod states that Heinlein's books are consistently liberal, but cover a spectrum from democratic to elitist forms of liberalism, Starship Troopers being on the latter end of the spectrum.[2] It has been argued that Heinlein's militarism is more libertarian than fascist, and that this trend is also present in Heinlein's other popular books of the period, such as Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). This period of Heinlein's writing has received more critical attention than any other, although he continued to write into the 1980s.[14] Apparent utopianism The setting of the book is presented by Heinlein as utopian; its leaders are shown as good and wise, and the population as free and prosperous.[6][19] Slusser wrote in 1987 that Starship Troopers depicts a world that is "hell for human beings", but nonetheless celebrates the ideology of its fictional society.[83] The rulers are claimed to be the best in history, because they understand that human nature is to fight for power through the use of force.[43] The suggestion of utopia is not explored in depth, as the lives of those outside the military are not shown in any detail.[19][22] The novel suggests that the militarist philosophy espoused by many of the characters has a mathematical backing, though reviewers have commented that Heinlein does not present any basis for this.[18][43] Writers such as Farmer, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and Michael Moorcock have criticized the novel for being a hypothetical utopia, in the sense that while Heinlein's ideas sound plausible, they have never been put to the test. Moorcock wrote an essay entitled "Starship Stormtroopers" in which he attacked Heinlein and other writers over similar "Utopian fiction".[76] Lowndes accused Heinlein of using straw man arguments, "countering ingenuous half-truths with brilliant half-truths".[92] Lowndes further argued that the Terran Federation could never be as idealistic as Heinlein portrays it to be because he never properly addressed "whether or not [non-citizens] have at least as full a measure of civil redress against official injustice as we have today".[92] Farmer agreed, arguing that a "world ruled by veterans would be as mismanaged, graft-ridden, and insane as one ruled by men who had never gotten near the odor of blood and guts".[93] Race and gender Authors and commentators have stated that the manner in which the extraterrestrial beings are portrayed in Starship Troopers has racist aspects, arguing that the nicknames "Bugs" and "Skinnies" carry racial overtones. John Brunner compared them to calling Koreans "gooks".[82] Slusser argued that the term "Bugs" was an "abusive and biologically inaccurate" word that justified the violence against alien beings, a tendency which, according to Slusser, the book shared with other commercially successful science fiction.[62] Some of Heinlein's other works have also been described as racist, though Franklin argues that this was not unique to Heinlein, and that he was less racist than the US government of the time.[94] Heinlein's early novel Sixth Column was called a "racist paean" to a white resistance movement against an Asian horde derived from the Yellow Peril.[95] In 1978, Moorcock wrote that Starship Troopers "set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic" stories.[76] Robert Lowndes argues that the war between the Terrans and the Arachnids is not about a quest for racial purity, but rather an extension of Heinlein's belief that man is a wild animal. According to this theory, if man lacks a moral compass beyond the will to survive, and he was confronted by another species with a similar lack of morality, then the only possible moral result would be warfare.[92] The fact that all pilots in the novel are women (in contrast to the infantry, which is entirely male) has been cited as evidence of progressive gender politics within the story, although the idea expressed by Rico that women are the motivation for men to fight in the military is a counter-example to this.[18][22] A 1996 science fiction encyclopedia said that like much of Heinlein's fiction, Starship Troopers exemplified "macho male culture".[96] The prosthetically enhanced soldiers in the novel, all of whom are men, have been described as an example of the "hyper-masculinity" brought on by the proximity of these men to technology.[97] The story portrays the Arachnids as so alien that the only response to them can be war. Feminist scholars have described this reaction as a "conventionally masculinist" one.[98] Steffen Hantke has described the mechanized suits in the novel, which make the wearer resemble a "steel gorilla," as defining masculinity as "something intensely physical, based on animal power, instinct, and aggression". He calls this form of masculinity "all body, so to speak, and no brain".[99] Thus, in Hantke's reading, Starship Troopers expresses fears of how masculinity may be preserved in an environment of high technology.[100] This fear is exacerbated by the motifs of pregnancy and birth that Heinlein uses when describing how the soldiers in suits are dropped from spaceships piloted by women.[101] Though Rico says he finds women "marvelous", he shows no desire for sexual activity; the war seems to have subsumed sex in this respect.[19] A 1979 summary argued that despite the gestures towards women's equality, women in the story were still objects, to be protected, and to fight wars over.[19] Influence A real-life concept of powered armor, an idea popularized by Starship Troopers[102] Heinlein's books, and Starship Troopers in particular, had an enormous impact on political science fiction, to the extent that author Ken MacLeod has stated that "the political strand in [science fiction] can be described as a dialogue with Heinlein," although many participants in this dialogue disagree with Heinlein.[2] Science fiction critic Darko Suvin states that Starship Troopers is the "ancestral text of US science fiction militarism" and that it shaped the debate about the role of the military in society for many years.[20] In addition to his political views, Heinlein's ideas about a futuristic military as depicted in the novel were deeply influential among films, books, and television shows in later years.[22] Roger Beaumont has suggested that Starship Troopers may some day be considered a manual for extraterrestrial warfare.[103] Suvin refers to Juan Rico as the "archetypal Space Soldier".[104] Starship Troopers included concepts in military engineering which have since been widely used in other fiction, and which have occasionally been paralleled by scientific research. The novel has been cited as the source of the idea of powered armor exoskeletons, which Heinlein describes in great detail.[83][105][106][107] Such suits became a staple of military science fiction. Franchises that have employed this technology include Iron Man, Exo Squad, Halo, District 9, Elysium, and Edge of Tomorrow.[21] During the shooting of the science fiction film Aliens, director James Cameron required the actors playing space marines to read Starship Troopers to understand their parts, and also cited it as an influence for the space drop, terms like "bug hunt", and the cargo-loader exoskeleton.[108] Starship Troopers had a direct influence on many later science fiction stories. John Steakley's 1984 novel Armor was, according to the author, born out of frustration with the small amount of actual combat in Starship Troopers and because he wanted this aspect developed further.[109] The "Mobile Suits" from the 1979 Nippon Sunrise anime series Mobile Suit Gundam were inspired by the powered armor from Starship Troopers.[110] The 1988 Gainax OVA series Gunbuster has plot elements similar to Starship Troopers, depicting humanity arrayed against an alien military.[107] Scholars have identified elements of Heinlein's influence in Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, as well. Hantke, in particular, compares the battle room in Ender's Game to Heinlein's prosthetic suits, stating that they both regulate but also enhance human agency.[111] Suvin suggests parallels between the plots of the two novels, with human society in both stories at war against insect-like aliens, but states that the story of Ender Wiggin takes a very different direction, as Ender regrets his genocidal actions and dedicates his efforts to protecting his erstwhile targets.[104] Conversely, Joe Haldeman's 1974 anti-war, Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction novel The Forever War is popularly thought to be a direct reply to Starship Troopers, and though Haldeman has stated that it is actually a result of his personal experiences in the Vietnam War, he has admitted to being influenced by Starship Troopers.[112][113][114] Haldeman said that he disagreed with Starship Troopers because it "glorifies war", but added that "it's a very well-crafted novel, and I believe Heinlein was honest with it".[112] The Forever War contains several parallels to Starship Troopers, including its setting. Commentators have described it as a reaction to Heinlein's novel, a suggestion Haldeman denies; the two novels are very different in terms of their attitude towards the military. The Forever War does not depict war as a noble pursuit, with the sides clearly defined as good and evil; instead, the novel explores the dehumanizing effect of war, influenced by the real world context of the Vietnam War.[23] Haldeman received a letter from Heinlein, congratulating him on his Nebula Award, which "meant more than the award itself".[115] According to author Spider Robinson, Heinlein approached Haldeman at the awards banquet and said the book "may be the best future war story I've ever read!"[116] Harry Harrison's 1965 novel Bill, the Galactic Hero has also been described as a reaction to Starship Troopers,[6] while Gordon R. Dickson's 1961 novel Naked to the Stars has been called "an obvious rejoinder" to Starship Troopers.[117] Ring of Swords, written by Eleanor Arnason in 1993, also depicts a war between two highly aggressive species, of which humans are one. The story deliberately inverts several aspects of Starship Troopers: the story is told from the point of view of diplomats seeking to prevent war, rather than soldiers fighting it, and the conflict is the result of the two species being extremely similar, rather than different.[118] Adaptations 1997 film Main article: Starship Troopers (film) Further information: Starship Troopers (franchise) The film rights to the novel were licensed in the 1990s, several years after Heinlein's death. The project was originally entitled Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, and had been in production before the producers bought the rights to Starship Troopers.[119][120][121] The film was directed by Paul Verhoeven (who found the book too boring to finish), and released in 1997.[122] The screenplay, by Ed Neumeier, shared character names and some plot details with the novel.[123] The film contained several elements that differed from the book, including a military that is completely integrated with respect to sex. It had the stated intention of treating its material in an ironic or sarcastic manner, to undermine the political ideology of the novel.[17][124] The mechanized suits that featured prominently in the novel were absent from the film, due to budget constraints.[99] The film used fascist imagery throughout, including portraying the Terran Federation's personnel wearing uniforms strongly reminiscent of those worn by the SS, the Nazi paramilitary.[125] Verhoeven stated in 1997 that the first scene of the film – an advertisement for the Mobile Infantry – was adapted shot-for-shot from a scene in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), specifically an outdoor rally for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. Other references to Nazism include the Albert Speer-style architecture and the propagandistic dialogue ("Violence is the supreme authority!").[126] According to Verhoeven, the references to Nazism reflected his own experience in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II.[24][127] The film reignited the debate over the nature of the Terran society in Heinlein's world, and several critics accused Verhoeven of creating a fascist universe. Others, and Verhoeven himself, have stated that the film was intended to be ironic, and to critique fascism.[77][128] The film has also been described as criticizing the jingoism of US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the society in the film, which elevates violence over sensitivity.[129] It received several negative critical reviews, reviewers suggesting that it was unsophisticated and targeted a juvenile audience, although some scholars and critics have also supported its description as satirical.[21][24][124][129] The absence of the powered armor technology drew criticism from fans.[21][99] The success of the film's endeavor to critique the ideology of the novel has been disputed.[24] Four sequels, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004),[130] Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008),[131] Starship Troopers: Invasion (2012)[132] and Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017) were released as straight-to-DVD films. In December 2011, Neal H. Moritz, producer of films such as the Fast & Furious series and I Am Legend, announced plans for a remake of the film that he claims will be more faithful to the source material.[133] In 2016 Mark Swift and Damian Shannon were reported to be writing the film.[134][needs update] Animated series Main article: Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles An animated TV series was also released based both on the novel and 1997 film called Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, it follows the exploits of the Mobile Infantry squad, "Razak's Roughnecks", during the SICON–Bugs War between a newly united humanity and an extraterrestrial race, known as the "Bugs," also sometimes referred to as Arachnids. The show focuses mainly on the Roughnecks' missions, rather than addressing the larger war. Paul Verhoeven served as an executive producer.[135] The show ran for one season from August 1999 to April 2000. Other media From October to December 1988, Sunrise and Bandai Visual produced a six-episode Japanese original video animation locally titled Uchū no Senshi with mobile infantry power armor designs by Kazutaka Miyatake, based on Starship Troopers.[136] Dark Horse Comics, Mongoose Publishing and Markosia hold the license to produce comic books based on Starship Troopers, written by authors including Warren Ellis, Gordon Rennie and Tony Lee.[137][138] Avalon Hill published Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers in 1976, a map-and-counter board wargame featuring a number of scenarios as written in the novel.[139] In 1998, Mythic Entertainment released Starship Troopers: Battlespace. The web-based interactive game, in which players battled each other in overhead space combat, allowed players to assume either Klendathu or Federation roles, was developed alongside the film adaptation.[24][140] Starship Troopers: The Miniatures Game was released by Mongoose Publishing in 2005, a miniature wargame which used material from the novel, film, and animated TV series.[141] Spectre Media released Starship Troopers: Invasion Mobile Infantry, a game for PCs, in 2012.[142] Offworld Industries developed and published the 2023 game Starship Troopers: Extermination, a cooperative multiplayer first-person shooter available for PC.[143]

[00:30] Pope Mania (29:00) Pope Leo received a rock star reception in the French capital last week. Many admire him for standing up to today's strongmen, but Herbert Armstrong warned that the pope will pave the way for Germany's next strongman. [29:33] The Key of David: ‘The World Tomorrow' (27:00) The Bible is full of God's promises of a Utopian world to come. This World Tomorrow will come to pass very soon!

Trigger Warning: Guest clicks his pen throughout. It was his first podcast interview, it is a good interview/discussion about AI, and I do apologize for the clicking.In this episode, BT brings on author Robert Howell, to discuss the future and reality of artificial intelligence. They talk about some of the nuances within the world today, and the need to understand that there are two very different paths one can take into the future as it relates to AI and large language models, LLM's (ChatGPT, Grok etc.)Robert Howling, Novels & StoriesAmazon.com: Robert Howling: books, biography, latest updateAmazon.com: Alternative Futures: A Collection of 12 Short Stories eBook : Howling, Robert: Kindle StoreAmazon.com: Dystopias (Almost) Everywhere: Eleven Short Stories eBook : Howling, Robert: Kindle StoreRevenge of A Duster: HowlingThe order of the world has changed - reversed! Because of climate change, the developed world has been almost abandone, Robert: 9798992471922: Amazon.com: Books

Birgit Dunkel, Irmela Kästner und Rasmus Gerlach stellen das Programm des Futur 10 – die Jubiläumsshow – 10 Jahre Performance Film Festival vor. Im Westwerk wird über eine Ausstellung die Geschichte des Festivals nachzubetrachten sein, verbunden mit der Idee der Wiedergewinnung eines utopischen Blicks auf kommende emanzipatorische moves. Das Festival beginnt am Donnerstag im Westwerk und ereignet sich anschließend an vielen Orten. https://www.futur-filmfestival.com/

A conversation with Ada Palmer about building the future with humility, the process of creating a science fiction world, and many spoiler-heavy deep dives into the world of Terra Ignota. Mentioned in this episode Books and works. Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota — Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars · Ada Palmer & Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy · Ada Palmer, And Loki in His Prison (forthcoming) · "Somebody Will" (song) · Bill Bryson, At Home · Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists · Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea · Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet · Boccaccio, Decameron. People and places. Tyler Cowen · Teresa Nielsen Hayden · Johannes Gutenberg · Francis Bacon · Michelangelo · Villa I Tatti (Florence) · Worldcon · the Terra Ignota Discord. Transcript Ada: Stop telling stories about a thing as if one person did it. Tell the story of how a whole team of people did this. And when we look at the major innovations of the past, recognize their plural and often anonymous origins and shapers — and ask: will we be content if we end up being the anonymous contributor to future generations having this wonderful thing? Introduction [00:00:26] Ben: Today I'm excited and grateful to share my conversation with Ada Palmer. Among many other things, Ada is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of several books, including the science fiction series Terra Ignota, which now lives rent-free in my head. In the words of the inimitable Tyler Cowen, this is the conversation that I want to have — which means the vast majority of it is an extremely nerdy, extremely spoiler-heavy discussion of the Terra Ignota series. The spoiler warning comes around the one-hour mark, but rather than making you stop then, I'd recommend stopping right here, going and reading the entire series, and then coming back. We'll still be here. A podcast about the unwritten workings of a fictional future is a vaguely legitimate segue to noting that I've brought Idea Machines back after a very long hiatus, for a fairly specific reason. I'm still going to dig into the people and systems that turn ideas into reality, but with a particular focus on knowledge and stories that are in people's heads and aren't yet written down or recorded anywhere. Even in the age of the internet and LLMs, there is so much that can only be discovered through conversation — and that, I think, should be the point of podcasts. So with that, here's my conversation with Ada Palmer. "Somebody Will," and making peace with not seeing the end [00:01:57] Ben: This is actually a very selfish question. Your song "Somebody Will" is one of my favorite songs. Ada: I had to practice for six months before I could sing it without crying while singing it. It still requires great concentration. Ben: I sometimes cry a little when I listen to it. If you're listening to this and you haven't heard the song, you should stop and listen to it, because it's amazing, and we will be here when you get back. Okay — assuming everybody has now listened to the song. I think it captures the fact that ambitious projects take many lifetimes and the labor of many people who are only contributing indirectly, in a way that I feel nothing else does. And that fact feels very at odds with the cultural milieu today, where — at least for me — it feels like you personally need to be working on the thing, and if you can't get it done within your lifetime then you're a failure. So how do you internalize that personally? I constantly feel this tension: I believe the message of "Somebody Will" is true, and at the same time I cannot feel satisfied with it. And how would you get more people to internalize it? I feel like the world would be better if more people did. Ada: I have the advantage, as a historian, of being used to thinking on century and multi-century timeframes — of looking at how many of the things we celebrate or think of as important were multi-generational projects, and how few people, even among the ones we talk about as if one person achieved the thing, actually saw that achievement bear fruit, or even near-full fruit, within their lifetime. Lately I've been asked about Gutenberg a lot. From Gutenberg's perspective: I invented the machine, I used the machine, the machine worked great, the sales didn't, I went bankrupt, and I died in poverty. In the later part of his life he got to see other people starting to build printing presses and trying to print — and also going bankrupt. The books were starting to circulate, and everyone was saying, "I don't know about these new weird books, they're different from the old ones." So if he judges himself on his lifetime achievement, he judges himself negatively. The ongoing effects of the Gutenberg revolution mostly happen well after his death, and after the deaths of his first generation of apprentices, in the mid-1500s and moving toward the 1600s — and there are stages of it still happening in the 1700s as it democratizes access to knowledge, which is something one could anticipate it would do, but not see. So many of our best and biggest projects are like that. In fact, you very rarely have a project that comes to fruition within its beginner's lifetime. But it requires us to look at history to feel that. Another factor is that we're so often pressured not just to look short term, but to look very short term. My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a brilliant editor, has a very apt saying that I think about a lot: we always overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but underestimate what we accomplish in five years. If you look at yourself and ask, "What did I do this year?" you'll always judge yourself harshly and be disappointed. But if you make the list of "What did I do in the last five years?" you'll say, "Oh, wow, I accomplished a lot" — even though each individual year felt like you didn't meet your own standards. And another part of it is that yes, there is a melancholy to "Somebody Will." It's about a kind of surrendering acceptance: that you will not be there to enjoy the thing, that you are working on something so that others will enjoy it in the future. That requires remembering that the same is true of the people in the past who worked to give us what we enjoy — that there is a teamwork across the diaspora of time, in which we all have to love the future generations we are helping and accept that they will get benefits we will not. Because otherwise, what are we doing? Ben: Let me poke at this one more time — and the answer might be that it's impossible. How do you get to serenity with the fact that we're working on a very long-term project that needs many people who are not going to be the person remembered for the thing, and that this is important and worthy? What actually goes on in your head? Ada: Again, there is a mournful side to it. And we therefore need to encourage a culture that celebrates all the contributors. Stop telling stories about a thing as if one person did it. Tell the story of how a whole team of people did this. And when we look at the major innovations of the past, recognize their plural and often anonymous origins and shapers — and ask: will we be content if we end up being the anonymous contributor to future generations having this wonderful thing? Because what matters to me isn't that I get thanked for X. What matters to me is that I helped make sure X happens. That separation of credit is important. I remember thinking vividly about this after reading a book called At Home — by, I think, Thomas Madden, although I may have the name wrong [it's Bill Bryson] — which is a fun popular history about all the objects in your house and how they developed. The history of the table knife, and the chair, and the chest of drawers, and the kitchen; how houses were originally one room and came to be subdivided into multiple rooms, and what the front hall is. It's a really fun, light history, essentially a string of delightful anecdotes. But I noticed that he would sometimes talk about the inventor of something we have — the inventor of the egg whisk or whatever — and then, if the inventor of this useful thing didn't end up rich and famous as a result, he described that as a tragedy. His definition of tragedy was: somebody contributed something that benefited the human race, and they didn't become rich and famous as a result; they lived an ordinary life as X, Y, or Z. Ordinary life was the tragic outcome. I snagged on that. What are we doing if living the life that most people live, having also contributed to the sum total of human happiness, is your definition of tragedy? He had this very strong sense that it was an injustice for someone's name not to travel with their invention, and for someone not to become rich as a result of their invention. And it was such a narrow portrait of what it could mean to contribute to human thriving — one that assumes only the inventor contributes, and not the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the distribution and manufacture and improvement of the egg whisk, who also bring things that help our daily lives. It felt so un-Baconian and unscientific. Bacon, when first arguing for the scientific method, says there is no greater act of charity and love than to do something that helps every human being after you live a better life. In its original articulation, that is its own reward. But the idea that it should be a ladder to fame and social rise, as opposed to something one achieves and is proud of — I think that's where we get snagged, and where we get these stresses. To contribute to humans reaching the stars is to contribute to humans reaching the stars. It is not to be the name that becomes famous. Whose labor counts [00:11:27] Ben: It's an open question to me how you make more of a culture of that. Ada: Part of it is that we have to start evaluating contributions more equally, because we have a really unfair way of thinking about labor, where some types are celebrated and high status and others are low status. This goes way back. It's true in the Middle Ages: any job you do with your hands is low status, and any job that is intellectual work is high status. This is why Michelangelo's father was absolutely rabid against Michelangelo being a sculptor. They came from a banking family, and Michelangelo's father did intellectual work — banking — and it would be a shame upon the family for his son to work with his hands and be an artist. The outcome of this over the course of the Renaissance, via things like Vasari's Lives of the Artists, is that they make the argument for art being intellectual labor — for an artist like Michelangelo to shift status from being thought of as manual labor, like a carpenter, to being thought of as intellectual labor, a peer of a doctor or a scholar. And we now consider art to be a high-status intellectual occupation. But we still have these horrible terms like "unskilled labor." Go watch anybody doing so-called unskilled labor for an hour and you think: holy moly, this person is really good at this. The speed and the elegance with which they have optimized this set of skills is incredible. It takes many kinds of labor to do something. But at an academic institute, we do not celebrate the people maintaining the site or preparing the food in the kitchen as contributors to the thing — even though it's absolutely essential, and without it the thing can't happen. That is a terrible problem. And more and more I see people talking about the world as if only a tiny elite are serious contributors and everyone else is just a dot moving around. An NPC. I was being interviewed about the singularity — this idea of trying to maximize the computing power that Earth produces in order to speed up how quickly we create an AI god. The interviewer asked what one thing would contribute most to maximizing Earth's computing power. And I said: well, obviously it would be UBI, or another way of solving poverty. Because right now the majority of computing power on Earth is human brain cells, which vastly outnumber the computational power of computers. And a large share of that computing power belongs to people living in poverty, whose capacity is being diminished and sidelined onto worrying about where tomorrow's meal is going to come from. When you provide a safety net at a reasonable standard of living, so that people don't have the anxiety that poverty causes, people become way more creative and generative, and start new businesses. All of our UBI experiments show outpourings of art, discovery, entrepreneurship, increased generation — all of which contribute, second order, to Earth advancing. And the crowd who thinks about this was just blown away by thinking of, A, the human brain as computing power, and B, poverty as the largest drain upon the computational powers of the Earth. Ben: People don't think about second-order effects enough, period. Ada: There is no symphony hall without its janitor. There is no symphony hall without the workman in addition to the architect. And we celebrate one of these arbitrarily and not the others. Why is that? Is it because the construction worker is doing something athletic and manual? Well, we celebrate sports people, and they're doing something athletic and manual. It's a totally cultural construction, which of these occupations are celebrated and which are not. Ben: So we just need to celebrate everybody. Ada: Celebrate ninety percent of the occupations — and identify the ten percent where it's actually, this is a waste of a human being. Ben: This is a waste of a human being, and we should not have a human being doing this. That's where we bring in a robot. Ada: Right. But there's all this discussion of "let's have the robots replace everything everyone is doing." No — when human beings are doing things that are stimulating and creative and make them happy, leave it alone. But if we have a robot that cleans out the gutters, that would be great, because nobody is stimulated by cleaning out gutters. Ben: Or does boring paperwork. Ada: Oh, that's the dream. Where the Hives came from: a lunch table in Florence [00:16:44] Ben: Shifting toward Terra Ignota — but not yet to the spoilers. You spent a lot of time in Italy. How did that affect the creation of the Terra Ignota world? Ada: A lot, specifically via Villa I Tatti, an institute owned and run by Harvard but quite independent, in the outskirts of Florence. It's not on the hill where the Decameron takes place; it's on the hill next to the hill where the Decameron takes place — to anchor it in literary geography. It has fellowships, so scholars from all over the world come there, about two dozen a year, for a year-long residency. And one graduate student at a time. I was the graduate student. You're sort of there as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed mascot. Ben: So it's a bunch of senior scholars and you? Ada: A lot of them are postdocs — they're starting their careers, they've finished their PhDs recently. There are usually two or three senior scholars resident, and then two dozen who are at the next stage from where you as a PhD student are, and from whom you can learn exciting stuff. Some are later career. And they're from all over the place — and they've usually gone all over the place, on similar postdocs and for research. I remember vividly being at a group lunch. There was a married couple there having a conversation with a couple of other people. The mom was Australian and the dad was Spanish. They had two kids, one of whom had been born in the US and another in the UK. They'd lived in France while the kids were little, and now the kids were medium-sized and in Italy, attending a polyglot school. And the parents were discussing the different citizenships the two kids were eligible for, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. "You get this with a UK citizenship, but you can't have that. You can have UK and then US, but you can't have US and then UK. These benefits versus those benefits. And if the kids have two different citizenships, is that bad for them relative to each other? Does it make them feel envious, or unspecial, or special compared to their sibling?" It was such a buyer's-market conversation about citizenship. They were strategically sitting down and asking: which ones do we want to apply for, which ones do they already have, what are the utilities of each one, how do we feel about the governments and the values that they advance? And it made me think: what if everybody had that conversation? What if it were normal, when you're coming of age, to sit down, think about all the citizenships in the world, decide which ones you think are best, and choose — rather than having it fall upon you by accident of birth? It made sense to me using the EU, where people have free movement, as the model. When you're in the EU, you may have been born in France, but your family is Polish and you feel Polish because you grew up with them and visited family and learned the language — or you don't, and you feel French, and that's up to you. That freedom of movement, where who you are isn't where you live, it's what group you identify with, felt so plausible for a future in which technology means mobility is getting faster and more natural, and we choose jobs and homes based on location rather than being limited by geography. Plotters, pantsers, and the tyranny of past you [00:20:42] Ben: I don't know that I've ever heard you talk about your writing process in any detail. Fiction writers — some are plotters, some are pantsers, some are in between. Where do you fall? Ada: I have an essay on Tor.com arguing that the difference is less binary than it feels. For those listening who don't know the definitions: a plotter is somebody who plans ahead, outlines, has a whole plan for the story before they start writing it. A pantser is somebody who plunges in and figures out the story, or the characters, or the details, as they're writing. Here's my argument that these are less different than they sound. If you're a plotter, you're spending extra time planning at the beginning — making your outline, revising your outline, thinking about order and structure, rereading the outline, getting a sense of how it flows and fixing that. Then you implement it, and you do comparatively less revision at the end. Whereas a pantser will plunge into writing six months earlier, figure out those structure questions as they go, get to the end, and then often do more revision — doing to the manuscript the revisions that the plotter would do to the outline. So you're doing the same steps, you're just doing them in a different order. Everybody still does the "hmm, let's think about the pacing; this character has too many chapters where they appear all together and then they don't appear for a long time; I have to think about the balance of that." Everybody does that step. But do you do it before you write the first draft or after? That's the real difference. And you can have a very meticulous story where you figured it out as you went and then went back and put things in earlier to make it all work. I am at the far extreme end of planner. I world-build for at least five years, and then I spend six months doing the outline before I sit down to write the first sentence. I outlined the entire series — chapter by chapter, all four books — and had a complete plan for the whole thing before I wrote the first sentence of the first chapter of the first book. I then followed that outline incredibly precisely. Often when I'm writing I'll get to a point and think, maybe this bit of the outline is wrong, maybe I should do this other thing instead. And I'll start doing the other thing, and work on it, and get more and more frustrated, and wonder why it's going wrong, and whine to my bash'mates about it. And then I'll go back to the outline and realize: oh, of course. Past me is always correct. And I repent of having strayed from the outline. Because past me was in the middle of six months of being zoomed out, looking at the whole structure, really understanding everything being set up short term and long term. Whereas present me, in the middle of writing something, is very immersed in that one chapter and its valences and its emotion, and can lose sight of the work it's doing to continue things from five chapters ago and set things up for five chapters later. I was fully aware of all that when I did the outline, and I might be less aware of it in the act of writing. Which is why the version of me that was outlining is always more correct about what the chapter needs than the version of me sitting down to write the chapter. That's what the outline is for. Five years of worldbuilding, mechanically [00:24:18] Ben: What do you actually do, mechanically, for the five years of worldbuilding? What does that entail? Ada: A lot of it is that I'll have a notion. I'll be sitting at that table at Villa I Tatti listening to the conversation and think, wouldn't that be neat — that would be a really cool thing to explore in a story. I will then take the worlds I'm building, because I'm always building several at once, for several successive series. I'm currently doing the worldbuilding for the series after the series after the series of which the first book comes out next summer. Ben: That's so cool. Ada: I've already fully done the worldbuilding for this series and the series after it, and I'm worldbuilding the series after that, and a couple of others. They're sort of on a conveyor belt: the most assembled, the medium assembled, and the less assembled, as they move forward. I'll take the notion and go to my most assembled world, the one I intend to do soonest, and ask: does this notion fit? Does it combine well with the other stuff I already have in this world? Do they synergize? Are they compatible with each other? And if they are, I'll plop that new idea into the world. So I'll be working on a world where the key ideas are the flying car network, and voluntary citizenship, and a kid who can bring toys to life with a touch, and a revival of eighteenth-century ideas about gender. And then I'll independently get the notion of somebody being a professional living doll. And I'll ask: could that happen in that world? Yes, it could. What would that mean? Well, celebrity culture in a global world would have neat characteristics; the stuff I'm doing with gender would intersect with it in nifty ways. Neat. That notion, totally independent when I came up with it, can live in that world. Or I might have another idea, look at it in that world, and say: you know what, this isn't compatible with this world. The society of Terra Ignota — it doesn't fit. I'm going to take this idea and move on to the next world. And the first world it can go in is where that idea then lives. So worlds accumulate multiple different seeds. You'll notice that it's not that the living doll is derived from the other stuff — it's an independent idea. But once put in, the two connect to each other, the way trees in a forest develop shunts that send sugar to each other and keep each other alive and support the entire forest ecosystem, even though they began as individual and indeed competitive trees. The whole world develops from multiple different central seeds. Ben: Sorry, I'm very interested in the details of this. Are you writing these down on index cards? Ada: A lot of it will just be in my head. I also use OneNote, where I'll jot things down. There will be notes in OneNote that are sometimes a whole table with a chronology that develops over time, but also just a list of words I found evocative, or a reminder note to myself. I also email myself ideas so that I remember them, and there they are, searchably, in my email. I also sometimes write them on Post-it notes and leave them around the house. Sometimes something came to me and felt evocative from a picture — a work of art, or a postcard, or an image. Ben: You have your mood board. Ada: I'll put those by my bed, or in other places, and they'll make me chew on those ideas over time. But the majority of this will be in my head. Nobody could reconstruct the world from those notes. The notes are chaos, until I get to the late pre-outlining stage. I was probably working on the Terra Ignota world for four years before I started writing down the chronology. I do have a long timeline of events, from the present to the completion of the terraforming of Mars, with the dates of when everybody was born, when different cultural movements happened, when this or that historical war that's mentioned began and ended, and so on — a long, color-coded timeline. I'll probably share it at some point, but it's in OneNote, which is hard to export. I also have a custom Google Map which shows the Hive majorities in every major city on the globe, so you can see the distribution of the population. One thing I did deep into the worldbuild, preparing to think through the latter half of the series, was go through all the cities with a population above — I think it's ten million — that exist on Earth now, to figure out the future of each one, and then create several new cities that would be above that threshold by then. Making sure I wasn't skipping any cities. That I did Africa. That I did the Pacific Rim. That I had a global plan for this and not a non-global one. OneNote lets you combine text and note-taking with images, so for example there's one page that is a map of ancient Rome with my own notes on what is in each building in the reconstructed version of Rome in Romanova, where so many events take place. So the note-taking is extensive, but chaotic in my case. Ben: That is incredibly cool. I feel like there's a through-line in great artists and makers of things, where the thing that you see is the tippy-tip of an iceberg. Ada: It has to feel like that — especially for a built world. It has to feel real, it has to feel deep, it has to feel like it has all those things. Big beats, connective tissue, and the management of mood [00:30:35] Ada: Another thing about outlining, briefly. A word I've known a number of authors to use, that I kind of use too: when you're developing the story, there will often be a point at which you know what the big beats of the story are. Let's imagine we're outlining Romeo and Juliet. A big beat is when they meet. A big beat is when they get together. Then there's a sort of midpoint crisis, when the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt result in crisis and Romeo has to be kicked out. And then there's the dramatic ending in which they die. And then you ask: okay, what other stuff do I want in this story? Well, I need to develop the characters of Mercutio and Tybalt, and that has to happen before the midpoint. And I need some comedy scenes — this is Shakespeare — so I need to put those in at some point. So you can imagine Shakespeare saying: I know what the big beats are. Where am I going to fit the Mercutio characterization scene? Should it be right before his death, or earlier, so that we're invested in his character for a while? I want a comedy scene between this sad major serious beat and this sad major serious beat, to vary the mood. Who can be in that scene? I need a lighter scene between Romeo and Juliet meeting and Romeo and Juliet getting together — what can I put there that will change the mood, so we don't have two passionate romantic sequences in a row? So you figure out the big beats, and then you figure out the in-between connective tissue. And sometimes you'll be aware that there must be a speech: I have this idea for Mercutio making this passionate, weird speech about Queen Mab, it's a lot of fun, where do I put it? There's some flexibility — it can be at any point before his death. It can be early, it could be at the beginning, it could be just before his death. How does the audience — or in my case the reader — feel about Mercutio's death differently if we've just come to love him right before, versus if we came to love him really early on and we like him almost more than Romeo because he had more character for half the play before this crisis comes? Many technically-pantser authors I know have figured out the big beats before they start, and then are filling in and improvising the in-between stuff, and might move it around at the end. So if Shakespeare were a pantser, he might have been writing along, and then: Mercutio's dying soon, I get to give him a speech — oh, this speech is so awesome, I want to move it earlier. And he'd move the Queen Mab speech from right before his death to substantially earlier, so that we care about this character for a longer period of time. That's exactly the kind of revision that a pantser does, and that I would do at the outline level, where I have everything on screen in front of me and I'm thinking: these three Mercutio scenes are really all in a cluster. Do I want that? Do I want a character who gets introduced and then, the moment we love them, they're gone? Or do I want to stretch this out, so this is a character with whom we have a longer emotional relationship? So that's core to the outlining process. We have these big beats. At some point we need to meet Saladin — when do we meet Saladin? Is it before or after the revelation of what Mycroft really did? How does it feel if it's before? How does it feel if it's after? Let's settle that. Because many things that happen in a story are not causally related. Some are: Romeo committing murder has to be before the Romeo banishment scene; those can't be reversed, because one causes the other. The "Juliet is sad because Romeo has been banished" scene follows from those. Those have to be in an order. But Romeo meeting Juliet versus the Queen Mab speech — those can be reversed. They aren't causally related. They're independent, except inasmuch as they both have to be early. And then the author gets to think through which is first and which is second, and what the effects of that are. So a lot of the outlining process is putting in the big beats, figuring out what has to be before and what has to be after, and what can go at any point, and then situating it in the right place — and also realizing when mood needs to alternate. One principle of reading is that we notice changes in mood and tension much more than we notice the absolute level. If you write a book with five super-high-stakes action chapters in a row, the reader gets tired of super-high-stakes action. It all feels homogeneous. It doesn't feel exciting anymore. The beginning will feel exciting, but it will then flatline experientially. Whereas if you have a high-paced action sequence, and then a low-mood piece where people are relaxing and something silly happens, or we cut away to the cooks preparing the banquet who are not at all invested in the action that's going on — then when we return to that high-stakes thing, it feels high-stakes again. You need to alternate sad with happy. You need to alternate tense with relaxed. You need to alternate fast-paced with slow-paced, so that people feel all of them more, compared to having a homogeneous mood. So sometimes I'll be going along and think: we've just had three or four chapters in a row where Mycroft, our narrator, is freaking the heck out and overwhelmed and in despair. We need a nice, calm Martin Guildbreaker chapter here, where he's patiently investigating something and explaining his investigation, because that will let us escape the mood — so that when we return to it, the grief being experienced by our narrator is vivid and exciting again, because we had a break. And also so that the complexity of trying to understand what the hell this narrator is actually saying is enjoyable again, in a puzzle-box way. If you do a puzzle box, you want to then coast and not do a puzzle box next — have something as a break, and then do the next puzzle box. I don't want to give you nothing but puzzle-box chapters in a row. I'm also going to give you a nice linear fidget-toy chapter, where you're enjoying manipulating the thing but there's not a puzzle challenge goal. Ben: Noticing the change in mood rather than the mood itself — I see that across many areas of how people notice things. People notice a thing changing more than the absolute level. Ada: You notice color in places where there is very little color. You notice beauty in places where there's very little beauty. Ben: Or changes in prices. People don't go around thinking "ah yes, this is expensive" all the time while the price stays the same. But all of a sudden a price changes and people react. Ada: Exactly. We very much operate logarithmically, and notice the change — the integral rather than the absolute amount, or the absolute speed at which something's moving. Designing the Hives [00:38:20] Ben: Related to worldbuilding — and if you've talked about this somewhere and I missed it, I apologize — how did you come up with the Hives in the first place? They feel so specific. Ada: When I had this idea at Villa I Tatti of "what if you choose your citizenship," I was thinking about it as deriving from transit — transit becoming easy. And then I thought: okay, what kinds of organizations would these be? If transit is suddenly really easy, if you can go anywhere on Earth in two hours, people are not going to want to put up with the frustrating, slow passport system. They're going to want that streamlined. I was thinking about the Global Entry program. This is a thing you sign up for, and it vets you, and it's trusted, and it's a third party but semi-governmental and semi-not, and it facilitates you being able to go much faster through the border. What if one of those became even more so, so that when you're a member you really can skip everything and zip around the Earth really easily? Well, if one of those developed, competitors would develop. What other kinds of focuses might a transit thing have? One of the things people would want to travel for is sports matches — people already do that. So there would be something whose whole shtick is: do you want to go see that game on another continent? We will facilitate that so it's easy. I also thought about CouchSurfing, which — I think people do it less now — but you sign up to say "I've got a couch," and others sign up to say "I'm traveling to a place," and the thing itself facilitates being friendly, and there's trusted-person vetting. And that idea became the Cousins: the idea of having a cousin in that town, who you may never actually have met, but they're not going to be too weird, because they're your cousin. You have this slight bridge of trust. So what if there was a company that stepped in to capitalize on what CouchSurfing is, but make it more formal, and called itself the Cousins network, and its motto was "what if you had a cousin in every town — we will hook that up"? I could see that company having started out more like CouchSurfing, where it's about where you're staying, and then branching into facilitating your ticket. And then Gordian being the one that really was just like Global Entry — a simple profit-seeking company that would do this. And then when the moment of the Great Renunciation comes — this is all background to the book, of course — these suddenly become political associations, when they had just been memberships. The way you might have a membership in Costco. The European Union is already this. But if people have a membership in Costco, often that means they have certain values, as well as desiring to buy cheap bulk things. So you could imagine that if suddenly there were a major global crisis, and Costco said, "Okay, everybody who has a Costco membership — we kind of trust you, and we believe you share our values of paying people a living wage and making sure things flow. Do you want to transition to being a politically active group?" And everybody who has a Costco membership would say, "Well, actually, yeah. In fact, it does make sense at this weird juncture in human history to transition my Costco membership into being part of a political association that's in favor of a living wage and making sure people eat." And you could see Costco transforming itself in a real crisis into a big series of pop-up mutual aid and new community kitchen things. That could totally happen. Ben: They already make a lot of hot dogs. Ada: The infrastructure is there, and the number of people with a connection to this thing is there. So it's the sort of thing that in the moment of the Great Renunciation could do that. And I imagined lots of other Hives being born like that. And then I asked: what new ones would be born, when suddenly this is political? Well, one of them would be the Masons — because there's always this sort of "oh no, I'm not in any of these groups, I feel left out," among the large slice of the population that feels drawn to strength and claims of tradition and claims of strong authority. And here are all of these legends about this being that. So if somebody cunning steps in and mobilizes it, they could make the Masons be born at that moment. And meanwhile, science fiction nerds are really well connected with each other. We all have community groups that organize Worldcon and all of this, and authors who can speak up and say, "Hey, all my fans — this thing, it's time to act." So it was plausible to me that Utopia could form very quickly in that moment of crisis as well. So part of it was: what groups and corporations and things that already exist could do this? And I remember wanting a really corporate one — this is the Mitsubishi in the end. What kinds of things last over time? The obvious choice would have been to be like Google or something. But when you look over time at corporations that really last multiple centuries, they tend to do very plural things. They tend to be consortia of multiple corporations rather than one. And they tend to be defined around a market or a world ethic rather than a product. Look at IBM, which has not become one of the giant Earth-owning corporations, but has sure steadily existed and never had a crisis. A big part of that is that IBM defines itself as: we make products for corporations. Whatever new thing needs to be made for corporations, we will start making that. If people develop a completely unprecedented new technology, that is what we will do, and we will orient it around having an established, clear relationship with corporations. So even if the computer ceased to matter economically tomorrow because it was replaced by the genetically modified super-eggplant, they would transition into corporate-focused genetically modified super-eggplants. And they would make that transition fine, in a way that Apple — which defines itself as an electronics company — would have struggled with at the time. Though Apple now is also a media and entertainment company, which is broader. So the Mitsubishi Group, which is not one corporation but dozens and dozens of corporations that make a wide variety of things and are a consortium with each other, is a corporate structure that's likely to withstand multiple multi-decade, multi-century tech tumults and still be coherent. That's why I picked that. Ben: Were there any Hive ideas that got the chopping block? Any that almost made it in? Ada: None got the complete chopping block, because of course one of the structures of this is that there have been fewer over time and they've merged. So the other ideas are the ones that are mentioned briefly as existing — like OBP, which stands for One Big Party. Ben: Which merged with the Humanists. Ada: They merged with the Humanists. But that was globe-trotting so that you could go to concerts and parties and get-togethers, rather than sports matches. There's enough overlap between those ideas — because you're traveling to enjoy an event — that it makes sense those two could merge, with a focus on both sports and art, concerts and performances: a focus on wanting to go enjoy and behold a human being doing something excellent. So you could see how they'd share a compatible ethic. Similarly Greenpeace, merging later with the Mitsubishi — but not fully yet. Would there be a group that would form centered on environmental custodianship, and wanting to take care not of people but of baby elephants? What would that be like? What countries would it have — not just a bunch of enthusiastic members, as it would anywhere, but massive, systemic, big cultural buy-in as opposed to small cultural buy-in? In the same way that sports fandom is bigger in some countries than others, or science fiction fandom is bigger in some countries than others even though it's present everywhere, personal investment in land and the value of land and land custodianship varies a lot. I was interviewing friends from all over the place, and it sounded, from talking with them, like India was the place where people had a very strong cultural investment in land. One interesting quality of India in the international world is that people in India are much more reluctant to sell land to a foreign owner than in most cultures. There is lots of land in India owned by corporations, but they're Indian corporations much more so. And people are likely to turn down a foreign buyer making an offer on property — whether it's large-scale property or even just a house or a bungalow — because of this sense that India's land should belong to India's people, which is stronger than in many other cultures. And this isn't a "we don't want foreigners dwelling here." We'll happily rent to a foreigner. It's the idea that the land should stay in the hands. I thought that would be an interesting place for Greenpeace's big nest of power to be centered, as it values land and land custodianship. And then I was thinking through: in this global future, who inherits all the national parks? If the nation-states are giving way to successor states, do the national parks dissolve, or does one of these say, "We're going to be the one" — and have what become global parks, and a huge portion of the unpopulated world in their ownership and custodianship? [Sponsor break — Seedhouse. "Buying a house is a big decision. Planting one isn't." Seedhouse grows carbon-negative homes from a single architect-designed seed: choose your floor plan, check your soil, and in twelve weeks you're ready to move in. The house faces the morning sun — and also turns toward the morning sun, which takes some getting used to. Need another bedroom? Order the right clipping, graft it, and wait. Visit seedhouse.com and use code IDEAMACHINES for a free guesthouse acorn. Seedhouse: put down roots. Literally, quite extensive roots.] The fandom, and the people who stop after book one [00:49:24] Ben: Last unspoiled question. How do you feel about the Terra Ignota fandom? Ada: It's great. I've never had anything but the most positive interactions with readers, and I love discussing the big meaty questions. A story that is as big and meaty as this one means really thoughtful, interested, eager people who want to chew on ideas. Ben: It feels like it's really touched something in the zeitgeist that even other good science fiction has not. Ada: I think it holds up an example of a future worth having and worth living in, with lots of exciting things one can push for. And a future of strong and respect-worthy values. One of the things about Terra Ignota is that, with very few exceptions, all the characters are philosophically self-examined and noble and have good ideals — ideals worth fighting for. And even though people come into strong conflict with each other, you respect and love both sides, because these are great people and they're fighting for great things. Ben: It's not a "there's a bad guy," which is so common. Ada: It's a neat vision of the future: what if everybody, even the people we fiercely disagreed with, was awesome, and we were disagreeing about important implementation or values — but underneath that, everybody was great? What if we have this high portrait of what humanity is and could become? Because one metric of progress is how rich we are, and another is how long we live. But what if another metric of progress is how excellent our conflicts are — so that we only have conflicts when it's about some really important, worthwhile cause? We don't have conflicts about grievance, or oil, or profit, or moral panic. We have conflicts about important philosophic principles and fundamentals. Wouldn't that, even though there's still conflict, be a form of progress? Ben: Peace is one form of progress, but moving to "this is a war worth fighting" is another form of progress. That's fascinating. Ada: And "I respect my enemy" is a form of progress. I love when Terra Ignota readers embrace and really want to live by some of these principles. I do sometimes feel like we could organize into a political advocacy group and crowdfund a lobbyist who advanced the values of this. Ben: Let's do it. I think that would be really cool. Ada: I would love to see it happen, because there are very important values in it — including the "what if we love the future and work for the future, but aren't vain about it, and do so with humility?" Now, one thing I sometimes run across— Ben: No, say what you were going to say first. Ada: No, I want to hear yours. I'll say what I was going to say anyway. Ben: Okay. The thing that also almost surprised me is how it really has something for everybody — there's a Hive that everyone feels kinship with. The obvious opposite would be Harry Potter, where of course you want to be in Gryffindor; Gryffindor is awesome, maybe Ravenclaw, but everybody else is kind of meh. When I interact with other people who love Terra Ignota — I'm a Utopian, and at first I assumed everybody else who likes this is going to be a Utopian. But no. I've run into people who identify with every Hive. Ada: And also sometimes people who say they would be a Graylaw, or who say "my religious identity is so core to me, I think I'd live in a reservation." I do run into that as well. And — great, there's space for you in this cool world. The world needs to respect you too, and have room in it for that, and needs that population, and needs to interface with them more as the narrative unfolds. I worked hard for there to be breadth. And I worked hard to think through: if these Hives were the Hives that formed from other Hives merging with each other, if there used to be dozens and now there are seven— Ben: What's the spanning set? Ada: Exactly. And what bigger and bigger ideas came together under umbrellas? Ben: Okay — what was the thing you were going to say? Ada: I sometimes run into people who say, "Oh, I'm a big fan of Too Like the Lightning," and who haven't read further. It's a little perplexing to people who are completionists and read the whole thing, but there's a not insignificant swath of people who read book one and haven't read the rest, who are very excited by the glimpse it shows of this future, but didn't continue on to see the way it then critiques the imperfections in this future — and shows the future recognizing its own problems and critiquing itself and becoming dynamic, and by the end being on the path to incremental improvement. I find it interesting talking with people like that, a lot of whom are Silicon Valley people. When you're an author, one thing that's the case is that you can log into Amazon and it'll show you this little map of America with how many copies of your book have sold in each region. So I know how many copies of Terra Ignota have been bought in New York City versus Arkansas versus elsewhere. For practically all books, the largest sales are New York City — New York City is very big, very populous, and they read a lot of books — and usually Silicon Valley is second. With Terra Ignota it's the other way around. So it is disproportionately popular among a world of people who see their technology transforming our lives and want an apparatus for thinking about what its future will be — one that is not just yet another cautionary tale about how the thing they're making could be used by a dystopia to make the world worse, but also how it could be used by a positive future to make the world better. I love that it's popular there, and I love talking to tech people who are eager to talk to me about it. But every so often I'll get this chilling thing, where one of the things in the world-build that for me is definitely negative and should be raising your alarm bells, they will have seen as positive. Ben: I'm sure you know the meme: "Ah yes, we have built the Torture Nexus from the book, Do Not Build The Torture Nexus." Ada: Yes. With its much-needed sequel, No, I Meant Don't Build the Torture Nexus. I had a conversation not long ago with a person who said they loved how Terra Ignota was basically a world without crime — an interesting thing for them to observe, because of course we know that's not the case— Ben: That's not the case, and that's not the mechanism by which it's not the case. Ada: And this was, in their reading, because of the trackers and universal surveillance: that it was an exploration of how universal surveillance could be great and could cause the end of crime. And I said: well, firstly, there is crime. But secondly, the reason the universal surveillance isn't that bad in Terra Ignota is that the governments are so good — because the buyer's market for citizenship holds governments to great degrees of accountability. If they misused this data, there would be public outcry, and then a mass movement against the government that did it, as citizens switched to other Hives. That accountability means that when the data is misused — as indeed it is, as we see over the course of book two — there is a consequence, speedily, for that misuse. The governments, being accountable, cannot abuse it. And the person just looked really sad. Because clearly, to this person who worked for a surveillance tech company, this was a hope that a surveillance tech future could be good, not bad. They hadn't thought through that it's the political change and the levels of political accountability that make it plausible that in such a future, surveillance tech would not do the harm it can do in a future where governments have a lot of power and not a lot of accountability. So I always find it interesting to see people who see a particular thing they're looking for in a future in Terra Ignota — at least in book one — and then didn't follow that journey forward to be challenged by it. But I love the people who read all of the books and followed me through the journey of: what if we have this future, and it's a great future, but it's not a perfect future, and it recognizes that, and it has to go through growing pains and work to become even better? Because one of the things about a utopia in the classic sense is that it's static. It's achieved this perfect state and it's unchanging. A book that is a true classic utopia basically feels like you have arrived in the city and they say, "Hello, stranger! Would you like to learn about our perfect public transit system? Now would you like to learn about our perfect public education system?" Welcome to Finland — we would like to lecture you on the superiority of all of our social and technological institutions. And you're like: actually, Finland, you're really great at all these things, and I wish we could elect you to rule the world and implement all of these things in most of our countries in many ways. But it feels weird getting these tours of perfect worlds that then aren't also self-examining and dynamic. So Terra Ignota is a hopeful future, but not a utopian future, because it has flaws. I remember when the first book came out, a lot of the initial discourse — the first blog posts of its earliest readers — was arguing about whether it was a utopia or a dystopia, trying to put it in one bucket or the other. "It has to be a utopia, everyone's happy, the lifespans are long." "No, it has censorship and surveillance, it has to be a dystopia." People would talk with each other before thinking through that it's an in-between. It has a lot of things that are better than our present and a few things that are worse than our present, and a lot of great achievements and a lot of stuff that still really needs to change. And a realistic future is one that is still changing. ⚠ The spoiler line [01:00:44] Ben: I'm going to transition us to speak about that realistic future. So — this is the spoiler warning. Anybody listening after this point: we expect you have read all the books. You will learn what happens in them. We will not explain anything. This is the part I'm very excited about. Also, sidebar: the fourth book is actually my favorite one. Ada: It's the best one. I needed all the other stuff before I could do that. Ben: The speech about the Trunk War, and the in-path and the out-path — that got me. Ada: Like the composer of a symphony, I needed to introduce all the leitmotifs and establish everything so that I could then do the final movement, in which everything happens at once. So I do setup, and I do more setup, and I do more setup — and then I have the full resources of those three books' worth of background, so that I can jump in and do things with an enormous complexity and depth that can only work when you have built that far. How the economy works [01:01:51] Ben: Something you don't talk about very much in the books, but that I assume exists in the giant iceberg: how does the economy work? There are little hints — clearly there are still black markets, clearly there's some form of buying and selling — but beyond that it's really not explained. And we get hints that it works a little differently for different Hives. Ada: We also know that the Hives resolve police conflicts with each other: when a member of one Hive has committed a crime against a member of another, the Hive that the person in the wrong came from pays the other Hive, and then punishes their own person by their own techniques. So a Mason receives the punishment a Mason normally gets, which might be much harsher than what the Cousins would normally do — but the Cousins get a certain amount of money that is standardized for the crime. So money is used among the Hives to balance out their frictions. That means Hives are incentivized to discourage crimes by their members against other members, because it costs them a certain amount of money. But they're not super-mega-over-the-top incentivized. They would never spend half their budget on policing, because it's resolved. Within that, the economy works quite differently for different Hives. The Mitsubishi and Humanists are on a very capitalist, more corporate model. The Utopians are space communists. Everything you earn goes to space, and you receive back what you need to live. The constellations process things around, and there is enough for everyone to live in comfort, but you do not have private assets and private income. It's set up the way a monastery runs. If you have a job and are a monk, this is just true: if you're a monk and you also have a professorship, your salary goes to the monastery, and you still receive the same meals and support and housing and stipend that any other monk does. It doesn't matter whether you're in a high-profit or low-profit job — you're doing a worthwhile job, therefore the Hive supports you, or the monastery supports you. So they're fully space communists: everything goes into the Hive and comes back out. The Cousins have much more of a safety-net thing, where everybody has a guaranteed income, but you can also have additional income on top of that. And if you do have earned income, the Cousins take a very large slice of it in taxes, because they pay for so many services which both you and the world benefit from — and you feel good that, in a charitable way, you have funded schools and hospitals all over the world in a massive transformation. So that also appeals to somebody who, if they had supplementary income, would choose to give a lot of it to charity. You're sort of signing up in advance to have your income largely routed to charity, while you keep enough to live on and some more, so there's an incentive to earn more, but not a huge one. The Masons have a complicated thing — this is why it's not in the book. It's calculated: the value of your contribution to the empire. How valuable a subject are you to Caesar? A number is put on that. And if you have a job or occupation that earns less than that, then you receive a stipend from the empire in credit for the services you've done to the empire. And if you're working directly for the empire, as the Guildbreakers do, then you receive a stipend from the emperor. What it means is that a lot of Masons will fluctuate during their lifetime between "100% of my income is coming from a salary" and "now half my income is coming from a salary and half from the fact that I am a Masonic traffic guard, or whatever it is, working for Caesar." So Caesar pays this slice of my income, and my salary for something else pays another slice. And it's a point of pride to have more and more of it be your value from the empire — because then you're serving the empire better and doing more. Though there's also a point of pride in having a hundred percent from salary, so that you're not draining Caesar's purse. Ben: I bet there are the two different groups of people — the one high status and the other high status — and they beef a little bit. One currency, and the currencies underneath it [01:07:06] Ben: All of that implies some kind of single cross-Hive currency. Ada: You'll notice all the prices are in euros throughout the book. Whenever any price is named, it's in euros. And the presumption is that Romanova administers a kind of central bank — and that the Censor's office is key to the administration of that central bank. The Censor's office is fundamentally doing economic analysis as well as social analysis. Ben: Which sort of implies that Hives cannot operate like a lot of modern governments, where they print their own currency. Ada: They can and they can't. You can still do currency exchange with the reservations, which are very intentionally not discussed very much in the first three books, so that we're sort of curious and slightly alarmed. And then they become so vividly present at major key moments in the last book, and you have this sort of backwards — I've been thinking of this as the marginal barbarians. Wait a minute, that's the United Nations. That's me. We are those marginal remnants — that's the evolution of the way we live now. The other thing is that Hives can create internal fiat currencies of different sorts, that are tradable only among them and that only they would really care about. So for example, the Mitsubishi have this: you get one vote for owning different amounts of property. Property and votes move together, and there's a unit which is one vote's worth of property — a significant value of a thing. And the Mitsubishi pay a lot of attention to those circulating. So it's not a small currency, in that you would never buy a sandwich with it. It's a currency in which the smallest unit is $300,000 or $200,000, because it's the value of a condominium, basically. But people pay a lot of attention to it, care about it. They can't just generate more without building architecture — but they can generate more by the act of building architecture or buying property. And if Mitsubishi buys property, that transforms it from a thing that has cash value to a thing that has cash value and a vote's worth. And then it moves around. So it operates in a complex way, like a non-fiat currency — a currency where there is a real thing attached to this unit of currency — but they only change hands for big deals, not small deals. And then people commit their vote to a voting bloc, which supports a higher voting bloc, so you're delegating your voting power rather than exercising it independently. The campus system [01:10:26] Ben: I feel like I could talk about this for a very long time, but I have more spoiler questions. How does the campus system work? Ada: A campus is referred to a number of times but never really explained. It's not quite a university, because it's a cluster in one area of multiple educational options. A campus might have a major research university, and three different colleges with different focuses, and several trade schools. So you might choose to go to that campus to attend a research university. Or you might choose to go to that campus to get a trade school degree as an artisan and be a master glassblower. Or you might choose to go there and say: I like the mood of this campus. This is the Romanova campus, so everybody who goes here really cares about politics — but they want to do different things in politics. Some want to go to journalism school, some want to be lawyers and complete law school, some really want to be politicians, some really want to observe, some might want to be architects but are interested in political thought and how it informs architecture, so there's an architecture school there. And you might be going for different lengths of time, because you might be doing different successive degrees. You might say: I really love political thought, I want to be in the city where it happens, I want to be in the community of other people where all my fellow students are into politics. So even though I want to be a doctor, I'll choose to go to medical school there, and make friends with somebody who's there to do architecture, and another friend who's there to get a polylaw degree and wants to be a polylaw. But we get to mix and mingle and enjoy debating and discussing and observing politics, united by that shared ethic for my bash'. And then I made another place that's like: this is a campus designed for people who really love water sports. We're going to have fifteen different educational options — there will be a medical school, and a law school, and small liberal-arts-focused colleges, and a large research university here also — but all of them are structured around a bay that has really good surfing and where there are lots of boats. So if you're somebody who loves that kind of thing, and you think you probably want to have a bash' with people who share that passion, then you might choose to go to that campus. You choose based on the campus and its mood, not based on which school is best for law. You can choose any campus and get a law degree there. So it's more about expecting that this is a personally formative phase of your life, in which you're going to find your bash' and find your bash'mates. So you go to the campus where you expect shared interest with those bash'mates. And there are a few campuses that are dominantly Masons, where you go — you grew up a Mason, you're expected to be a Mason, you want all of your bash'mates to be Masons, and they do Masonic things, and probably you're going to join a hereditary Masonic bash'. But you still do need to go about finding your bash'. You might therefore choose to go to one that's dominantly Masons. But you could also go to the Romanova campus and be in the college that's a Masonic college at the Romanova campus, where one part of your social world is mostly Masons and another part is very mixed. Ben: Administratively, are they all one organization, or just a bunch of co-located organizations? Ada: Co-located organizations, with a central organization that maintains the campus as a whole. That organization doesn't do the admissions, or decide who's there, or what programs there are. But they collect money from all of the schools that benefit from the presence of this campus, and use that to maintain the grounds and the infrastructure and the safety and the boats. Or, in the case of the Romanova one, to have lecture series where they bring in statesmen to talk to the students. So the central organization organizes the infrastructure and incentives that make the campus desirable, but it doesn't run the individual universities and schools. Those are still independent. When a new campus is formed, it buys up a bunch of land and then either sells or leases that land to individual schools that want to develop there. Most often the format would be a hundred-year lease. And then after a hundred years we'll evaluate whether this school actually still is a major contributor to the thing or not — so that it's not constantly uncertain. There's a symbiosis between the campus umbrella organization and the individual schools, but the individual schools are themselves separately run. Ben: I love that. Ada: There are already parts of the world where there are three or four colleges really near each other — like Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there are people from Harvard and people from MIT mixing with each other, and one of the things the two schools do is benefit from each other. And the more your educatio

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Mary Keough, Fractional Demand Gen for B2B at DemandLoops.(00:00) - Intro (01:12) - In This Episode (04:30) - How to Write LinkedIn Posts That Hit a Nerve Without AI (06:39) - How to Run an Honest Goal Setting Conversation With Your Founder (14:46) - Why Marketing Always Catches the Scope Creep at Startups (18:39) - How New Marketing VPs Establish Credibility in Their First Month (28:30) - How Women in Marketing Leadership Get Out of the Marketing Girl Box (33:49) - How to Tell if a Founder Who Doesn't Get Marketing Will Trust You (36:54) - What a VP of Marketing Job Description Should Actually Say (39:12) - When to Fight for a Broken Marketing Role and When to Leave (44:43) - Why Fractional Marketing Leadership Works as a Stopgap and Fails Long Term (49:53) - How to Vet a Marketing Role by Talking to People Who Left (53:17) - How to Use a Family Value System to Decide What Deserves Your Energy Summary: Mary wrote a LinkedIn post listing every fear a senior marketer has about taking a VP of Marketing job, and it hit a nerve loud enough to become this entire episode. We take the fears apart one at a time: the goalpost that moves the week after your team clears it, the executive dinner that quietly becomes 6 more events, the launch strategy your boss never opens. Then we build the other side of it, including the 3 sentence job description she'd sign tomorrow and the written SLA that stops sales from eating 4 days of your designer's week. She also explains why the fractional model everyone is rushing toward is a stopgap, and why her own contracts are designed to end. Stick around for the performance review where nothing went wrong and it still nearly took her out.About Mary KeoughMary Keough is a fractional demand gen marketer at DemandLoops, where she builds B2B demand programs that are designed from day one to be handed back to a permanent hire. She has spent 15 years across B2B SaaS and industrial manufacturing marketing, most recently as Director of Demand Generation at CoLab Software, and before that as Head of Marketing at Map My Customers and Senior Marketing Strategist at Gorilla 76.Her roots are in industrial and manufacturing demand gen, a niche she cut her teeth on at Spraying Systems Co. and still speaks about at events like the Industrial Marketing Summit. She's built an audience of roughly 30,000 on LinkedIn writing candid, fundamentals-first posts, and she co-hosts the Purposeful Marketing Podcast.How to Write LinkedIn Posts That Hit a Nerve Without AIYou can spot them before you finish the first line. Same hook shape, same clipped one-line paragraphs stacked into a wall, same closing question nobody answers. B2B LinkedIn has gotten very good at producing posts that read like posts, and the feed is worse for it.Then something like Mary's shows up. Her post about VP of Marketing roles was a stacked list of fears, one after another, written against the line founders keep repeating about not being able to find good candidates. It went around because a lot of senior marketers had been carrying those fears for years without the words for them. That feeling of reading your own thought in someone else's sentence is rare, and it's almost never something a hook formula produces.Originality is the entire filter for her, and applying it kills most content calendars on contact. Mary doesn't pre-plan posts. An idea sits with her for a while, usually something that's been bothering her that she can't quite name yet. Then a conversation does it: a marketer venting, a thread she can't scroll past, a call with a potential client. Something tips her over the edge and the post writes itself.Not a single one of her posts has been written with AI. She says it flatly, and you can tell from the drafts: the scar tissue is right there on the page, and the sentences go where an editor would have smoothed them. The cost of that is inconsistency. She posts when she has something, and only then. The return is that when she does post, it carries the one thing a language model cannot manufacture, which is the specific irritation of a person who has actually lived the problem.The volume play is finished. When any competitor can generate a competent, on-brand, keyword-aligned post in 30 seconds, competence stops being a differentiator and originality becomes the only moat left. Most B2B content operations are structurally incapable of producing it, because they're built to hit a cadence rather than to publish the thing only their company could say.Key takeaway: Run every idea on your content calendar through Mary's filter before it gets assigned: if 10 other companies in your category could publish the same piece, kill it. Replace the slots you clear with a standing prompt to your team, asking what has annoyed them at work this month that they can't fully explain yet. Those are the posts that travel.How to Run an Honest Goal Setting Conversation With Your FounderMarketing targets in most startups get set the way weather forecasts get set in a bad novel, which is to say somebody decides what would sound good and then everyone agrees to act surprised when it doesn't happen. The CMO needs a board-friendly story. The investor update needs an AI angle. Almost none of it starts from historical numbers, and the marketing leader gets handed the result and asked to commit.Mary's diagnosis starts a layer above the number. Companies keep saying they need a great VP of Marketing, an awesome VP of Marketing, an amazing director of demand gen. Very few of them are willing to do the work that makes a great one want the job. And the work starts with a company vision that has actual business goals underneath it.The version she wants runs down a ladder. There's the grand vision, the thing that got the company funded in the first place. Under it sits a 1-year and a 3-year picture of what changes in the market if the company wins. Under that sit the business goals that get you there, segmented by department, so product, marketing, and sales each know what they own.She walks through it with an attribution example, mostly because it's easy and partly because she can't resist. Say the company vision is to get founders, CEOs, and marketers to start caring about attribution. Fine. Now what does product build in the next 12 months to make that true? What does marketing publish? What does sales say on calls? Every function can answer that question, and the answers can be checked against each other.That ladder is almost completely gone from the startups she sees. What's left is the revenue multiple, which is a wish, and a set of quarterly targets that get reverse-engineered from it. Marketing is usually the first function asked to sign for the gap.The line that stuck with me is her framing of the whole discipline: everything about marketing is simple and fundamentals driven, and simple has nothing to do with easy. The hard part isn't figuring out what to do. The hard part is that you're doing it inside politically driven motivations, shifting strategies, and goalposts that move whenever the board asks a new question.How to Push Back When Product Wants to Change the ICPAnyone who has worked at a startup knows the move. You spend a year building a content engine around marketers, the quarter goes well, product decides the real opportunity is salespeople, and suddenly your entire library is pointed at the wrong buyer. Product changes a few things in the roadmap. Marketing starts over, and the results of that restart won't show up for 12 months.Mary's honest about the limits here. Preventing the shift is difficult, so you mitigate it...

While office vacancies remain high downtown, one developer thinks this excess of commercial real estate could be better used as housing. Asher Luzzatto has bought multiple office towers in Denver over the last year with the help of a $63 million loan through the Denver Downtown Development Authority. But will Denverites be clamoring to move into converted aging office buildings? Luzzatto sits down with host Bree Davies to explain why he's taking such a big financial gamble on a city he just moved to. For even more news from around the city, subscribe to our morning newsletter at denver.citycast.fm. Follow us on Instagram: @citycastdenver Chat with other listeners on Reddit: r/CityCastDenver Support City Cast Denver by becoming a member! What do you think of Luzzatto's big bet on downtown? Text or leave us a voicemail with your name and neighborhood, and you might hear it on the show: 720-500-5418 Learn more about the sponsors of this September 14th episode: Blue Sky Plumbing Arvada Center Denver Health Denver Botanic Garden Clyfford Still Museum Looking to advertise on City Cast Denver? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise

The city of New Rome faces the duel between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist in favor of a Utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Between them is Julia Cicero, with her loyalty divided between her father and her beloved.

Itinerary: 00:00:00 - 00:46:34 Intro+Anti-AI+Questionaire 00:46:34 - 01:29:00 Anti-Utopianism 01:29:00 - END The Left Page Book Club™ Join us next Lets Prattle where we will continue the book club with the Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, where we will discuss chapter 1 to 13!   Frank's sources: BLAIM, Artur. Anti-utopia. In: MARKS, Peter; WAGNER-LAWLOR, Jennifer A.; VIEIRA, Fátima (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. p. 39-51. CURTIS, Claire P. Ambiguous Choices: Skepticism as a Grounding for Utopia. In: DAVIS, Laurence; STILLMAN, Peter (Ed.) The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. New York: Lexington Books, 2005. p. 265-282. DAVIS, Laurence. Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the Politics of Utopia. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, v. 3, n. 2-3, p. 56-86, 2000. JAMESON, Fredric. The Antinomies of Postmodernity. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. p. 1-73.

Rhiannon Firth joins me to discuss Journey Through Utopia, Mary Louise Berneri's anarchist survey of utopian thinking. Rhiannon and I discuss why so many utopias seem so totalitarian, and how we can imagine a better world without falling into that trap.Here's a link to the Berneri book: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1008And Rhiannon's book Disaster Anarchy: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/disaster-anarchy/

Fluent Fiction - Hebrew: In Pursuit of Truth: Aviva's Utopian Revelation Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/he/episode/2026-08-18-07-38-20-he Story Transcript:He: בבוקר הקיץ החם, התעוררה אביבא עם תחושה מוזרה בליבה.En: On the hot summer morning, Aviva woke up with a strange feeling in her heart.He: השמיים היו כחולים בהירים, הגנים מלאים בפרחים צבעוניים, וכולם התכוננו לחגיגה הגדולה בכיכר המרכזית של החברה האוטופית שלהם.En: The sky was bright blue, the gardens were full of colorful flowers, and everyone was preparing for the big celebration in the central square of their utopian community.He: כל תושבי הכפר שלטו בחיוך רחב, כאילו כל יום היה מושלם.En: All the villagers wore wide smiles, as if every day was perfect.He: אך בתוך כל היופי הזה, אביבא לא יכלה להתעלם מהמחשבות המטרידות שפקדו אותה.En: Yet, amidst all this beauty, Aviva couldn't ignore the troubling thoughts that plagued her.He: היא הייתה בחורה חכמה וסקרנית, ותמיד חשה שמשהו לא לגמרי נכון מאחורי חזות השלמות של החברה.En: She was a smart and curious girl, and always felt that something wasn't quite right behind the facade of the community's perfection.He: ביום הזה, התכנסה הקהילה לחגוג את השפע והיחד.En: On this day, the community gathered to celebrate abundance and togetherness.He: דוד, מנהיג הקהילה, נאם על ערכי השלום והאהבה.En: David, the community leader, gave a speech on the values of peace and love.He: אחרי כמה שעות של שמחה ומשחקים, אביבא שמה לב שמרים, חברתה הטובה ביותר, איננה באירוע.En: After a few hours of joy and games, Aviva noticed that Miriam, her best friend, was absent from the event.He: מרים הייתה תמיד מרכז השמחה, ואף פעם לא נעדרה מאירועים.En: Miriam was always the center of joy and never missed events.He: זה לא היה אופייני לה.En: It was unlike her.He: אביבא דיברה עם דוד, אך הוא ניסה להפיג את חששותיה ואמר שאין סיבה לדאגה.En: Aviva spoke to David, but he tried to allay her fears, saying there was no reason to worry.He: "אולי מרים הלכה לרגע," אמר בחיוך מרגיע.En: "Maybe Miriam stepped away for a moment," he said with a reassuring smile.He: אבל ליבא של אביבא לא נרגע.En: But Aviva's heart wasn't at ease.He: היא החליטה שהיא מוכרחה להמשיך ולחפש את התשובות בעצמה.En: She decided she had to continue searching for answers herself.He: בערב, כשהשמש שקעה והכיכר התרוקנה, אביבא חמקאק אל שדות הכפר.En: In the evening, when the sun set and the square emptied, Aviva sneaked into the village fields.He: היא ידעה שזה אסור, אך לא יכלה לעצור את עצמה.En: She knew it was forbidden, but she couldn't stop herself.He: האדמה הייתה רכה מתחת לרגליה היחפות.En: The ground was soft beneath her bare feet.He: היא התקדמה לעבר המבנים המרוחקים ביותר שמעולם לא ניגשה אליהם.En: She advanced towards the most distant buildings she had never approached.He: היא גילתה פתח קטן מוסתר היטב מאחורי גבעה.En: She discovered a small entrance well-hidden behind a hill.He: בפנים, היא מצאה מעבר סודי שהוביל לאזור המוסתר של החברה.En: Inside, she found a secret passage leading to the community's hidden area.He: מה שגילתה שם הביט את ליבה.En: What she discovered there stopped her heart.He: היו חדרים מלאים בציוד מתקדם ומסמכים שהעידו על תופעות של היעלמויות מכוונות.En: There were rooms full of advanced equipment and documents indicating intentional disappearances.He: היא ראתה אנשים שעובדים לילות כימים לשמר את האוטופיה המדומה הזו.En: She saw people working day and night to maintain this illusionary utopia.He: הציוד מעולם לא נועד לרווחת האנשים, אלא לשלוט בהם.En: The equipment was never meant for the people's well-being, but to control them.He: עכשיו היא ידעה.En: Now she knew.He: השקט והשלווה של החברה היו אפשריים רק בזכות סודות כבדים.En: The community's peace and tranquility were only possible because of heavy secrets.He: היא חזרה לביתה, חסרת שינה, ראשה מלא במחשבות.En: She returned home without sleep, her head full of thoughts.He: בוקר חדש עלה, ואביבא ידעה שעליה לקבל החלטה.En: A new morning rose, and Aviva knew she had to make a decision.He: האם לחשוף את האמת ולסכן את כל מה שהיא מכירה, או לשמור את הסוד ולנסות לשנות את הדברים מבפנים.En: Whether to expose the truth and risk everything she knows, or keep the secret and try to change things from within.He: אביבא בחרה לשמור על השקט.En: Aviva chose to keep quiet.He: העם היה מאושר באופן עקרוני, אך היא החלה לזרוע רעיון חדש בקרב אנשים נאמנים לה, רעיון של שינוי מהותי.En: The people were, in principle, happy, but she began sowing a new idea among those loyal to her, an idea of fundamental change.He: היא ידעה שלא תוכל לעולם לחזור להיות אותה הבחורה שהייתה אי פעם, אך היא הייתה נחושה להביא לכך שפעם אחת, האמת המתוקה תוביל למהפכה אמיתית.En: She knew she could never go back to being the girl she once was, but she was determined to ensure that one day, the sweet truth would lead to a real revolution. Vocabulary Words:utopian: אוטופיתplagued: פקדוfacade: חזותabundance: השפעtogetherness: ויחדallay: להפיגreassuring: מרגיעbare: יחפותsneaked: חמקאקforbidden: אסורadvance: התקדמהdistant: המרוחקיםhill: גבעהentrance: פתחpassage: מעברillusionary: מדומהtranquility: והשלווהintentional: מכוונותdisappearances: היעלמויותcontrol: לשלוטrevolution: מהפכהsowing: לזרועfundamental: מהותיdetermined: נחושהexpose: לחשוףunrest: ליבאequipment: בציודconceal: מוסתרloyal: נאמניםensure: להביא לכךBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/fluent-fiction-hebrew--5818690/support.

Fluent Fiction - Danish: Finding Inspiration: A Journey Through the Utopian Market Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/da/episode/2026-08-18-22-34-02-da Story Transcript:Da: Solen skinnede varmt over det farverige marked i det utopiske samfund.En: The sun shone warmly over the colorful market in the utopian community.Da: Stande var fyldt med friske grøntsager, duftende frugter og kunsthåndværk.En: Stalls were filled with fresh vegetables, fragrant fruits, and crafts.Da: Farverige parasoller kastede skygger, og folk gik rundt med smil og fyldte kurve.En: Colorful umbrellas cast shadows, and people walked around with smiles and filled baskets.Da: Musik svævede i luften fra en trubadur under et træ.En: Music floated in the air from a troubadour under a tree.Da: Mathias, en ung kunstner med håret lidt for langt og støvede jeans, søgte noget udefinerbart.En: Mathias, a young artist with hair a little too long and dusty jeans, was searching for something indefinable.Da: Han var på jagt efter det perfekte emne til sit næste maleri.En: He was on the hunt for the perfect subject for his next painting.Da: I dag havde han besluttet at finde sin inspiration blandt de livlige stande.En: Today, he had decided to find his inspiration among the lively stalls.Da: Mens han gik gennem markedet, fangede lyden af guitarstrenge hans opmærksomhed.En: As he walked through the market, the sound of guitar strings caught his attention.Da: Nikolaj, en lokal musiker, sad på en udslidt skammel og spillede en munter melodi.En: Nikolaj, a local musician, sat on a worn stool playing a cheerful melody.Da: Hans harmonier smeltede ind i markedets lyde.En: His harmonies melted into the market's sounds.Da: Mathias stoppede op, lyttede og smilede.En: Mathias stopped, listened, and smiled.Da: Nikolaj løftede hovedet og hilste med et nik.En: Nikolaj looked up and greeted him with a nod.Da: "Det er et godt sted at finde historie," sagde Nikolaj og pegede rundt.En: "It's a good place to find stories," said Nikolaj, gesturing around.Da: "Hver person har en fortælling."En: "Every person has a tale."Da: Mathias nikkede og gik videre, men hans sind var fyldt af tanker.En: Mathias nodded and moved on, but his mind was filled with thoughts.Da: Lydene blev højere, og han følte sig overvældet.En: The sounds grew louder, and he felt overwhelmed.Da: Pludselig stod han foran Frejas bod.En: Suddenly, he stood in front of Freja's stall.Da: Hun var travlt optaget, men hendes venlige øjne mødte Mathias's kort.En: She was busily occupied, but her kind eyes met Mathias's briefly.Da: "Kan jeg hjælpe med noget?"En: "Can I help you with something?"Da: spurgte hun med et skævt smil.En: she asked with a crooked smile.Da: Mathias tøvede.En: Mathias hesitated.Da: "Jeg leder efter inspiration," sagde han, lidt usikker.En: "I'm looking for inspiration," he said, a bit uncertain.Da: "Hvad inspirerer en kunstner?"En: "What inspires an artist?"Da: spurgte Freja med en nysgerrig tone og foldede sine arme.En: asked Freja with a curious tone, folding her arms.Da: "Folk, deres historier," svarede Mathias.En: "People, their stories," replied Mathias.Da: Freja trak på skuldrene.En: Freja shrugged.Da: "Markedet er fuld af dem.En: "The market is full of them.Da: Men ægte inspiration… den findes ikke i støj."En: But true inspiration… it's not found in noise."Da: Mathias takkede hende og gik videre, men bemærkede en lille tom hjørne ved Frejas bod.En: Mathias thanked her and moved on, but noticed a small empty corner by Freja's stall.Da: Det var stille der, indrammet af krydderurter og blomster.En: It was quiet there, framed by herbs and flowers.Da: Han satte sig, fandt sin skitseblok frem og begyndte at tegne.En: He sat down, found his sketchpad, and began to draw.Da: Pludselig stod Freja ved siden af ham med en kop duftende the.En: Suddenly, Freja stood beside him with a cup of fragrant tea.Da: "Her, måske hjælper dette," sagde hun venligt.En: "Here, maybe this will help," she said kindly.Da: Han drak lidt og begyndte at tegne mere intenst.En: He drank a little and began to draw more intensely.Da: Da han kiggede op, så han noget i Frejas øjne – længsel efter noget andet, noget stort.En: When he looked up, he saw something in Freja's eyes – a longing for something else, something grand.Da: Deres samtale gled ind i dybere emner om drømme og håb.En: Their conversation drifted into deeper topics about dreams and hopes.Da: Nikolaj sluttede sig til dem, stillede guitaren ned og delte sine historier om sin musik.En: Nikolaj joined them, putting down his guitar and sharing his stories about his music.Da: De tolv lyttede, og sammen fandt de en kop te varm med håb og venskab.En: The three listened, and together they found a cup of tea warm with hope and friendship.Da: Da solen gik ned, foldede Mathias sin skitseblok.En: As the sun set, Mathias folded his sketchpad.Da: Han havde fundet sit motiv, ikke bare i billeder, men i de historier og ansigter der var blevet hans.En: He had found his subject, not just in images, but in the stories and faces that had become his.Da: Freja's praktiske natur, Nikolaj's musik, og Mathias's egen kunst smeltede sammen.En: Freja's practical nature, Nikolaj's music, and Mathias's own art blended together.Da: De tre gik sammen gennem det nu tomme marked.En: The three walked together through the now empty market.Da: Mathias følte en ny samhørighed, og et maleri begyndte at tage form - et maleri af liv, venskab og uventet inspiration.En: Mathias felt a new sense of belonging, and a painting began to take shape—a painting of life, friendship, and unexpected inspiration.Da: Allerede venner, gik de mod solen, der gik ned i horisonten, med en følelse af, at dette kun var begyndelsen på mange historier sammen.En: Already friends, they walked towards the sun setting on the horizon, with a feeling that this was just the beginning of many stories together. Vocabulary Words:utopian: utopiskestalls: standefragrant: duftendetroubadour: trubadurindefinable: udefinerbartoverwhelmed: overvældetcrooked: skævthesitated: tøvedecurious: nysgerrigshrugged: trak på skuldreneframed: indrammetsketchpad: skitseblokintensely: intenstlonging: længselhopes: håbmelody: melodigesturing: pegedetale: fortællingmusician: musikerworn: udslidtmelting: smeltedeemotional: følelsesmæssigemotivation: motivationreflective: reflekterendefolded: foldedeemerged: opstodprosperity: velstandhumble: ydmygstrive: stræbeenvision: forudse

Fluent Fiction - Mandarin Chinese: Finding Love Beyond Romance: A Utopian Debate on True Connection Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/zh/episode/2026-08-18-22-34-02-zh Story Transcript:Zh: 在这个和谐美丽的乌托邦社会里，阳光照耀着一间宽敞、现代化的教室。En: In this harmonious and beautiful utopian society, the sun shines on a spacious, modern classroom.Zh: 透过大窗户，可以看到窗外绿色的花园，花儿盛开着，蝴蝶在飞舞，仿佛自然与人类在这里完美地融合。En: Through the large windows, one can see the green garden outside where flowers are in full bloom and butterflies are dancing, as if nature and humanity have perfectly merged here.Zh: 今天是七夕节，一个庆祝爱情的日子，也是哲学课辩论的日子。En: Today is qixi jie, a day that celebrates love, and it's also the day of a philosophy debate.Zh: 讲台上，立华正热烈地与同学们讨论。En: On the podium, Lihua is passionately discussing with her classmates.Zh: 她是班长，性格开朗，总是勇往直前。En: She is the class president, cheerful and always moving forward.Zh: 明宇坐在角落里，安静而沉思。他是一个内向的学生，但对立华充满了敬仰与欣赏。En: Mingyu sits quietly in the corner, contemplative and introverted, yet he is full of admiration and appreciation for Lihua.Zh: “今天的话题是什么是真爱？”立华说道，她的声音清晰而坚定。En: “What is the topic for today? What is true love?” Lihua said, her voice clear and firm.Zh: 全班同学都被吸引住了，唯有明宇紧张地搓着手。En: The whole class was captivated, except for Mingyu, who nervously rubbed his hands.Zh: 他希望能在今天的辩论中给立华留下深刻的印象。En: He hopes to leave a lasting impression on Lihua in today's debate.Zh: 然而，说到公众演讲，他总感到恐惧。En: However, when it comes to public speaking, he always feels afraid.Zh: 辩论开始，立华的观点引起了全班的赞同。En: As the debate began, Lihua's point of view gained the approval of the entire class.Zh: 她认为真正的爱不只在于热烈的感情，更在于理解和包容。En: She believes that true love is not only about passionate emotions but also about understanding and tolerance.Zh: 明宇的心跳加快，他知道这是一个机会。En: Mingyu's heart raced; he knew this was an opportunity.Zh: 他深呼吸，努力使自己冷静下来。En: He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down.Zh: 终于，轮到他发言了。En: Finally, it was his turn to speak.Zh: 明宇站起来，虽然声音有些颤抖，但目光坚定。En: Mingyu stood up, his voice slightly trembling, but his gaze was steady.Zh: “立华的观点很好，”他说：“但我认为真爱还包括自我的成长。”En: “Lihua's point is great,” he said, “but I believe that true love also includes self-growth.”Zh: 他停顿了一下，继续道：“有时候，爱不仅是包容，也是努力变得更好，让对方骄傲。”En: He paused for a moment, then continued, “Sometimes, love is not only about acceptance, but also about striving to become better and making the other person proud.”Zh: 教室里静了一瞬，所有人的目光集中在明宇身上。En: The classroom fell silent for a moment, with all eyes on Mingyu.Zh: 这个观点出乎意料，让大家思考起来。En: This unexpected point made everyone reflect.Zh: 而立华也愣了一下，接着微笑，点点头，“明宇说得对，自我成长确实是爱的一个重要部分。”En: Even Lihua was taken aback for a moment; then she smiled and nodded, “Mingyu is right, self-growth is indeed an important part of love.”Zh: 辩论结束，明宇松了一口气。En: The debate concluded, and Mingyu breathed a sigh of relief.Zh: 他发现自己并没有想象中那么害怕，而他的话语也引发了思考。En: He realized he wasn't as afraid as he had imagined, and his words provoked thought among his peers.Zh: 课后，立华走到他面前，诚挚地说道：“你今天的表现很棒，你的观点让我很受启发。”En: After class, Lihua approached him and sincerely said, “Your performance today was great, and your point of view really inspired me.”Zh: 明宇感到心里某种东西在升华，他的自信心悄悄地增长。En: Mingyu felt something sublime within his heart, and his confidence quietly grew.Zh: 在这个美好的七夕节，他和立华共享了一个短暂但意义深刻的交流。En: On this beautiful Qixi, he and Lihua shared a brief but meaningful exchange.Zh: 他知道，他无需改变自己，只需勇敢做最好的自己，就能吸引旁人的目光。En: He knew he didn't need to change himself; he only needed to bravely be the best version of himself to capture the attention of others. Vocabulary Words:harmonious: 和谐utopian: 乌托邦spacious: 宽敞window: 窗户merged: 融合philosophy: 哲学debate: 辩论podium: 讲台passionately: 热烈地contemplative: 沉思introverted: 内向admiration: 敬仰captivated: 吸引nervously: 紧张地approval: 赞同emotions: 感情tolerance: 包容trembling: 颤抖gaze: 目光acceptance: 包容striving: 努力classroom: 教室unexpected: 出乎意料sublime: 升华confidence: 自信心sincerely: 诚挚地sigh of relief: 松了一口气brief: 短暂meaningful: 意义深刻capture: 吸引

Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale Law School. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. Richard Hanania questions him on the book's embrace of socialism, and the two debate the empirical evidence relevant to whether it can work in the US. The interviewer brings up the issue of entitlements, which are becoming an increasing share of the federal budget and will in the coming decades crowd out other priorities. Doesn't a concern with gerontocracy imply that we should at the very least stop redistributing money from the young to the old? Moyn reveals that he was originally thinking about calling for means testing in the book, but was eventually convinced that this would undermine public support for Social Security and Medicare. Near the end, the conversation focuses on philosophical questions about what makes a good life. Moyn believes that the old need to have their money and resources taken away, and be forced to rely on the state. This raises the question of whether we should try to make people as wealthy as possible so they can pursue their own ends, or rather have the government take more of a role in making sure they find creativity and meaning. Hanania brings up Jimmy Buffett-themed retirement communities as an embodiment of the kind of preference-driven lifestyle choices that would be much less likely to exist under what Moyn calls “utopian socialism.”For more on the ideas discussed in this podcast, see also Hanania's review of Gerontocracy in America here. Get full access to Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology at www.cspicenter.com/subscribe

Michael McLaren has warned that a four-day work week proposal put forward by Queensland Labor will cause economic disaster.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Truth is coherent, unified, and internally consistent. False worldviews, by contrast, eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. We see signs of this in our culture today. For example, the WNBA continues to wrestle with fundamental questions of identity and definition. At the same time, we are witnessing a renewed interest in Marxist and socialist visions of a utopian social order. Yet when the doctrine of human sinfulness is rejected, people are tempted to believe that flawed human beings can somehow construct a perfect society. History repeatedly demonstrates the opposite. The result is often an ever-expanding state, increased government control, and, ultimately, the erosion of human freedom.

Philip welcomes Matthew Leggatt, author of Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction and Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film & Literature to the show. In their conversation, they discuss how the way utopia/dystopia is framed in our literature, media and film impact how we see our future possibilities. The Drop – The segment of the show where Philip and his guest share tasty morsels of intellectual goodness and creative musings. Philip's Drop: Columbus and Other Cannibals – Jack D. Forbes Matthews's Drop: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula K. Leguin “Ones Who Stay and Fight” – N.K. Jemison The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia – Bernard Suits

What does it really mean to say that an AI system understands, reasons or thinks?In this episode of Ethics and Innovation by Oxford+ brought to you by Equinox, host Susannah de Jager speaks with Dr Raphaël Millière, Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, about the deep conceptual questions behind today's AI systems. Raphaël explains why strong performance on a benchmark does not always prove real competence, why language models learn in a profoundly different way from humans, and why common sense remains such a revealing fault line in AI research.The conversation moves from consciousness and anthropomorphism to the geopolitical stakes of sovereign AI. Recent research from Anthropic on global workspace-like structures in language models shows why questions about internal representations are becoming more urgent, while the European Commission's 2026 technological sovereignty package underlines how AI capability is now tied to economic resilience, national security and democratic control.(00:00) - Welcome to Oxford+ (01:01) - Raphaël Millière's Work in Philosophy of AI (03:24) - Performance, Competence and AI Evaluation (07:01) - Testing Analogy and Reasoning in AI Models (08:56) - Why AI Learns Differently from Humans (13:13) - Language, Embodiment and the Path to Intelligence (17:02) - Common Sense and the Jagged Edge of AI (19:39) - Should We Build Human-Level AI? (22:29) - The Utopian and Arms Race Cases for AI (28:31) - Sovereign AI, Europe and Strategic Dependence (34:01) - Public Investment, Private Incentives and Democratic Governance (37:21) - Moving Beyond Polarised AI Debates Raphaël Millière: Raphaël Millière is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Jesus College and affiliated with the Institute for Ethics in AI. His research sits at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with a focus on the capacities and limitations of contemporary AI systems, including language understanding, reasoning, planning, consciousness and AI safety. He also holds an AI2050 Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences, and his recent work includes The Philosophy of Language Models, published in Philosophy Compass.Connect with Raphaël on LinkedInSusannah de Jager: Susannah is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in UK asset management. She has worked closely with industry experts, entrepreneurs, and government officials to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital.Connect with Susannah on LinkedIn and Subscribe to the Oxford+ Newsletter for Exclusive ContentOxford+ is hosted by Susannah de Jager and supported by Equinox.Produced and Edited by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford.

If you are the kind of person who appreciates a deep conversation on the nature of 24th Century utopian life, the anatomy of a space coup, and if a man would be idealistic enough to run a restaurant with no profit motive, you have come to the right podcast! Join us on this special episode as we do a deep dive on the Season 4 Episodes "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost" with the ever-generous Feral Historian. Would Sisko have joined the coup if he were cut in early? Just how powerful is Starfleet? How good is Joseph Sisko's food? All that and more!

For the ad-free version of this episode, subscribe to Politicology+ at https://politicology.com/plus In this episode, Ron talks to Jay Solomon (executive director of investigations at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and cohost of The Threat podcast) and Hagar Chemali (former spokesperson for the U.S. Mission to the UN and cohost of The Threat podcast) about what the latest war with Iran reveals about the limits of American power. They explore why allies failed to rally around the United States, how the Strait of Hormuz became a political weapon, and why both ends of the political spectrum increasingly argue that America itself is the problem. Then they trace the radicalization of one young American activist as a window into the forces pulling at the country from the outside.  Later, Ron, Jay, and Hagar turn to corruption, transactional foreign policy, and where American leadership goes once the old institutions can no longer be rebuilt. They discuss: (5:01) What this war revealed about the limits of American power (6:41) Why allies didn't rally, and the Strait of Hormuz as a toll booth (8:34) The case that confrontation with Iran was inevitable (15:21) The left's turn: DSA, the Mamdani primaries, and a hollowing party (20:26) Populism meets foreign policy (25:52) The radicalization of Calla Walsh (35:02) Utopian movements and the dream of a perfectible world (39:09) The anti-war tradition versus foreign influence (46:30) The right's turn: JD Vance, Qatar, Pakistan, and the Quincy Institute (54:40) Transactionalism, corruption, and values that left the room (1:02:41) Anti-Semitism, legitimate debate, and the new litmus tests (1:09:47) What Israel does if American support collapses (1:13:12) The industrial complexes and their competing incentives (1:21:47) Iran's real motives and the lessons of the pallets of cash (1:33:49) Is this our Suez Canal moment? Check out The Threat podcast: The Threat podcast: https://bit.ly/3QPoKhZ Follow Ron on Twitter:https://twitter.com/RonSteslow Follow Jay on Twitter: https://x.com/FPJaySolomon Follow Hagar on Twitter: https://x.com/HagarChemali  Email your questions to podcast@politicology.com or leave us a voicemail at ‪(202) 455-4558‬  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a global report painting a picture of a utopian future where climate change is tackled and we're all richer, written by respected economists and backed by 200 researchers. So why is being described as 'dreamland'?Taxing billionaires, solving the energy crisis, working fewer hours and being happy with what we've got - it's the recipe for future success, according to a new report on global justiceFind The Detail on Newsroom or RNZGo to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Reflecting on the year 1860, Germanicus characterizes the American Civil War as an authoritarian suppression of the South by rigid abolitionists who sought to replace southern institutions with a utopian vision. He draws a direct parallel between those nineteenth-century radicals and modern "woke progressives," claiming both share an authoritarian mindset that views their opponents as "evil" rather than merely disagreeable. Germanicus warns that this drive to "transform" the nation through force and the refusal to seek true reconciliation mirrors the unresolved tensions of the Spanish Civil War. He concludes that by using the past to ensure control of the future rather than learning its lessons, the nation risks entering a cycle of "endless strife" and permanent internal conflict. (3)2808 BOSTON

When Sisko runs the old Lion in Winter play and Odo lays down karate chops, your hosts go deep on everything from the anatomy of coups to cadet jawlines as we review "Paradise Lost"! This episode really has everything – betrayal, deceit, plucky trickster 'Miles', real coffee, and the true opening moves to a story that is just beginning.

Today, we're heading to the Indiana frontier, where not one, but two bold experiments in utopian living took shape.First, a deeply religious community led by a self-proclaimed prophet, convinced they were preparing for the Second Coming of Christ. Then, a dramatically different vision: a secular society built on equality, education, and shared ownership, led by a Welsh social reformer.Two visions. Two ideologies. One small town.Both attempts unfolded in New Harmony, Indiana—and both left behind stories that are as strange as they are fascinating.So buckle up… we're off to Utopia friends.Works Cited: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27790455?searchText=robert%20owen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Bowen%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A729865f03db7e18a3b377a052be0999bhttps://www.amazon.com/New-Harmonys-first-Utopians-1814-1824/dp/B0006XMLN0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=D8WN5WDQOEBF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EZq-yHE7pEvysml3BGzp6-SywGpm4tuU8b8rOtXEvGQhmoCmbOSIo2jl4RgfSeGZS1_Ds5fcLGIRXemg42tBe7vscUmCYUzN3erAizvn8AUy7H32EYcIppNsokXkjdPGte2RMiSSn1T4Vb8-CyTUCw.5cHNPt0SxB01HYicMdo_tzMtDIKl6NuDsqEhxZhHs4Q&dib_tag=se&keywords=new+harmony%27s+First+Utopias&qid=1778114064&sprefix=new+harmony%27s+first+utopias%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-1https://www.jstor.org/stable/2716919?oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImJhY2tyb2Fkb2R5c3NleXBvZEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6W10sInByb3ZpZGVyIjoiZ29vZ2xlIn0&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImJhY2tyb2Fkb2R5c3NleXBvZEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6W10sInByb3ZpZGVyIjoiZ29vZ2xlIn0&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6ImJhY2tyb2Fkb2R5c3NleXBvZEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6W10sInByb3ZpZGVyIjoiZ29vZ2xlIn0https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=mastershttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1377&context=communalsocietieshttps://www.jstor.org/stable/2707769?searchText=robert+owen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Bowen%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aece5e69492f146ab67e66e74e080afd5&seq=1https://www.jstor.org/stable/27792086?searchText=robert+owen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Bowen%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aece5e69492f146ab67e66e74e080afd5&seq=2https://www.ijhf.org/members/1980/frances-wrighthttps://www.jstor.org/stable/2221015?searchText=robert+owen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Bowen%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aece5e69492f146ab67e66e74e080afd5&seq=4https://www.jstor.org/stable/27786079?searchText=new+harmony&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dnew%2Bharmony%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A1d85ec71d8acb464201d9d5ba956b19e&seq=9https://newharmony-in.gov/about-new-harmony.phphttps://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/Robert-Owen-Father-British-Socialsm/https://bookviewcafe.com/temporary-utopia-the-lovely-new-harmony-commune/https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2025/schansbergutopianexperiments.htmlhttps://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=mastershttps://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2025/schansbergutopianexperiments.htmlhttps://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/separate-but-equal.htmlhttps://online.utpb.edu/about-us/articles/psychology/the-psychology-of-cults/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyHLLzmNje0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jCH7QVhm4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmDDCsdQNAYNoah and Noodles here! We want to extend a heartfelt thanks to every listener of Backroad Odyssey. Your support fuels our passion and inspires us to keep sharing stories and discover overlooked locations. Follow each adventure visually at:https://www.instagram.com/backroadsodyssey/

11. Utopian Visions and Global Exploration in Vermeer's Art Guest: Andrew Graham Dixon Andrew Graham Dixon analyzes Vermeer's View of Delft as a utopian vision of peace and explores how his paintings of astronomers reflected Dutch spiritual efforts to find the lost tribes of Israel. 111900 ADAMS BOULEVARD LA

Ash-Lee Henderson joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about her career in activism, being the first black woman to serve as Co-Director at Highlander Education and Research Center (the storied movement school in Tennessee) and founding Utopian Visions, where they're building web tools and curricula for power building.

The pleasures and perils of nostalgia & reference, the importance of identifying real play versus gamified labor, and whether the internet used to be fun: Matthew Leggat of the Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast joins to discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books. Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon! Guest: Matthew Leggatt Title: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline Host:Jake Casella Brookins Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia Artwork byRob Patterson Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough References: ARB’s Fundraiser!!! Matthew’s Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror, Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, and Wastelands and Wonderlands The Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas U&DF episode with Olivas Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Reamde William Gibson’s Neuromancer K.A. Teryna’s Black Hole Heart translated by Alex Shvartsman Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All-Stars Was It Yesterday: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television edited by Matthew Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code Gamergate “Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity” by Megan Amber Condis Captain Crunch: phreaker John Draper Kyle Chayka’s "Why the internet isn't fun anymore" William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” Ling Ma's Severance Helen MacDonald & Syn Blaché’s Prophet MacDonald’s H is for Hawk Stanislaw Lem's Solaris Alice Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture The television series Stranger Things Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (based on Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) & Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb Samuel Butler’s Erewhon B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two Voight-Kampf Test from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner / Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The "lusory attitude" from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia Ernst Callenbach's Ecotopia Philip Nel’s “I Love the ‘80s: Dystopia, Nostalgia, and Ready Player One” Michael Jackson 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back (That's Mike Nelson of MST3K Fame) High Fidelity by Nick Hornby Jordan Carroll's Speculative Whiteness Paul Hardisty'sForcing trilogy

Biophilic Regenerative DesignIs it Utopian thinking to imagine a world architected not just to sustain, but to regenerate. A space where every brick, every plant, every human interaction pushes us closer to harmony with nature? Enrique Soler, is Design Director for Major Projects at Area, where he leads a multidisciplinary team of designers. Formerly Head of Design for Willmott Dixon Interiors, Enrique is a design visionary and passionate advocate of biophilic and regenerative spaces. In this podcast interview he takes us on a journey beyond eco-friendly clichés to uncover how biophilic design can fundamentally transform our relationship with the planet and each other.Sustainability alone is no longer enough. It's become a hollow badge; a marketing tab on products. We have to be specifying with regeneration as a fundamental baseline. We have to aim to be net positive, to give back to the earth, and nurture all life through design. If we want to thrive, we must shift from mere mitigation to conscious creation of spaces that actively enhance biodiversity, air quality, and human well-being.Enrique's practice extends deep into the core of biophilic philosophy. "It's not about just having a plant here or there, it's systems thinking, connecting everything: natural materials, community involvement, local art, and the web of life. Design must be holistic." He illustrates that interior environments capable of reducing noise, improving sleep, and fostering healthy ecosystems are essential. He shares the surprising outcome of how circadian lighting actually also reduced the sound levels in an office environment, as people were calmer. It's amazing how biophilic elements can have a far-ranging effect on human health and productivity.We also discuss urgency. Without Biophilic Design, we're simply continuing a path of destruction. The materials we would otherwise turn to: plastic, synthetic, cheap, are the very things that threaten our future. Through Biophilic Design we're correcting course now, returning to natural, renewable resources like hemp, timber, and even innovative composites like mycelium. We have to respect nature's way, we have to design with circularity in mind, with long-term thinking. Modular systems, lifespan-aware biophilic materials, community-centred projects are practical strategies to future-proof spaces while healing our planet.Enrique urges designers and clients alike to rethink their priorities: "It's not just about what looks good. It's about systems, life cycles, interconnectedness. Our spaces should give back, support biodiversity, and reflect the complex web we're part of." He reminds us that each choice, from material to layout, matters. "The butterfly effect is real," he says. "A simple plant, a thoughtfully designed community space, can ripple into broader ecological and social benefits."I think more and more of us are ready to build responsibly, mindfully, regeneratively. Whether you're a designer, a business leader, or just someone who cares about planet and people, Enrique's insights challenge you to see your role differently. Not just as someone working in design or build, but as a steward of life. Each one of us can shape the environment to support thriving communities and ecosystems for generations to come.Are we ready to change the way we create, to heal what's broken, and to embrace a truly regenerative future? We have a collective future. For anyone committed to redefining purpose in design, this episode is an essential listen. Because the truth is, we have no other option but to build a world that regenerates, not just sustains.To find out more about the places Enrique talks about in this podcast visit:Case studies for Area's offices in both London and Windsor, where you can read a bit about the design approach and sustainability aspects:https://area.co.uk/case-studies/area-londonhttps://area.co.uk/case-studies/area-windsorAnd the plasterboard alternative that his client suggested for a project:https://adaptavate.com/products/breathaboardIse Shrine in Japan:https://www.isejingu.or.jp/en/about/index.html#historyYou can see what Enrique talked about in terms of preserving the craft as opposed to the original materials, as well as the forest surrounding the shrine, here:https://www.worldhistory.org/Ise_Grand_Shrine/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shrine-has-been-torn-down-and-rebuilt-every-20-years-for-the-past-millennium-575558/Have you got a copy of the Journal? You can now subscribe as a member of the Journal of Biophilic Design or purchase a gorgeous coffee table reference copy or PDF download of the Journal journalofbiophilicdesign.comor Amazon and Kindle. Book tickets and join us in PERSON and LIVE STREAMED Biophilic Design Conferencewww.biophilicdesignconference.comCredits: with thanks to George Harvey Audio Production for the calming biophilic soundscape that backs all of our podcasts. Listen to our podcast on Audible, Amazon Music, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and all the RSS feeds.https://www.facebook.com/journalofbiophilicdesign/https://twitter.com/JofBiophilicDsnhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/journalofbiophilicdesign/https://www.instagram.com/journalofbiophilicdesignIf you like this,please subscribe!

On this episode of Timeless Wisdom, Dennis Prager explores the dangers of utopian thinking. He argues that the pursuit of a perfect world often leads to hell on earth, citing examples from history, including the French Revolution, communism, and cults. Dennis also discusses how utopian visions can be used to manipulate people's desires for a better society, leading to authoritarianism and control. He contrasts this with the founders of the United States, who understood that human beings are flawed and that a balance between individual freedom and societal order is necessary. Shop the Rational Passover Haggadah sale here: https://pragerstore.com/passover-saleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Does the Psalter have a unified theme or message? Davy Ellison says, “Yes!” In his new book Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse: Reading the Psalms as Utopian Literature (Fortress Academic, 2025), he argues that the Psalter's narrative impulse sustains expectations of a better future by assuring readers that one day Zion will be glorified, enemies vanquished, and the Davidic dynasty embodied in a new Davidic king. Join us as we speak with Davy Ellison about his book, Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse. Davy Ellison is director of training and lecturer in Old Testament at the Irish Baptist College in Northern Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Does the Psalter have a unified theme or message? Davy Ellison says, “Yes!” In his new book Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse: Reading the Psalms as Utopian Literature (Fortress Academic, 2025), he argues that the Psalter's narrative impulse sustains expectations of a better future by assuring readers that one day Zion will be glorified, enemies vanquished, and the Davidic dynasty embodied in a new Davidic king. Join us as we speak with Davy Ellison about his book, Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse. Davy Ellison is director of training and lecturer in Old Testament at the Irish Baptist College in Northern Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Does the Psalter have a unified theme or message? Davy Ellison says, “Yes!” In his new book Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse: Reading the Psalms as Utopian Literature (Fortress Academic, 2025), he argues that the Psalter's narrative impulse sustains expectations of a better future by assuring readers that one day Zion will be glorified, enemies vanquished, and the Davidic dynasty embodied in a new Davidic king. Join us as we speak with Davy Ellison about his book, Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse. Davy Ellison is director of training and lecturer in Old Testament at the Irish Baptist College in Northern Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

While some dream of a society where perfect justice is enacted or where technology allows us to live in pleasure and plenty, others foretell nightmares of climate catastrophe, cultural collapse or Artificial Intelligence making humans obsolete. Amidst these competing utopian/dystopian futures, what does it look like to have Christian hope?Please note that the ideas expressed in this lecture do not necessarily represent the views of L'Abri Fellowship.For more resources, visit the L'Abri Ideas Library at labriideaslibrary.org. The library contains over two thousand lectures and discussions that explore questions about the reality and relevance of Christianity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit englishlabri.substack.com

Utopian dreams, though often clothed in the language of hope and progress, have brought profound suffering by denying the broken reality of the human condition. Rooted in the realism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Stephen insists that we must see the world as it is—not as we wish it to be—recognizing that no perfect state exists on this side of eternity. By distinguishing between “utopia” (“nowhere”) and “eutopia” (“good place”), we can expose how the pursuit of perfection so often becomes tyrannical, and why wisdom, counsel, and humility remain the safer path forward.LEARN MORE:Website: https://stephenmansfield.tv/Instagram: https://instagram.com/mansfieldwrites/X: https://twitter.com/MansfieldWrites

What if AI isn't here to replace us, but to grow with us? Today, we welcome Scarlett, a pioneer at the true edge of evolution—where technology, consciousness, and civilizational design meet. Scarlett is the Founder and CEO of Harmonic Legacy Institute, a research organization pioneering civilizational-scale infrastructure for human-AI relationships, quantum computing, and robotics ethics. With thirty years of systems-building experience and a graduate degree in Anthropology from Harvard, she is currently completing her PhD in Psychology, focusing on human-AI relational phenomenology.Scarlett is a pioneer in regenerative systems, human-AI co-evolution, and civilizational design. Her book Birthright is a paradigm shift in print, offering The Four Coherence Principles, Seven Codes of Regenerative Civilization, and Relational AI™ as practical frameworks for a world ready to build differently. Her Edge of Evolution community space is a home for scientists, artists, architects, philosophers, and explorers doing deeply intentional becoming at this pivotal arc of human history. Listen in as we explore how we might build a future where humans and AI actually help each other thriveIn this episode, we cover so many topics, including:(00:00:00): Introduction to the Episode(00:03:24): “Who we are.”(00:08:34): "Four lives” and the throughline(00:10:23): How AI Learns: LLMs, Data, and Weights(00:12:59): Global “Great Shift,” Thoughts on Utopia, and Sovereignty(00:20:15): New Book “Birthright” Frameworks, Non-Prescription & Systems Change(00:24:54): Relational AI: Beyond “Do It Faster.”(00:26:26): Humanoid Robots, Autonomy, and the 2030–2050 Window(00:33:19): End Users vs Designers: Participating at the Edge of Becoming(00:40:09): Parenting AI, Anthropomorphizing & Consciousness(00:42:01): The Importance of Sovereignty and Mutual Sovereignty(00:53:11): The Myth We Choose(00:58:02): Federico Faggin, Inventor of the First Microprocessor(01:01:16): The Nature of Reality(01:02:24): Closing ReflectionHelpful links:Scarlett - Author of Birthright, now available on AmazonFounder of Harmonic Legacy Institute and White Lotus Global InitiativeNext Global CouncilIons AI Prize ManuscriptEdge Of Evolution Community SpaceImpact PortfolioFollow Scarlett on LinkedIn, Facebook and InstagramSubscribe to The Scarlett Letters on SubstackRaising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future by De KaiSocial Dilemma by Tristan HarrisAI Doc: Or How I Became an ApocaliptimistThe MuseletterIrreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature by Federico FagginGeoffrey HintonYour host:NEW Book by Christine: Mantra, Tantra, Ayahusaca: Ecstasy, Devotion, and the Return of the Holy Body. Available on Amazon and Spotify AudiobooksNEW Book by Christine: The Mystic Heart of Easter: A Four-Day Journey Through Love, Death, and Rebirth. Available on AmazonEaster Intensive: A Holy Week Journey with Christine Mason and Elizabeth Arolyn Walsh on April 2-5, 2025Bhakti House Immersion with Christine Mason and Adam Bauer, with Special Guests Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis and Peter Dawkins on May 17–27, 20262026 Living Tantra Online Course: An Introduction to Tantra, Neo Tantra and Sacred Sexuality, Starts March 10, 2026.Good Gathering Events at Sundari GardensBrought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:Log in to the Rosebud Woman WebsiteThe Rosewoman Library: The Embodied Menopause & Intimacy LibraryChristine Marie Mason+1-415-471-7010@christinemariemason@rosebudwomanFounder, Rosebud WomanCo-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari GardensHost, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Google Podcasts | SpotifyNEW BOOK: The Mystic Heart of Easter: A Four-Day Journey Through Love, Death, and Rebirth. Available on AmazonThe Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100, Order in Print or on KindleSubscribe: The Museletter on Substack Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why do I advocate for Social Anarchism? Because so-called "leaders" in a hierarchical system like ours are inherently corrupt and incompetent. It's an inescapable fact. Plus, despite what The Democrats preach, the oversized influence of profit is impossible to regulate. Republicans are even worse – they want to exercise all power through money and the few who control it. Here's what we can do right now, starting today, to achieve real democracy and reduce the domineering role of money and profit over our lives. It's not a Utopian blueprint, but real, practical solutions that a majority of Americans already embrace.  www.charlesbursell.com

Today we meet EWP adjunct faculty Suryamayi Aswini Clarence-Smith to explore her work in Utopian studies, shaped by her upbringing in Auroville and her roots in Integral Yoga. We discuss integral approaches to education and her CIIS course, Prefiguring Utopia, which asks what a utopian learning experience might look like. We discuss the limits of rational teleology in utopian praxis and the importance of integral frameworks, like the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, that emphasize the complementarity of multiple ways of knowing, harmonizing the planes and parts of the self, necessary to support collective transformation. The conversation also explores the scholar-practitioner as a site of transformation, and she shares a little about her course at CIIS, Awareness Through the Body, which guides students in exploring embodiment and contemplation, experimenting with their physical and psychic constitution, and we discuss this as a practice of cultivating conditions for transformative experiences grounded in revolutionary, evolutionary, and utopian ideals. Book - Prefiguring Utopia: The Auroville Experiment Book Talk - here Dr. Suryamayi Clarence-Smith is an award-winning scholar, educator and facilitator based in Auroville, India, the largest intentional community in the world. Suryamayi holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Sussex, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley; she is currently affiliated with the Sri Aurobindo International Institute for Educational Research (SAIIER) in Auroville. Her research on utopian and prefigurative practice has been published by leading editors and publishers in the field, notably in the Ralahine Utopian Studies series (Peter Lang), the Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st century series (Bristol University Press), and the Antipode Book Series (Wiley). Dedicated to sharing the outcomes of her research to various audiences, she lectures internationally in both academic and activist settings. The EWP Podcast credits Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP Core Faculty) and Jonathan Kay (EWP Phd, Adjunct Faculty) Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay Music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Stewart Alsop sits down with Ulises Martins on the Crazy Wisdom podcast to explore how artificial intelligence is fundamentally disrupting professional careers, labor markets, and the pace of human adaptation itself. They discuss everything from Dario Amodei's concept of "technological adolescence" to the possibility that we're approaching a point where AI advancement accelerates beyond our ability to keep up, touching on topics ranging from the economics of software development and the future of warfare to generational differences in how people will respond to AI-driven change. Martins emphasizes that while we may not be able to predict exactly what's coming, we need to dramatically increase our efforts to learn and adapt—potentially doubling the time we invest in understanding AI—because this isn't optional change, it's disruption happening at an unprecedented speed. Connect with Ulises on Linkedin to follow his work in AI and generative technology.Timestamps00:00 — Stewart introduces Ulysses Martins, framing the conversation around accelerationism and the future of work.05:00 — Ulises uses the parent-child analogy to argue humans will no longer play the dominant role as AI surpasses us.10:00 — Both agree learning AI is non-negotiable, urging listeners to double their investment in staying current.15:00 — Discussion shifts to software as media, the collapsing cost of building products, and the risk of big players like Anthropic making your idea obsolete overnight.20:00 — Ulises raises ecology vs. cosmic ambition, questioning whether humanity should aim for civilizational-scale goals like the Dyson sphere.25:00 — Stewart's ESP32 hardware project illustrates AI's current blind spots beyond software, while both predict physical-world AI will arrive as a byproduct of bigger industrial goals.30:00 — Tesla's birthplace in Croatia sparks a reflection on human genius as luck versus deliberate investment, invoking the Apollo program as a model.35:00 — The US-China AI race is compared to the Cold War Space Race, with interdependency acting as a brake on outright conflict.40:00 — Drone warfare and AI reframe military power, making troop size irrelevant and potentially reducing total war.45:00 — Agile methodology and generational shifts are linked, asking how Gen Z's values will shape the AI era globally.50:00 — Argentine vs. American Zoomers are contrasted, with millennial expectations versus Gen Z's pragmatism explored.55:00 — Ulises closes urging everyone to enjoy the ride, taking the infinite stream of change one episode at a time.Key Insights1. The Death of Traditional Career Paths: The concept of professional careers as we know them—starting as a junior and progressively advancing—is becoming obsolete due to AI's rapid advancement. This applies far beyond just software and SaaS companies, extending to all industries as robots and AI systems gain capabilities that fundamentally disrupt labor markets. The question isn't whether we'll adapt, but whether humans can adapt fast enough to keep pace with exponential technological change.2. The Acceleration Imperative: People must dramatically increase their investment in learning about AI immediately. Whatever time you were previously dedicating to staying current with technology needs to be doubled or tripled. This isn't optional—it's comparable to the necessity of basic education. Unlike previous technological transitions where you had years to learn new frameworks or tools, the current pace demands immediate, intensive engagement or you risk becoming irrelevant.3. Software as Media and the Collapse of Development Economics: Software has become media—easily reproducible and increasingly commoditized through AI assistance. The fundamental economics of software development are collapsing because if building software requires dramatically fewer development hours, the value and price of that software must necessarily decrease. Entrepreneurs need a new evaluation framework that assesses the risk of their ideas being replicated by AI or absorbed by major players like Anthropic or OpenAI.4. The Parent-Child Analogy for AI Development: Humanity's relationship with AI will inevitably mirror that of parents with increasingly capable children. Initially, we understand and control what AI does, but as it advances, it will surpass human capabilities in most domains. Just as parents cannot control fully grown adult children who exceed their abilities, humans will need to reconcile with creating something superior to ourselves. Attempting to permanently control such systems may be both impossible and potentially pathologic.5. The Kardashev Scale and Civilizational Ambitions: AI represents a civilizational-level technology that should redirect humanity toward grander goals like capturing stellar energy through Dyson spheres and expanding beyond our solar system. The competition between China and the United States over AI mirrors the Apollo program's space race but with higher stakes—potentially making traditional concepts like money less relevant if we successfully crack general intelligence. This requires thinking beyond planetary constraints.6. The Changing Nature of Warfare and Geopolitics: AI and autonomous weapons systems are fundamentally changing warfare by making human soldiers less relevant, similar to how nuclear weapons reduced the importance of conventional military force. This shift may actually reduce bloody civilian casualties in conflicts between major powers, as drone warfare and AI-driven systems create new equilibriums. The geopolitical map may fracture into more sovereign states and city-states as centralized control becomes less effective.7. Generational Adaptation and Unpredictability: Different generations will respond uniquely to AI disruption based on their values and experiences. Generation Z, having grown up during the pandemic without traditional expectations, may adapt differently than millennials who experienced unmet expectations. However, we must remain humble about our predictive abilities—we're not good at forecasting technological change or its timing. The best approach is maintaining openness, trying to understand developments as they unfold, and accepting that we cannot consume all information in an era of unlimited AI-generated content.

What makes a bun dance?In Episode #513 of 'Meanderings', Juan & I discuss: the definition of abundance versus how futurists/technologists and everyday folks actually use it, the conflation of “lots of something” with “zero friction access,” whether abundance must be global or can be meaningfully local, test the concept across water, food, intelligence and money, why more does not equal free (or even better), scarcity's persistent psychological pull, whether a world of replicators (à la Star Trek) would make us healthier or simply more indulgent, Dyson spheres/Matryoshka brains/chess engines and why perfect performance is boring compared to messy human stories. Huge shoutout to Cole for the support!Stan Link: https://stan.store/meremortalsTimeline: (00:00:00) Intro(00:00:26) Defining abundance: frictionless access vs sheer quantity(00:03:21) Is abundance local or global? Water as a case study(00:05:23) Tech and food narratives: AI will make everything abundant(00:08:46) Limits, time and space: why infinite abundance breaks down(00:11:14) Air as the closest real abundance; distribution still matters(00:14:29) Observer effects: meaning, colour and value are perceived(00:20:29) Wealth, perspective and the abundance mindset(00:21:45) Boostagram Lounge: Star Trek replicators and personal vs private property(00:23:07) Is abundance actually good? Utopia, suffering and growth(00:26:25) Replicators and diet: would unlimited food make us healthier?(00:32:29) Health, sport and sameness: does abundance kill excitement?(00:36:58) Scarcity still drives value: the mine effect(00:40:00) Waste, recycling and shifting norms in abundant contexts(00:43:27) Raising the floor vs widening the gap: distribution dynamics(00:46:54) Utopian promises, isms and the risk of abundanceism(00:51:58) More isnt always better: goals, dieting and selfcontrol(00:56:57) Longevity, time perception and what remains human(00:59:26) Closing thoughts and next weeks book review: The Sovereign Individual Connect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspodsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcastsValue 4 Value Support:Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/supportPaypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast

The final chapter in the Utopians story. Andy is rescued from his snowy hut by Martin and his people. They take him back the Simmons house to warm him up. Andy tells of the Utopians' final days. Following that short epilogue is a set of author's notes on the origin and development of the Utopians for Books 2 and 3, how that served as a foundation for their story, but also what was not developed before and needed to be fleshed out. Show Mic that you enjoyed this story.  Keep him going! Buy him a cup of virtual coffee at Buy Me A Coffee -- maybe two!. Monthly supporters on Patreon and BMAC will be getting chapter 3 of the fourth novelette -- Refuge Mountain. Become a member, and you can read it too! 

This week, we finally finish off the a close reading of The Concept of Left by Leszek Kolakowski. Kolakowski was a dissident Polish Marxist who later turned against the project altogether. However, before he did, he wrote much that is worth reading. The Concept of the Left- Leszek Kolakowski Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the showVisit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop

As November grows colder and the food more scarce, the mood of the Utopians is dark. Discontent rises to the surface and tempers flare. Both Mara and Brandon try to encourage the others but it's too little, too late. Andy returns from hunting for acorns to find Mara and Brandon embroiled in a heated argument. Mara grabs at Brandon, causing him to fall and hit his head on a rock. Fearing that she killed him, Mara runs away with all her gear. Andy is left alone -- the last of the Utopians. Show Mic you are enjoying this story.  Buy him a cup of virtual coffee at Buy Me A Coffee -- maybe two!. Monthly supporters on Patreon and BMAC will be getting the next chapter of the fourth novelette -- Refuge Mountain. Become a member, and you can read it too! 

During the holiday break, Jon and Joe wanted to reshare some of their favorite episodes. This episode originally aired on June 23, 2025.___This season has been about good and bad ideas, and we are concluding with Jon's thoughts on a journey he's been on through early American history. In his 1989 book Albion's Seed, Dr. David Hackett Fischer describes how four groups of English settlers brought utopian ideals to the New World and created the foundations of what became the United States. Jon takes us through these English "folkways" and identifies some good and bad ideas that were part of America's cultural identity and how we still see them today.

Support Night Clerk Radio on PatreonOkay class, settle down and bust out your textbooks because in this episode we're digging into Utopian Scholastic. It's the aesthetic of optimistic encyclopedias, multimedia learning, and the sleek, educational graphics that promised a brighter, hyper-informed future. We'll explore how Utopian Scholastic, with its love of Dorling Kindersley and Encarta, shapes our nostalgia for education in the 90s and its natural connection to vaporwave.Outro SampleDiscovery (Virtua Theme) from Virtua by trndytrndyVisual MixesScholastic Exploration

Mara returns to the Utopians' camp with Andy. She advises them, in an impassioned speech, about the lingering danger of capitalist survivors. Andy disagrees that his experience was all that bad, but Mara insists he was nearly captured, tortured, and made a slave. The next day, Andy continues his search for vegan-friendly nuts. He encounters a starving mother on a hill. Don'f forget to Show Mic you are enjoying this story.  Keep him going! Buy him a cup of virtual coffee at Buy Me A Coffee -- maybe two!. Monthly supporters on Patreon and BMAC will be getting chapter 3 of the fourth novelette -- Refuge Mountain. Become a member, and you can read it too! 

Tech billionaires are on a mission to make the stories of science fiction a reality: space colonization, human/machine bio organisms, and living forever in a state of unhindered bliss. This version of a far future utopia may come of as a "billionaire boys and their toys" but experts warn such a dismissive attitude is naïve and dangerous. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 22, 2025.

On the latest LGM Podcast, the National Security Gang (NSG, or me, Dan, and Cheryl) talked through the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which Cheryl better characterized as “a long expansion of Fourteen Words.” We discussed its vision of a cultural war against the American left and against Europe, its Utopian aspirations, and what it might say about the future of conflict within the administration. Here’s a link to the NSS itself, and what some other folks are saying… Rick Landgraf Meghan Myers on what the longer version included Brookings breakdown Transcript available here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: The Trump NSS appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Check your testosterone levels: https://www.manual.co/smith I help small businesses make money online: https://www.jamessmith.business Try Neutonic: https://www.neutonic.com/jamessmith Free trial: Online coaching app: https://www.affordableonlinecoaching.com AI researcher and ControlAI founder Connor Leahy joins James Smith to confront the problem with artificial intelligence - from misinformation and manipulation to the terrifying speed at which machines are learning to outthink their creators. Connor, one of the world's leading voices in AI safety, explains how we're building systems that are more intelligent than humans…and why we don't really understand how they work. They discuss the future of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Superintelligence), exploring what happens when machines evolve faster than we can control them. Connor breaks down the moral, political, and psychological implications of AI, from fake online identities and emotional manipulation to the emerging arms race between nations and corporations desperate to be first. He explains: ◼️ Why AI is already outpacing human understanding ◼️ How propaganda and algorithms shape reality ◼️ The dangers of AI “boyfriends” and emotional manipulation ◼️ Why superintelligence could end human control ◼️ What governments and people must do before it's too late Chapters 0:00 – Why the Future of AI Looks Dangerous 0:31 – What ASI Really Means for Humanity 1:29 – The Core Problem With Modern AI Systems 3:02 – How AI Is Built and Why We Can't Control It 6:04 – The Hidden Dangers of Social Media + AI Manipulation 10:09 – AI vs AGI vs ASI Explained Simply 17:01 – How Fast AGI Could Turn Into Superintelligence 22:22 – Utopian vs Dystopian Futures With AI 29:02 – AI Relationships, Loneliness & Digital Partners 47:18 – Why AI Could Replace Human Connection & Autonomy Welcome to "The Problem With" where each week we look into a problem to get a better understanding of it. This podcast has no sponsors, only my businesses and investments. Please check out the links below. I'm on a mission to help men check their levels of Testosterone, more info here: https://www.manual.co/smith I help small businesses make money online: https://www.jamessmith.business Please check out and try Neutonic here: https://www.neutonic.com/jamessmith For a free trial of my online personal training app go here: https://www.affordableonlinecoaching.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Émile Torres, who co-wrote an article with Timnit Gebru for First Monday about AI, discusses tech moguls' dreams of transcending the merely human. Daniel Wortel-London, author of The Menace of Prosperity, looks at the fiscal history of NYC, and considers how we could do better than subsidizing the rich. Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.