Podcasts about Whole Earth Catalog

Gang Of Four's moment was dramatic but brief. It was littered with times when the future seemed impossibly bright before disaster crept up with a cosh in their relentless “refusal to do the obvious”. Being a musician, he points out, is a ridiculous life best not taken seriously. His memoir ‘To Hell With Poverty!' rightly describes itself as “rich with stories”, many remembered in this spirited exchange with David and Mark, among them … … the transformational effect of a scholarship to the boarding school where he met GO4 guitarist Andy Gill and future film-makers Adam Curtis and Paul Greengrass. … life-changing records he heard in the school art department – Highway 61 Revisited, the Stooges, the MC5. … “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. … aged 11, bumping into John Lennon in Sevenoaks who'd just bought his Mr Kite poster. … signing a contract with the manager that robbed them and whose busy and efficient office of “ripped and buffed” staff turned out to be hired actors. … being thrown off Top Of The Pops for not changing an ‘offensive' song lyric – “EMI were “mortified”. … the old hippy world of the ‘70s – Hawkwind, the Whole Earth Catalog and “a Withnailesque flat where we had an airgun to shoot the mice”. … hopeless online misinterpretations of his song lyrics - “there may be soil under fuck all” (aka “there may be oil under Rockall”). … the rigours of trying to promote “outsider music”. … reaching “the point where the game is up”. … the Bourgeois Brothers, the ‘comedy' duo he formed with Andy Gill at Leeds University and why they returned to England to form a band in the mould of Talking Heads, the Ramones and Richard Hell. … and why recording the audiobook moved him to tears. Order ‘To Hell With Poverty!' here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hell-Poverty-Class-Inside-Gang/dp/1636142346 Gang Of Four tour dates:https://www.songkick.com/artists/393675-gang-of-four/calendarFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gang Of Four's moment was dramatic but brief. It was littered with times when the future seemed impossibly bright before disaster crept up with a cosh in their relentless “refusal to do the obvious”. Being a musician, he points out, is a ridiculous life best not taken seriously. His memoir ‘To Hell With Poverty!' rightly describes itself as “rich with stories”, many remembered in this spirited exchange with David and Mark, among them … … the transformational effect of a scholarship to the boarding school where he met GO4 guitarist Andy Gill and future film-makers Adam Curtis and Paul Greengrass. … life-changing records he heard in the school art department – Highway 61 Revisited, the Stooges, the MC5. … “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. … aged 11, bumping into John Lennon in Sevenoaks who'd just bought his Mr Kite poster. … signing a contract with the manager that robbed them and whose busy and efficient office of “ripped and buffed” staff turned out to be hired actors. … being thrown off Top Of The Pops for not changing an ‘offensive' song lyric – “EMI were “mortified”. … the old hippy world of the ‘70s – Hawkwind, the Whole Earth Catalog and “a Withnailesque flat where we had an airgun to shoot the mice”. … hopeless online misinterpretations of his song lyrics - “there may be soil under fuck all” (aka “there may be oil under Rockall”). … the rigours of trying to promote “outsider music”. … reaching “the point where the game is up”. … the Bourgeois Brothers, the ‘comedy' duo he formed with Andy Gill at Leeds University and why they returned to England to form a band in the mould of Talking Heads, the Ramones and Richard Hell. … and why recording the audiobook moved him to tears. Order ‘To Hell With Poverty!' here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hell-Poverty-Class-Inside-Gang/dp/1636142346 Gang Of Four tour dates:https://www.songkick.com/artists/393675-gang-of-four/calendarFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gang Of Four's moment was dramatic but brief. It was littered with times when the future seemed impossibly bright before disaster crept up with a cosh in their relentless “refusal to do the obvious”. Being a musician, he points out, is a ridiculous life best not taken seriously. His memoir ‘To Hell With Poverty!' rightly describes itself as “rich with stories”, many remembered in this spirited exchange with David and Mark, among them … … the transformational effect of a scholarship to the boarding school where he met GO4 guitarist Andy Gill and future film-makers Adam Curtis and Paul Greengrass. … life-changing records he heard in the school art department – Highway 61 Revisited, the Stooges, the MC5. … “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. … aged 11, bumping into John Lennon in Sevenoaks who'd just bought his Mr Kite poster. … signing a contract with the manager that robbed them and whose busy and efficient office of “ripped and buffed” staff turned out to be hired actors. … being thrown off Top Of The Pops for not changing an ‘offensive' song lyric – “EMI were “mortified”. … the old hippy world of the ‘70s – Hawkwind, the Whole Earth Catalog and “a Withnailesque flat where we had an airgun to shoot the mice”. … hopeless online misinterpretations of his song lyrics - “there may be soil under fuck all” (aka “there may be oil under Rockall”). … the rigours of trying to promote “outsider music”. … reaching “the point where the game is up”. … the Bourgeois Brothers, the ‘comedy' duo he formed with Andy Gill at Leeds University and why they returned to England to form a band in the mould of Talking Heads, the Ramones and Richard Hell. … and why recording the audiobook moved him to tears. Order ‘To Hell With Poverty!' here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hell-Poverty-Class-Inside-Gang/dp/1636142346 Gang Of Four tour dates:https://www.songkick.com/artists/393675-gang-of-four/calendarFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Back again by popular demand, here are more tales from Burning Man's oral history project, an ambitious endeavor to track down and talk with people who helped shape the culture as we now know it.Stuart and Andie share stories of early technology on the playa, and on the internet.Andie Grace aka Actiongrl interviews from the vantage of having co-created Burning Man's world of communications, from Media Mecca to this very podcast.Brian Behlendorf - technologist and open-source software pioneer. He developed Burning Man's online presence and connected people through the venn diagram of luminaries from SF Raves, to Wired Magazine to the Apache Software Foundation.David Beach - designer, creative director, and instigator of the impossible with early dynamic content on the web. He helped create Burning Man's first live streaming and web presence.Scott Beale - documentarian, founder of Laughing Squid, subculture super-connector of various tentacles of the meta-scene.Stuart Magrum - zinester, cacophonist, billboard liberator, Minister of Propaganda, Director of the Philosophical Center, publisher of the first on-site newspaper of Burning Man (the Black Rock Gazette), and always in the same place at the same time as the characters in these stories of Burning Man's media experiments.Andie GraceBrian BehlendorfDavid BeachScott BealeStuart MangrumLaughing Squid: Burning Man 1996 Netcastdispatch2023.burningman.orgjournal.burningman.org/philosophical-centerburningman.org/programs/philosophical-centerBurning Man Live: A People's History of Burning Man - Volume 2Burning Man Live: A People's History of Burning Man - Volume 1 LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

My guest today is Kevin Kelly, the author of 14 books, a public speaker who has delivered TED talks with tens of millions of views, and a technology expert. In 1983, Kevin was hired by Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand to edit several later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review, and Signal. He later on served as the founding executive editor of the magazine Wired. In our conversation, Kevin and I talk about the scaling laws behind all technologies, but also how these laws intersect with biology, society, and policy. We explore themes from What Technology Wants, we focus on the 'Triad of Evolution' and the concept of convergence, and connect these ideas to antitrust and innovation policy. I also touch on his earlier work, including New Rules for the New Economy, where we discuss the dynamics of trust in network economies and its implications for technology adoption. Finally, we delve into the inevitability of technological evolution, its accelerating diffusion, and what happens when technology becomes ubiquitous in society. These questions feel increasingly urgent as we approach 2025, a pivotal moment for revisiting these ideas in light of modern developments. I hope you enjoy our discussion. Find me on X (@ProfSchrepel) and BlueSky (@profschrepel.bsky.social). References Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010) Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (1998) Rishi Bommasani et al., Considerations for Governing Open Foundation Models (2023) https://hai.stanford.edu/issue-brief-considerations-governing-open-foundation-models

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times' science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper's star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In Whole Earth, he delivers the definitive biography of one the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological and cultural revolutions of the last six decades. While Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s, his life's work is much larger. Brand became a key influence in the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand's famous mantra “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.” Brand has always had “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand's uncanny ahead-of-the-curve-ness is what makes John Markoff his ideal biographer. Markoff's reporting has always been at the cutting edge of tech revolutions—he wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993 and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Stewart Brand gave Markoff carte blanche access in interviews for the book, so Markoff gets a clearer story than has ever been set down before, ranging across Brand's time with the Merry Pranksters to his fostering of the marriage of environmental consciousness with hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture. Markoff's other books are: The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel); Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner); Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura); What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry; and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. He is a Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and an adjunct faculty member at the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013, Markoff was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.” He continues to work as a freelance journalist for The Times and other organizations. Markoff graduated from Whitman College with a B.A. in sociology, and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Oregon.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In his 1979 Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand wrote, “We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.” Based on his time on the Mississippi River, however, Boyce Upholt concludes “that we do not make very good gods.” In the final pages of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Upholt reflects, “The river is an unappeasable god, and to react to it with fear and awe is not wrong. . . . Perhaps what people learn after thousands of years of living along one of the world's greatest rivers is that change is inevitable, that chaos will come. That the only way to survive is to take care–of yourself and of everyone else, human and beyond.”Boyce Upholt is a “nature critic” whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, especially in the U.S. South. Boyce grew up in the Connecticut suburbs and holds a bachelor's degree from Haverford College and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His work has been published in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and was awarded the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. His stories have been noted in the Best American Science & Nature and Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Boyce lives in New Orleans.Book photo courtesy of Boyce Upholt.

Join host Matt Prewitt in an inspiring conversation with Edge City co-founders Janine Leger and Timour Kosters, as they dive into the transformative world of pop-up villages and cities. Discover the story behind Edge City's latest experiment, Edge Esmeralda, and learn how temporary communities are reshaping the way we live and work. Janine and Timour share their passion for experimentation, collaboration, co-creation, and their vision for building healthier, more dynamic environments.From the Whole Earth Catalog to the Chautauqua movement, this episode explores the rich history of pop-up communities while introducing groundbreaking ideas like community currencies ("∈dges") and iterative social technologies. Tune in for an engaging and forward-thinking discussion that reveals fresh perspectives on the future of community building, collaboration, and social innovation. Don't miss this illuminating discussion!Links & References: References:About Edge CityEdge Esmeralda RecapWhy I Built Zuzalu by Vitalik Buterin | Palladium Magazine2023: First ZuzaluBalaji Srinivasan's on network states: The Network StateDigital nomad - WikipediaWhole Earth Catalog - WikipediaBack-to-the-land movement - WikipediaBurning Man - WikipediaHistory of the Regional Network | Burning Man ProjectMichel Bauwens - WikipediaThe Seeds of The Commons: Peer-to-Peer Alternatives for Planetary Survival and Justice | Postdigital Science and EducationChautauqua - Wikipedia  What is a Chautauqua“Scenius” = Scenes of geniusScenius, or Communal Genius | WIREDFurther notes on scenius - Austin KleonRadicalxChange(s) | Barry Threw: Executive & Artistic Director of Gray AreaSecret Societies, Network States, Burning Man, Zuzalu, and More - RadicalxChangeEdges: A Plural Money Experiment - RadicalxChangeFork Edges herePlural Money: A New Currency Design - RadicalxChangeBios:Janine Leger is the co-founder of Edge City, an organization that convenes leaders and builders across tech, science, and society in pop-up villages around the globe. Previously, she co-created Zuzalu and led the Public Goods Funding team at Gitcoin.Timour Kosters is also a co-founder of Edge City. Prior, he spent ten years building and investing in startups, including Artsy, the largest online art marketplace; Kama, a leading health-tech app; and Impact, an impact-focused social media brand. He was most recently a partner at Seed Club Ventures.Links: Janine and Timour's Social Links:Janine Leger (@JanineLeger) / Xtimour kosters (@timourxyz) / XEdge City (@JoinEdgeCity) / XEdge CityMatt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.Matt's Social Links:ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ (@m_t_prewitt) / X Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:RadicalxChange Website@RadxChange | TwitterRxC | YouTubeRxC | InstagramRxC | LinkedInJoin the conversation on Discord.Credits:Produced by G. Angela Corpus.Co-Produced, Edited, Narrated, and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus and Matt Prewitt.Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Stora LSD-fester i San Francisco med kalejdoskopiska ljusshower och lantliga kollektiv i sfärformade hus känns som ljusår från andra världskriget och kalla krigets militära forskning, men skenet bedrar. Det finns raka linjer från andra världskrigets militärindustriella komplex till 1960-talets motkultur och gröna våg.När det tidiga kalla krigets rumsstora datorer med hålkort byts mot persondatorer kom motkulturens centralfigurer att intressera sig för datorernas möjligheter. Senare skulle både hackarna och den framväxande tech-industrin komma att inspireras av motkulturens tankegods.I detta avsnitt av podden Historia Nu samtalar programledaren Urban Lindstedt med David Larsson Heidenblad, docent i historia vid Lunds universitet, om boken From Counterculture and Cyberculture – Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism av professor Fred Turner.Det militärindustriella akademiska komplexet var centralt vid framväxten av techindustrin i Silicon Valley. Utan denna generösa offentliga finansiering hade varken minneskretsar, mikroprocessorer eller persondatorer kunnat utvecklas där och då. Det militärindustriella komplexets forskning skulle också inspirera motkulturen i Kalifornien.I centrum för boken From Counterculture and Cyberculture står Stewart Brand, född 1938, och mest känd som redaktör för The Whole Earth Catalog, utgiven mellan 1968 och 1972. Det var en kombination av tidskrift och produktkatalog riktad direkt till motkulturen. Stewart Brand var en entreprenör med en förmåga att sammanföra olika sociala världar, skapa dynamiska nätverk och bygga relationer.Katalogen visade att 1960-talets motkultur visade ett stort intresse för informationsteorier framtagna av militärforskare på 1940-talet. Och när kalla krigets rumsstora datorer med hålkort slimmades ner till persondator med skärm och tangentbord öppnades möjligheter för digitala nätverk inom motkulturen.LSD kom att läcka ut till motkulturen från militära forskningsprojekt både i USA och Sverige. Och i hippiesarnas bibel, The Whole Earth Catalog, fanns böcker om informatik från 1940-talets militärforskare. Och de sfärformade husen som hundratusentals grönavågare byggde när de skapade lantliga kollektiv i slutet på 1960-talet var direkt inspirerade av skyddshöljen från radaranläggningar som skulle upptäcka en sovjetisk kärnvapenattack.Motkulturen var intresserade av konsumentteknik som stereos och bilar, men förkastade stordatorerna som kontrollerades av militären och stora bolag. Därför blev persondatorn en symbol för individens frihet. Och de var mer intresserade av personlig utveckling och förverkligande än kollektivt politiskt arbete.Det är väl känt att Apples grundare Steve Jobs var hippie och att hans partner Steve Wozniak hackade telefonsystem. Men det är kanske mindre känt att techindustrins sätt att organisera sig i entreprenöriella och projektbaserade nätverk i stället för byråkratier kom från amerikansk militärforskning under andra världskriget.Bild: Timothy Leary, familj och band på föreläsningsturné; State University of New York at Buffalo (1969) (Buffalo, New York). OBS: Foto: Dr. Dennis Bogdan, Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0Musik: Swing It Smooth av Jon Presstone, Storyblocks AudioLyssna också på Sveriges psykedeliska historia.Klippare: Emanuel Lehtonen Vill du stödja podden och samtidigt höra ännu mer av Historia Nu? Gå med i vårt gille genom att klicka här: https://plus.acast.com/s/historianu-med-urban-lindstedt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shapeshifting artist Toro Y Moi takes the plunge into rap-rock, Soundcloud rap, and Y2K emo on his eighth full length album, Hole Erth. But that’s not all: The album’s title comes from the counterculture publication Whole Earth Catalog, of the late ‘60s and early 70s,. The magazine carried the tagline “access to tools” and offered everything from how-to guides to cultural analysis and self-reliance tools. It spoke to everyone from hippies to technology-heads, which helped lay the groundwork for Silicon Valley’s ethos, and is attuned to TyM’s catalog. 

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour... Key Insights:* Vernor Vinge was one of the GOAT scifi authors—and he is also one of the most underrated…* That a squishy social-democratic leftie like Brad DeLong can derive so much insight and pleasure from the work of a hard-right libertarian like Vernor Vinge—for whom the New Deal Order is very close to being the Big Bad, and who sees FDR as a cousin of Sauron—creates great hope that there is a deeper layer of thought to which we all can contribute. The fact that Brad DeLong and Vernor Vinge get excited in similar ways is a universal force around which we can unite, and add to them H.G. Wells and Jules Verne…* The five things written by Vernor Vinge that Brad and Noah find most interesting are: * “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”,* A Fire Upon the Deep,* A Deepness in the Sky, * “True Names”, & * Rainbows End…* We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: The world is not a game of chess in which the entity that can think 40 moves ahead will always easily trounce the entity that can only think 10 moves ahead, for time and chance happeneth to us all…* We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: Almost all human intelligence is not in individual brains, but is in the network. We are very smart as an anthology intelligence. Whatever true A.I.s we create will be much smarter when they are tied into the network as useful and cooperative parts of it—rather than sinister gods out on their own plotting plots…* We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: mind and technology amplification is as likely to be logistic as exponential or super-exponential…* The ultimate innovation in a society of abundance is the ability to control human personality and desire—and now we are back to the Buddha, and to Zeno, Kleanthes, Khrisippus, and Marcus Aurelius…* With the unfortunate asterisk that mind-hacking via messages and chemicals mean that such an ultimate innovation can be used for evil as well as good…* Addiction effects from gambling are not, in fact, a good analogy for destructive effects of social media as a malevolent attention-hacker…* Cyberspace is not what William Gibson and Neil Stephenson predicted.But it rhymed. And mechanized warfare was not what H.G. Wells predicted.But it rhymed. A lot of the stuff about AI that we see in science fiction will rhyme with whatever things are going to happen…* The Blight of A Fire Upon the Deep is a not-unreasonable metaphor for social media as propaganda intensifier…* We want the future of the Whole Earth Catalog and the early Wired, not of crypto grifts and ad-supported social media platforms…* Vernor Vinge's ideas will be remembered—if only as important pieces of a historical discussion about why the Superintelligence Singularity road was not (or was) taken—as long as the Thrones of the Valar endure…* Noah Smith continues to spend too much time picking fights on Twitter…* &, as always, Hexapodia…References:* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. .* Bursztyn, Leonardo, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, & Christopher Roth. 2023. “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media”. Becker-Friedman Institute. October 12. .* Patel, Nilay, Alex Cranz, & David Pierce. 2024. “Rabbit, Humane, & the iPad”. Vergecast. May 3. .* MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics: : A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan. .* Ober, Josiah. 2008. Democracy & Knowledge: Innovation & Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. .* Petpuls. 2024. “The World's First Dog Emotion Translator”. Accessed May 7, 2024. .* Rao, Venkatesh. 2022. “Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism”. Ribbonfarm Studio. Auguts 21. .* Taintor, Joseph. 1990. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .* Vinge, Vernor. 1984. “True Names”. True Names & Other Dangers. New York: Bluejay Books. .* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. .* Vinge, Vernor. 1993. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era". .* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. .* Vinge, Vernor. 2006. Rainbows End. New York: Tor Books. .* Williams, Walter Jon. 1992. Aristoi. New York: Tor Books. * Wikipedia. “Vernor Vinge”. Accessed May 7, 2024. . Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

(NOTAS Y ENLACES DEL CAPÍTULO AQUÍ: https://www.jaimerodriguezdesantiago.com/kaizen/191-del-largo-ahora-al-ultimo-ser-humano)Es posible que hayas escuchado alguna vez el discurso de inauguración de Steve Jobs en Stanford. Es uno de esos vídeos con los que uno se topa de vez en cuando en internet. Mucha gente recuerda y cita frases que pronunció ese día. Como aquello de que los puntos sólo se unen mirando hacia atrás, o lo de que conviene preguntarse si lo que vas a hacer hoy es lo que querrías hacer si fuese el último día de tu vida. O como las palabras con las que cerró aquel discurso, por las que mucha gente recuerda a Steve Jobs: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Algo así como «Mantente hambriento. Mantente alocado», pero suena mucho mejor en inglés. Aunque de lo que no solemos acordarnos es de que esas palabras no son suyas. Lo dice él mismo justo antes de esa frase, cuando cuenta que las leyó a mediados de los años 70, en la última página del último número de una revista bastante peculiar: The Whole Earth Catalog. El Catálogo de la Tierra Completa. Esas palabras, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”, fueron la manera en la que tuvieron de despedirse de sus lectores.Aquella revista fue fundada en los años 60 por un tipo peculiar: Stewart Brand. Y la historia detrás de esas palabras resume a la perfección su filosofía. En 1966, Brand creó una campaña para exigir a la NASA que compartieran con el mundo las fotos que tenían de la Tierra vista desde el espacio. Sí, porque en 1966, la mayor parte de la gente no había visto una foto de la Tierra. Así que nuestro amigo decidió distribuir chapas con una frase: «¿Por qué no hemos visto una foto de la Tierra al completo?» Estaba convencido de que la imagen de aquella canica azul de la que hablamos hace unos cuantos capítulos podía cambiar el mundo. De ahí vino el nombre de la revista. Brand era una de tantas personas obsesionadas con el efecto perspectiva del que te he hablado varias veces. De hecho, tenía una especie de proyecto en el que quería contraponer las imágenes de cómo se veía el amanecer de la Tierra desde el espacio como cómo se vivía siendo un humano en la Tierra. Y en sus propias palabras, se «imaginaba un autoestopista al amanecer, en una carretera perdida, con el sol saliendo y trenes pasando a su lado. La mentalidad de un joven autoestopista es una de las mentalidades más libres que hay». Y remataba, diciendo “You are always a little bit hungry and you know you are being completely foolish” «Siempre tienes un poco de hambre y sabes que estás siendo completamente alocado»Te he dicho que Brand es un tipo peculiar, pero seguramente no tanto como nos lo parece hoy. Como todos, fue un producto de su tiempo. Alguien que nació en 1938 y que pasó los primeros 30 años de su vida en una época de progresos tecnológicos increíbles. Progresos que nos permitirían ser dueños de nuestras vidas. De hecho, si en lugar de irnos a la última página, del último ejemplar del Whole Earth Catalog, nos vamos a la primera página de su primer ejemplar, publicado en 1968 con una imagen completa de la Tierra en su portada y leemos el pequeño manifiesto con el que se presenta, nos encontramos con la siguiente declaración, que es bastante difícil de traducir, pero vamos a intentarlo: «Propósito:Somos como los dioses y ya puestos podríamos aprender a hacerlo bien. Hasta ahora, el poder y la gloria que remotamente hemos alcanzado —a través de gobiernos, grandes empresas, la educación formal, la iglesia— han sido exitosos sólo hasta el punto en el que sus groseros defectos oscurecen los auténticos avances. En respuesta a este dilema y a esos avances, se está desarrollando todo un campo de poder personal —el poder de los individuos para dirigir su propia educación, encontrar su propia inspiración, dar forma a su entorno y compartir su aventura con quien quiera estar interesado. El Catálogo de la Tierra Completa busca y promueve herramientas para ayudarte en ese proceso»¡Toma ya!  ¿Te gusta kaizen? Apoya el podcast uniéndote a la Comunidad y accede a contenidos y ventajas exclusivas: https://www.jaimerodriguezdesantiago.com/comunidad-kaizen/

Dans cet épisode d'« IMAGINAIRES » avec Julie Momméja, nous retournons aux origines de la Tech, aux alentours de la baie de San Francisco dans les années 50 - 60. De la Beat Generation à la déclaration d'indépendance du Cyberspace porté par John Perry Barlow, en passant par les expériences aux LSD et le Whole Earth Catalog de Stewart Brand, c'est toute une culture alternative qui a posé les fondations de ce qu'est aujourd'hui la Silicon Valley. Alors que cette influence tend à disparaitre pour laisser place à un l'altruisme efficace, revenons sur ces années phare de la culture Tech.Julie Momméja, est professeure associée à l'université de Lorraine en études américaines et études des médias. Sa recherche doctorale se concentre sur les pionniers et les penseurs des sphères de la contre-culture et de la cyberculture qui sont apparus à San Francisco. Elle se penche sur l'émergence de la technologie en tant qu'outil social sur un territoire enraciné dans les idéologies utopiques et libertaires. Pour aller plus loin après votre écoute:La thèse de Julie Momméja ‣ these.frL'émission du "Meilleur des Mondes" sur France Culture intitulée "L'esprit dans la Silicon Valley : vers un “techno-messianisme” ?"Retour d'utopie. De l'influence du livre de Fred TurnerL'émission "la culture change le monde" intitulée "1996, La déclaration d'indépendance du cyberespace"The Whole Earth Catalog (online)Si l'épisode vous a plu, n'hésitez pas à donner la meilleure note et à laisser vos impressions en commentaire. Cela aide grandement le podcast à se faire connaitre. IMAGINAIRES est le podcast compagnon de la newsletter SYNTH qui observe nos réalités synthétiques, pour vous abonner, rendez-vous sur https://synthmedia.frIMAGINAIRES est un podcast indépendant créé et animé par Gérald Holubowicz.‣ Suivez Gerald sur : Twitter, Linkedin Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Kevin Kelly played a pivotal role in the establishment of Wired magazine back in 1993, where he assumed the role of executive editor during its formative seven years. His journey in the tech and digital landscape began even earlier when he contributed to the launch of The Well, a groundbreaking online service, in 1985. Prior to Wired, he also held positions as the publisher and editor of a branch of The Whole Earth Catalog. Beyond his media ventures, Kevin Kelly is deeply involved in shaping the future through his role as the co-chair of the Long Now Foundation, a membership-based organization dedicated to promoting long-term thinking and fostering responsibility toward future generations. His accomplishments have made him an iconic figure among the early cohorts of technology professionals. Yet, Kelly's influence extends to the younger generations entering the workforce as he's equally passionate about sharing his valuable insights as a futurist.

Today, Dinis Guarda interviews Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner, authors of The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology. Juliette Powell is an author, a television creator with 9,000 live shows under her belt, a technologist, and sociologist. Juliette's consultancy services are sought after by influential organisations including the United Nations, Microsoft, and Warner Brothers.Art Kleiner is a versatile writer, editor, and entrepreneur deeply engaged in contemporary business and tech challenges. He is now the Principal and Editor-in-Chief at Kleiner Powell International. Prior to that,  and as the editor-in-chief of PwC Global and the editor-in-chief strategy+business, PwC's award winning management magazine with a circulation of 1.3 million, Art had published some of his bestsellers.Juliette Powell BiographyJuliette Powell is an author, a television creator with 9,000 live shows under her belt, a technologist, and sociologist. She has recently co-written a book called "The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology" ( August 2023), which she co-authored with Art Kliener, brings together insights from engineering, business, government, and social justice perspectives.Juliette is the Founder and Managing Partner at Kleiner Powell International (KPI), a New York City-based consultancy. She is also the Founder, researcher, and curator at Turing AI and WeTheData.org, mapping the data economy with Intel Labs.Juliette's consultancy services are sought after by influential organisations including the United Nations, Microsoft, and Warner Brothers. She promotes digital literacy, critical thinking, and collaboration and contributes to discussions on the future of the internet and connected society.A business journalist, Juliette's research at Columbia University focuses on responsible AI deployment and ethical data exploration.A graduate in Economics from Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and Finance and International Business from McGill University, Juliette is also the faculty at The New York University. She was the Miss Canada titleholder in 1989, the contest's first Black Canadian winner.Learn more about Juliette Powell on https://www.openbusinesscouncil.org/wiki/juliette-powell Art Kleiner BiographyArt Kleiner is a versatile writer, editor, and entrepreneur deeply engaged in contemporary business and tech challenges. During his early career at the Whole Earth Catalog, he led the best-selling "Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" series. As the editor-in-chief of PwC Global and the editor-in-chief strategy+business, PwC's award winning management magazine with a circulation of 1.3 million, Art had published some of the bestsellers.With a journalism master's from UC Berkeley, Kleiner is part of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches group. He's a faculty member at the New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Learn more about Art Kleiner on https://www.openbusinesscouncil.org/wiki/art-kleinerAbout Dinis Guarda profile and Channelshttps://www.openbusinesscouncil.orghttps://www.intelligenthq.comhttps://www.hedgethink.com/https://www.citiesabc.com/https://openbusinesscouncil.org/wiki/dinis-guardaMore interviews and research videos on Dinis GuarSupport the show

Kevin Kelly is one of the most important tech writers of the last half century. Kevin started as the publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of Steve Jobs' favorite publications. After being mentored by Stewart Brand, he started writing books and magazine pieces before cofounding Wired Magazine. He has since become a prolific author - writing one feature article for Wired Magazine every year, and writing numerous bestselling books. The man is full of mysteries. Kevin writes abundantly but types very slowly. He writes often but calls himself a reluctant writer. He constantly explores new ideas but actually likes editing more than writing. Rare is the opportunity to sit down with the master who has decades of experience as a writer. This episode is a peek behind the curtain. SPEAKER LINKS: Website: https://kk.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly Latest Book: "Excellent Advice for Living": https://a.co/d/3nYau0X Want to learn more about the next cohort with Write of Passage? Click here: https://writeofpassage.school/hiw Want to learn more about How I Write? Website: https://writeofpassage.school/how-i-write/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidPerellChannel/videos Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSboniFAeGA8v9NpoPv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Access to Tools, and mushrooms. Early on K.M asks if J drugged him. It turns out, he did!!! Mushrooms!!! Although K.M. admits to being heavily influenced by the magic mushroom, it quickly becomes clear so is J. Together, they attempt to honor and chronicle Stewart Brand's counter culture icon and book series. Basically, we attempt to talk hippie shit from the 60's and 70's while drunk and on psychedelics. It's about what you would expect with J repeating himself endlessly, K.M. wondering what's happening and getting distracted by the possibly that William S. Burroughs fucked little boys. Thank Bacchus, Colorado steps in and wonderfully details the amazing achievement and work of Stewart Brand's "The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Access to Tools. After all, it was J's childhood.  

Welcome back to ParaPower Mapping. 2 EPs in 1 week? That's goddamn right! And it's the super-hefty first part of our comparative paranoid analysis of alchemical, Rosicrucian, & Pynchonian themes in Lodge 49 and The Crying of Lot 49. Support the show at: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping ... so I can cont. to churn out the many "paragnostic" parsings of beloved cult-ural classics planned for future episodes. And gain access to the Boston Brahmin Watch Premium Feed! In today's episode, we discuss: Further evidence that AMORC founder H. Spencer Lewis was a German asset or agent during WWI; we examine R. Swinburne Clymer's pamphlet Not Under the Rose Cross, the expose that accuses Lewis of being aligned with "Baphomet" & "Antichrist" Aleister Crowley, AMORC's authority of being derived from the OTO, & Lewis of plagiarizing such New Thought weirdos as Koresh Reed Teed, Crowley, theosophists like Dr. Franz Hartmann, etc.; we talk Lewis's status as a Wandering Bishop & his "radio church" the Pristine Church of the Rose Cross, reading some liturgy from one of his broadcast services; we talk San Francisco's KPO, which hosted Lewis & was founded by a Navy comms man + department store; Pat Robertson mentions; a comparison to Perry Mason & Aimee Simple McPherson; various AMORC newspaper story odds & ends—the possibility one of Thelemite Jack Parsons's relatives joined AMORC; WWII prophecies, AMORC trips to Tibet, etc.; the modern day Alchemy Museum at Rosicrucian Park; the curator's connections to Arizona U. Center for Consciousness Studies; AMORC alchemy lab graduate Frater Albertus, which connects to... the Whole Earth Catalog; we talk sus Stewart Brand; we explore the Catalog's origins in MK-Ultra-adjacent LSD research studies; Myron J. Stolaroff; Ampex; Ram Dass; Merry Pranksters; mass cultural programming; Whole Earth Truck Store; the Whole Earth Festival on UC Davis campus; Brand's involvement in booking venues for the "Acid Tests"; Trips Fest 1966; Buckminster Fuller; Dymaxion houses; callbacks to the French occultism EPs; Fuller's frequent gov't contracts; geodesic domes; his elite Boston brahmin ancestry (Margaret Fuller); Whole Earth Festival as Age of Aquarius Happening; LSD dealing; Int'l Foundation for Advanced Study; Stanford Research Institute; very sus fact that Wavy Gravy was yearly MC... From there, we dive into CoL49 & Lodge 49; a brief history of alchemy; Hellenistic, Arabic, & Medieval periods;early alchemist Bolos of Mendes, his invocation of his dead master, & "arcanum" scrolls in secret rooms; Raff's Jung & the Alchemical Imagination; "reliquum corpus" (NOT MUMMIES) in Lodge 49; Sovereign Protector = Masonic Grand Master; "Magnum Opus" / Great Work; crypto as alchemy; the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx's founder Harwood Fritz Merrill, a Christian Rosenkreutz-esque figure; the processes of the Great Work; running out of gas & dying batteries as divine intervention;... Plot structure & thematic symmetries b/w CoL49 & L49; alchemical pyramid fydration schemes; Hollander's heuristic & narrative structure device for Pynchon Notes; CoL49's allusions to the JFK assassination; Pierce Inverarity as spook?; comparisons b/w Inverarity & "Captain"; LSD subjectivity, gnosis, & paranoia; Dr. Hilarius; Orbis = Yoyodyne; Pierce's investment in aerospace; hints of Bohemian Grove & organized sexual transgression in Chapter 2 at Echo Courts; Book of the Dead; the Scope evoking Acid Tests; Mafia; Fangoso Lagoons & human skeleton black markets; a possible reference to the Hellfire Clubs in The Courier's Tragedy; the inner mysteries of L49; abyss; L. Marvin Metz = Metzger; working class pathos; WWI + WWII = Vietnam & Crimea in L49; subterranean rites in the Ancient Mysteries; death & rebirth underground; Hollow Earth; etc. MUSIC: | Lodge 49 - Theme | | Santana - Soul Sacrifice (Live at Woodstock) | | Ronnie Foster - Mystic Brew | | The Greg Foat Group - Dark is the Sun (Harpsichord Waltz | | The Shields - Nature Boy |

Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired magazine in 1993 and served as its executive editor for its first seven years. Prior to that, he helped launch The Well, a pioneering online service in 1985, and was publisher and editor of an offshoot of The Whole Earth Catalog. He co-chairs the board of the Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and responsibility to future generations. In these endeavors and more, Kelly has become an icon to early generations of technology workers. But, as a futurist, he is also interested in sharing his wisdom with younger generations just entering the workforce. On his 68th birthday, Kelly wrote down for his young adult children some things he had learned about relationships, business, and life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, he had more to say than he thought, so he continued composing these short passages of guidance until he had more than 400 of them. He has now compiled these inspirational concepts into a book, Excellent Advice for Living. Kelly's bits of advice cover a broad range of subject matter, and each statement is meant to be a memorable prompt for an action one could take. Many of them are about right living, good conduct, and civility. There is advice on setting ambitious goals, forgiveness and gratitude, taking responsibility for mistakes, optimizing generosity, and cultivating awareness, compassion and creativity. While his book is aimed primarily at young people, and in particular at young professionals, it's message could speak to anyone at any stage of life. Please join as a Bay Area trendsetter shares wise, practical and optimistic life advice—something all of us could us right now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meet Stewart Brand and his band of merry dematerialists, the Silicon Valley salesmen who undermined environmentalism with planet-saving fantasies that reek of technofetishism. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation.Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five (Phalse Prophets), read the definitive peer-reviewed taxonomic analysis from our very own Jason Bradford, PhD. Sources/Links/Notes:John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, 2022.Anna Wiener, "The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Catalog'," The New Yorker, November 16, 2018.Wolf Tivy and Matt Ellison, "'Life Goes On' With Stewart Brand," Palladium, September 14, 2022."Ecomodernist Manifesto"Timothee Parrique, "A response to Paul Krugman: Growth is not as green as you might think," Resilience, February 28, 2023.Low-Tech MagazineThe Long Now FoundationRevive & RestoreSupport the show

Dick Boak started as a draftsman at Martin guitars and stayed for 42 years taking on numerous roles at the company, including Director of the Martin Museum and Archives; Director of Advertising and Artist Models; Guitar Designer, Founder of the 1833 Shop; and more. For episode 76 of the podcast, Dick tells us about his first attempt at guitarmaking, the influence of the Whole Earth Catalog, and how he ended up Martin, thanks to some enterprising dumpster diving. We also talk about how his role at Martin changed over the years, what it's like to collaborate with well-known artists on signature models, and how Martin as a company has changed over the decades. Lastly, we hear about Dick's other pursuits and passions as an artist, solo luthier, author, poet, musician, teacher and archivist for none other than Mario Andretti. Link: https://www.dickboak.com Luthier on Luthier is hosted by Michael Bashkin of Bashkin Guitars and brought to you by the Fretboard Journal. This episode is sponsored by Acoustic Coffee Company (check out their new Gruhn Guitars blend), Stringjoy Strings, and Dream Guitars.

Shownotes and photos here: allthroughalens.com   It's another odd show, and we're actually changing things up again! For most of the show we'll be talking to Liz Potter (@lizpotterphotography on IG) and Amy Elizabeth (@itsamyliz on IG) about the Fallacy of the Sunk Cost Fallacy and why you shouldn't just give up on a project. We'll have our regular banter, but Eric will also tell you a little about the first photos taken of the entire Earth – it's both earlier and later than you think. Amy's article, “The Fallacy of Sunk-Cost Fallacy” is available here: https://www.itsamyliz.com/journal/the-fallacy-of-sunk-cost-fallacy Amy's website: itsamyliz.com Liz's website: lizpotterphotography.com Eric references the book Through Astronaut Eyes; Photographing Early Human Spaceflight by Jennifer K. Levasseur. Link. 1946. First image of Earth from outer space, taken by the V-2 No. 13 suborbital spaceflight.1947. First panorama of Earth from outer space. V-2 rocket.On October 5, 1954, an NRL-launched Viking rocket carrying a movie camera captured the first high-altitude images of a tropical storm over the Gulf of Mexico, sparking the interest of the U.S. Weather Bureau and the future of high-altitude weather reconnaissance. This mosaic is a compilation of images captured from an altitude of 100 miles above the Earth surface. [Released 11-1226-3531]. Also listed as file number 60834 (H-517).1961. First image of Earth from space taken by a person, first color images and first movie of Earth from space, by cosmonaut Gherman Titov – the first photographer from space.1966. First full-disk pictures of the Earth from a geostationary orbit. Taken by the ATS-1.1967. First full-disk “true color picture of the Earth; subsequently used on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog.1968. First full-disk image of Earth from space taken by a person, probably by astronaut William Anders.1968. The Earthrise image is the first color image of Earth from the Moon by a person (William Anders).1972. Blue Marble. The last photo of the entire earth taken by a human (Apollo 17 Crew)   PATREON Thank you to everyone who supports us! Check out our Patreon for bonus episodes, extended interviews, early drops. Tons of stuff! patreon.com/allthroughalens THE CREDITS OF ENDING www.allthroughalens.com Vania: IG, Flickr, Zines Eric: IG, Flickr, Zines, ECN-2 Kit  

Here is a new Jewish party game. Gather a bunch of friends around a table, and everyone must complete the following sentence: “The Jewish people should continue to exist and thrive because … ” You think it's easy? It's not. In fact, one of the things that makes this a Jewish party game is that the only people that ever ask themselves whether and why they should exist — just happen to be the Jews. That is why I was thrilled to interview Rabbi Michael Strassfeld. He is a noted author and thought leader in American Judaism (more on his most famous book later). His new book is “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century.” We talk about the Jewish counterculture, and what is good in Hasidism, and what Rabbi Strassfeld believes we have to get rid of in order for Judaism to survive. Rabbi Strassfeld is asking the following question: For what purpose are we preserving Judaism? Just to preserve it for its own sake is not compelling to me. If Jews no longer find Judaism meaningful or if it turns out Judaism can only flourish when we are being persecuted or by withdrawing from the world into separatist enclaves, then I am not sure Judaism can or will survive. The argument for observance for continuity's sake seems to me wrongheaded and one that I think people will increasingly find unconvincing. “Hanging out” with Rabbi Strassfeld brought me back to my years as a college student, when there was one Jewish book that everyone had on their shelves. And no — I am not talking about the Hebrew Bible. That book was “The Jewish Catalog,” edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel. “The Jewish Catalog” was sort of like a Jewish version of — and here, I am really dating myself! — the “Whole Earth Catalog.” “The Jewish Catalog” was unique. It was a volume on how to create your own Jewish life, and a Jewish life for the community that you wanted to craft for yourself. Ultimately, “The Jewish Catalog” would consist of three volumes — with essays and do it yourself guides by all of the major and even the minor figures of the Jewish counterculture of the time — many of whom have died, but whose influence lives on, profoundly. “The Jewish Catalog” was an American Jewish publishing phenomenon. It went on to be one of the bestselling books in American Jewish publishing history. Fifty years later (!),the question is no longer: How do I create a Jewish life for myself? It is a deeper question. Why would I want to? Why would I need to? That is the question that keeps me awake at night.

--{ "Interview on Social Engineering and Mind Control "}-- New Realities Given to Society - Standardized World Order, Uniform Culture - Population Reduction - Elimination of the Family Unit - Social Engineering - Separation of Children from Parents - Separation of Generations - Sexual Revolution and Drugs - Post-Consumerism and Austerity - Obamacare - Marshall McLuhan - Creation of a New Kind of Human - Behaviourism, Skinner and Russell - Use of Drama and Music to Change Culture - Church Architecture and Music - Guidance to Conclusions - Computer Logic and Programs - Memes and Trends - Front-Men in History - Stars Given to Follow - Einstein - World Citizenship, CFR/RIIA - Smart Meters, Electronic Frequencies, Electromagnetic Grid, Targeting - Voice-to-Skull Technology - Thought Insertion - Levels of Science, Archives of Information - EMF Hypersensitivity and Shielding - Technotronic Warfare - Common Culture - 2020 Film About Stewart Brand, "We Are As Gods" - Recreating Extinct Species - Rockefeller Foundation, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development - Brand and Testing Strobe Lights, Whole Earth Catalog, Early Days of the Internet - McLuhan - 2008 Book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism - "Prebunking" - EMF, Voice-to-Skull - Microwive, 5G - EMF Radiation, Chemtrails and Geoengineering - Gregorian Chant, Palestrina.

Margaret O'Mara, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington, leads the conversation on big tech and global order.   CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Margaret O'Mara with us to discuss big tech and global order. Dr. O'Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Dr. O'Mara is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and has received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. Previously, she served as a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. O'Mara served in the Clinton administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of several books and an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Welcome, Margaret. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. O'MARA: Thank you so much, Maria, and thank you all for being here today. I'm setting my supercomputer on my wrist timer so I—to time my talk to you, and which is very apropos and it's really—it's great to be here. I have a few slides I wanted to share as I talk through, and I thought that since we had some really interesting meaty present tense readings from Foreign Affairs as background for this conversation as well as the recent review essay that I wrote last year, I thought I would set the scene a little more with a little more history and how we got to now and thinking in broad terms about how the technology industry relates to geopolitics and the global order as this very distinctive set of very powerful companies now. So I will share accordingly, and, Maria, I hope that this is showing up on your screen as it should. So I knew I—today I needed to, of course, talk—open with something in the news, this—the current—the ongoing questions around what has—what was in the sky and what is being shot down in addition to a Chinese spy balloon, which is really kind of getting to a question that's at the center of all of my work. I write at the intersection of economic history and political history and I do that because I'm interested in questions of power. Who has power? What do they value? This is the kind of the question of the U.S.-China—the operative question of the U.S.-China rivalry and the—and concern about China, what are the values, what are the—and Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, particularly consumer-facing ones. And this is also an operative question about the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a few large platform companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States—(laughs)—a couple in my town of Seattle where I am right now talking to you, and others in Silicon Valley. It's very interesting when one does a Google image search to find a publicly available image and puts in Silicon Valley the images that come up are either the title cards of the HBO television comedy, which I was tempted to add, but the—really, the iconic shot of the valley as place is the Apple headquarters—the Spaceship, as it's called in Cupertino—that opened a few years ago in the middle of suburbia. And this is—you know, the questions of concentrated power in the Q&A among the background readings, you know, this was noted by several of the experts consulted about what is the threat of big tech geopolitically and concentrated power, whether that's good, bad, if that's an advantage geopolitically or not. It was something that many of those folks brought up as did the other readings as well. And this question of power—who has power and taking power—has been an animating question of the modern technology industry and there's an irony in this that if you think about the ideological granddaddy of Apple itself is the Whole Earth Catalog, which I—and this is—I quote from this in the opening to my review essay that was part of the background readings and I just thought I would pop this up in full for us to think about. This is Stewart Brand. This is the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The full issue is digitized at the Internet Archive as are so many other wonderful artifacts and primary source materials about this world, and this is right here on the—you know, you turn—open the cover and here is the purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, and church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The audience of the Whole Earth Catalog was not a bunch of techies, per se. It was back to the landers, people who were going and founding communes and the catalog was—you know, which was more a piece of art than it was an actual shopping guide, had all sorts of things from books by Buckminster Fuller to camp stoves and to the occasional Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, making this kind of statement that these tools could actually be used for empowerment of the individual because, of course, the world of 1968 is one in which computers and AI are in the hands of the establishment. We see this playing out in multiple scales including Hollywood films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, of course, follows, what, four years earlier Dr. Strangelove, which was also a satiric commentary on concentrated power of the military industrial complex, and computers were, indeed, things that were used by large government agencies, by the Pentagon, by Fortune 50 companies. And so the countercultural computer or personal computer movement is very much about individual power and taking this away from the global order, so to speak. This is the taking—using these tools as a way to connect people at the individual level, put a computer on every desk, connect everyone via computer networks to one another, and that is how the future will be changed. That is how the inequities of the world would be remedied. The notion of ultimate connectivity as a positive good was not something that originated with Facebook but, indeed, has much, much deeper origins and that's worth thinking about as we consider where we are in 2023 and where things are going from there. It's also worth thinking about the way in which global—the global order and particularly national security and government spending has played a role—an instrumental role—in the growth of the technology industry as it is. Take, for example, the original venture-backed startup, Fairchild Semiconductor, which is legendary as really starting the silicon semiconductor industry in the valley. It is the—it puts the silicon in the valley, and the eight co-founders known as the Traitorous Eight because they all quit en masse their previous job at Shockley Semiconductor working for William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, and they went off and did something that one does not—did not do in 1957 very often, which was start your own company. This was something that you did if you were weird and you couldn't work for people. That's what one old timer told me, reflecting back on this moment. But they, indeed, started their own company, found outside financing and in this group contains Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the two co-founders of Intel, as well as Gene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm. This is really the—you know, the original—where it all began, and yes, this is a story of free-market entrepreneurialism but it also is a story of the national security state. This is a—Fairchild is founded at a moment when most of the business in the Santa Clara Valley of California, later known as Silicon Valley, was defense related. This is where the jobs were. This is the business they were doing, by and large. There was not a significant commercial market for their products. A month after they're incorporated—in September '57 is when Fairchild incorporates itself. October 1957 Sputnik goes into orbit. The consequent wave of space spending is really what is the literal rocket ship that gets Silicon Valley's chip business going. The integrated circuits made by Fairchild and other chip makers in the valley go into the Apollo guidance system. NASA is buying these chips at a time that there is not a commercial market for them and that enables these companies to scale up production to create a commodity that can be delivered to the enterprise. And so by the time you get to the 1970s you are not talking about defense contractors in any way. These are companies that are putting their chips in cars and in other—all sorts of one time mechanical equipment is becoming transistorized. And Intel is Intel, still one of the most important and consequential—globally consequential tech companies around at the center of the action in the CHIPS Act of last year, not to mention others. But this longer history and this intertwining with the military industrial complex and with broader geopolitics—because, of course, the space program and the Apollo program was a Cold War effort. It was about beating the Soviets to the moon, not just doing it because we could. But that really kind of dissipates and fades from collective memory in the Valley and beyond with the rise of these entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, young, new-time CEOs that are presenting a very, very different face of business and really being consciously apolitical, presenting themselves as something so far apart from Washington, D.C. And this notion of tech, big or little, being something separate from government and governance is perpetuated by leaders of both parties, not just Ronald Reagan but also by Democrats of a younger generation that in the early 1980s there was a brief moment in which lawmakers like Tim Wirth and Gary Hart were referred to as Atari Democrats because they were so bullish on high-tech industries as the United States' economic future. And the way in which politicians and lawmakers from the 1980s forward talked about tech was very much in the same key as that of people like Steve Jobs, which is that this is a revolutionary—the tools have been taken from the establishment, and this is something that is apart from politics, that transcends the old global order and is a new one. And, in fact, in the speech in May 1988 in Moscow at the end of his presidency Ronald Reagan delivers a—you know, really frames the post-Cold War future as one in which the microchip is the revolutionary instrument of freedom: “Standing here before a mural of your revolution”—and a very large bust of Lenin—“I talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now. Its effects are peaceful but they will fundamentally alter our world, and it is—the tiny silicon chip is the agent of that, no bigger than a fingerprint.” This is really remarkable, if we sit back and take a deep breath and think about it, and particularly thinking about what happens after that. What happens after that are decades in which, again, leaders of both parties in the United States and world leaders elsewhere are framing the internet and understanding the internet as this tool for freedom and liberation, a tool that will advance democracy. Bill Clinton, towards the end of his presidency, famously kind of said, effectively, that I'm not worried about China because the internet is going to bring—you know, internet is going to make it very hard to have anything but democracy. And this notion of a post-Cold War and beyond the end of history and tech and big tech being central to that that, in fact, aided the rise of big tech. That was a rationale for a light regulatory hand in the United States, allowing these companies to grow and flourish and so big, indeed, they have become. But I want to end on a note just thinking about the—you know, why this history is important, why this connective tissue between past and present actually does matter. It isn't just that, oh, this is nice to know. This is useful. Lawrence Preston Gise was the second—sorry, the first deputy administrator of DARPA in 1958, created in the wake of the Sputnik—post-Sputnik panic, originally called ARPA, now DARPA. He later ran the entire Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission—Los Alamos, Livermore, et cetera. Longtime government public servant. In his retirement he retired to his farm in west Texas and his young grandson came and lived with him every summer. And his grandson throughout his life has talked about how—what a profound influence his grandfather was on him, showing him how to be a self-sufficient rancher, how to wrangle cattle and to build a barbed wire fence. But the grandson—you know, what the grandson didn't mention that much because it wasn't really relevant to his personal experience was who his grandfather was and what he had done. But when that grandson, Jeff Bezos—a few years ago when there was—when Google employees were writing their open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai saying, we are not in the defense business. We are—we don't like the fact that you are doing work with the Pentagon, and pressuring Google successfully and other companies to get out of doing work with the Pentagon, Bezos reflected, no, I think we're—I think this is our patriotic duty to do work—do this kind of work. And as I listened to him say that on a stage in an interview I thought, ah, that's his grandfather talking because this little boy, of course, was Jeff Bezos, the grandfather of Lawrence Preston Gise, and those—that connective tissue—familial connective tissue as well as corporate and political connective tissue, I think, is very relevant to what we have before us today. So I'll leave it there. Thanks. CASA: Thank you, Margaret, for that very interesting introduction. Let's open up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) While our participants are gathering their thoughts would you start us off by providing a few examples of emerging technologies that are affecting higher education? O'MARA: Yeah. Well, we've had a very interesting last three years in which the debate over online learning versus in-person learning very quickly was not necessarily resolved. We did this mass real-time experiment, and I think it made—put into sharp relief the way in which different technologies are shaping the way that higher education institutions are working and this question of who's controlling the—who controls the platforms and how we mediate what learning we do. Even though I now teach in person again almost everything that I do in terms of assignments and communication is through electronic learning management systems. The one we use at UW is Canvas. But, of course, there are these broader questions—ethical questions and substantive questions—about how our AI-enabled technologies including, notably, the star of the moment, ChatGPT, going to change the way in which—it's mostly been around how are students going to cheat more effectively. But I think it also has these bigger questions about how you learn and where knowledge, where the human—where the human is necessary. My take on it is, aside from the kind of feeling pretty confident in my having such arcane prompts for my midterm essay questions and research projects that ChatGPT, I think, would have a very hard time doing a good job with it but although I'm looking forward to many a form letter being filled by that technology in the future, I think that there is a—you know, this has a history, too. The concern about the robot overlords is a very deep one. It extends from—you know, predates the digital age, and the anxiety about whether computers are becoming too powerful. Of course, this question of artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence kind of is the computer augmenting what a human can do rather than replacing what a human can do or pretending to have the nuance and the complexity that a human might be able to convey. I think there's, you know, these bigger questions and I'm sure—I imagine there are going to be some other questions about AI. Really, you know, this is a—I think this is a very good learning moment, quite frankly, to think more—you know, one of the things I teach about a lot is kind of the information that is on the internet and who's created it and how it is architected and how it is findable and how those platforms have been developed over time. And what ChatGPT and other AIs like them are doing is they're scraping this extraordinary bounteous ocean of information and it is as good as the—it's as good as its source, right. So whatever you're able to do with it you have—your source materials are going to determine it. So if there is bias in the sources, if there is inaccuracy in the sources, there is—that will be replicated. It cannot be—you know, I think what it is is it's a really good rough draft, first draft, for then someone with tacit knowledge and understanding to come into, and I like to think of digital tools as ones that reveal where things that only people can do that cannot be replicated, that this—where human knowledge cannot be, where a machine still—even though a machine is informed by things that humans do and now does it at remarkable speed and scale it still is—there is—we are able to identify where humanity makes a difference. And then my one last caution is I do—you know, the one thing you can't do with these new—any of these new technologies is do them well really fast, and the rush to it is a little anxiety inducing. CASA: Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Leong from the—he's a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Michael, would you like to unmute and ask your question? Q: Yeah. Hi, Dr. O'Mara. Hi, Ms. Casa. Sorry for any background noise. I just had a, like, general question about your thoughts on the role big tech plays in geopolitics. Specifically, we've seen with SpaceX and Starlink especially with what's going on in Ukraine and how much support that has been provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and potentially holding that over—(inaudible)—forces. So, basically, do we expect to see private companies having more leverage over geopolitical events? And how can we go forward with that? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a really—that's a really great question. And you know, I think that there's—it's interesting because the way—there's always been public-private partnerships in American state building and American geopolitics, and that's something—it's worth kind of just noting that. Like, from the very beginning the United States has used private entities as instruments of policy, as parastatal entities, whether it be through, you know, land grants and transcontinental railroad building in the nineteenth century all the way through to Starlink and Ukraine because, of course, the Pentagon is involved, too—you know, that SpaceX is in a very—is a significant government contractor as ones before it. I think that where there's a really interesting departure from the norm is that what we've seen, particularly in the last, you know, the last forty years but in this sort of post-Cold War moment has been and particularly in the last ten to fifteen years a real push by the Pentagon to go to commercial enterprises for technology and kind of a different model of contracting and, I should say, more broadly, national security agencies. And this is something, you know, a real—including the push under—when Ash Carter was in charge of DOD to really go to Silicon Valley and say, you guys have the best technology and a lot of it is commercial, and we need to update our systems and our software and do this. But I think that the SpaceX partnership is one piece of that. But there has been a real—you know, as the government has, perhaps, not gotten smaller but done less than it used to do and there's been more privatization, there have been—there's been a vacuum left that private companies have stepped into and I think Ian Bremmer's piece was really—made some really important points in this regard that there are things that these platform companies are doing that the state used to do or states used to do and that does give them an inordinate amount of power. You know, and these companies are structurally—often a lot of the control over these companies is in the hands of very, very few, including an inordinate unusual amount of founder power, and Silicon Valley, although there's plenty of political opinionating coming out of there now, which is really a departure from the norm, this kind of partisan statements of such—you know, declarations of the—of recent years are something that really didn't—you didn't see very much before. These are not folks who are—you know, their expertise lies in other domains. So that's where my concern—some concern lies where you have these parastatal actors that are becoming, effectively, states and head of states then and they are not, indeed, speaking for—you know, they're not sovereign powers in the same way and they are speaking for themselves and speaking from their own knowledge base rather than a broader sense of—you know, they're not speaking for the public. That's not their job. CASA: Our next question is from Michael Raisinghani from Texas Woman's University. Michael, if you could unmute. Q: Thank you, Ms. Casa and Dr. O'Mara. A very insightful discussion. Thank you for that. I just thought maybe if you could maybe offer some clarity around the generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Wordtune or any of this in terms of the future. If you look, let's say, five, ten years ahead, if that's not too long, what would your thoughts be in this OpenAI playground? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Well, with the first—with the caveat that the first rule of history is that you can't predict the future—(laughs)—and (it's true ?); we are historians, we like to look backwards rather than forwards—I will then wade into the waters of prediction, or at least what I think the implications are. I mean, one thing about ChatGPT as a product, for example, which has been really—I mean, what a—kudos for a sort of fabulous rollout and marketing and all of a sudden kind of jumping into our public consciousness and being able to release what they did in part because it wasn't a research arm of a very large company where things are more being kept closer because they might be used for that company's purposes. Google, for example, kind of, you know, has very in short order followed on with the reveal of what they have but they kind of were beaten to the punch by OpenAI because OpenAI wasn't—you know, it was a different sort of company, a different sort of enterprise. You know, a lot of it are things that are already out there in the world. If we've, you know, made an airline reservation and had a back and forth with a chatbot, like, that's—that's an example of some of that that's already out in the world. If you're working on a Google doc and doing what absolutely drives me bonkers, which is that Google's kind of completing my sentences for me, but that predictive text, those—you know, many things that we are—that consumers are already interacting with and that enterprises are using are components of this and this is just kind of bringing it together. I think that we should be very cautious about the potential of and the accuracy of and the revolutionary nature of ChatGPT or any of these whether it be Bard or Ernie or, you know, name your perspective chatbot. It is what it is. Again, it's coming from the—it's got the source material it has, it's working with, which is not—you know, this is not human intelligence. This is kind of compilation and doing it very rapidly and remarkably and in a way that presents with, you know, literacy. So I'm not—you know, does very cool stuff. But where the future goes, I mean, clearly, look, these company—the big platform companies have a lot of money and they have a great deal of motivation and need to be there for the next big thing and, you know, if we dial back eighteen months ago there were many in tech who were saying crypto and Web3 was the next big thing and that did not—has not played out as some might have hoped. But there is a real desire for, you know, not being left behind. Again, this is where my worry is for the next five years. If this is driven by market pressures to kind of be the—have the best search, have the best—embed this technology in your products at scale that is going to come with a lot of hazards. It is going to replicate the algorithmic bias, the problems with—extant problems with the internet. I worry when I see Google saying publicly, we are going to move quickly on this and it may not be perfect but we're going to move quickly when Google itself has been grappling with and called out on its kind of looking the other way with some of the real ethical dilemmas and the exclusions and biases that are inherent in some of the incredibly powerful LLMs—the models that they are creating. So that's my concern. This is a genie that is—you know, letting this genie out of the bottle and letting it become a mass consumer product, and if—you know, OpenAI, to its credit, if you go to ChatGPT's website it has a lot of disclaimers first about this is not the full story, effectively, and in the Microsoft rollout of their embedding the technology in Bing last week Microsoft leaders, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI, were kind of—their talking points were very careful to say this is not everything. But it does present—it's very alluring and I think we're going to see it in a lot more places. Is it going to change everything? I think everyone's waiting for, like, another internet to change everything and I don't know if—I don't know. The jury's out. I don't know. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Denis Fred Simon, clinical professor of global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He asked, technology developments have brought to the surface the evolving tension between the drive for security with the desire for privacy. The U.S. represents one model while China represents another model. How do societies resolve this tension and is there some preferred equilibrium point? O'MARA: That is a—that's the billion-dollar question and it's—I think it's a relevant one that goes way back. (Laughs.) I mean, there are many moments in the kind of evolution of all of these technologies where the question of who should know what and what's allowable. If we go back to 1994 and the controversy over the Clipper chip, which was NSA wanting to build a backdoor into commercially available software, and that was something that the industry squashed because it would, among other things, have made it very difficult for a company like Microsoft to sell their products in China or other places if you had a—knew that the U.S. national security agencies were going to have a window into it. And, of course, that all comes roaring back in 2013 with Snowden's revelations that, indeed, the NSA was using social media platforms and other commercial platforms—consumer-facing platforms—to gather data on individuals. You know, what is the perfect balance? I mean, this is—I wish I had this nice answer. (Laughs.) I would probably have a really nice second career consulting and advising. But I think there is a—what is clear is that part of what has enabled the American technology industry to do what it has done and to generate companies that have produced, whether you think the transformations on balance are good or bad, transformative products, right. So everything we're using to facilitate this conversation that all of us are having right now is coming from that font. And democratic capitalism was really critical to that and having a free—mostly free flow of information and not having large-scale censorship. I mean, the postscript to the Clipper chip—you know, Clipper chip controversy is two years later the Telecom Act of 1996, which was, on the one hand, designed to ensure the economic growth of what were then very small industries in the internet sector and not—and prevent the telecoms from ruling it all but also were—you know, this was a kind of making a call about, OK, in terms when it comes to the speech on the internet we are going to let the companies regulate that and not be penalized for private—when private companies decide that they want to take someone down, which is really what Section 230 is. It's not about free speech in a constitutional sense. It's about the right of a company to censor or to moderate content. It's often the opposite of the way that it's kind of understood or interpreted or spun in some ways. But it is clear that the institutions of—that encourage free movement of people and capital have been—are pretty critical in fueling innovation writ large or the development and the deployment and scaling of new technologies, particularly digital technologies. But I think you can see that playing out in other things, too. So that has been, I think, a real tension and a real—there's a market dimension to this, not just in terms of an ethical dimension or political dimension that there does need to be some kind of unfettered ability of people to build companies and to grow them in certain ways. But it's a fine balance. I mean, this sort of, like, when does regulation—when does it—when do you need to have the state come in and in what dimension and which state. And this goes back to that core question of like, OK, the powerful entities, what are their values? What are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? I don't know. I'm not giving you a terribly good answer because I think it's a really central question to which many have grappled for that answer for a very long time. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ahmuan Williams, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Ahmuan? Q: Thank you. Hi. I'm wondering about ChatGPT, about the regulation side of that. It seems like it's Microsoft that has kind of invested itself into ChatGPT. Microsoft had before gotten the Pentagon contract just a few years back. So it's kind of a two-part question. So, first of all, how does that—what does that say about government's interest in artificial intelligence and what can be done? I know the Council of Foreign Relations also reported that the Council of Europe is actually planning an AI convention to figure out how, you know, a framework of some type of AI convention in terms of treaties will work out. But what should we be worried about when it comes to government and the use of AI in political advertisements and campaigns, about, basically, them flooding opinions with, you know, one candidate's ideas and, therefore, them being able to win because they're manipulating our opinions? So what would you say would be kind of a regulation scheme that might come out of these type—new flourishing AI devices? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. That's a good question. I think there's sort of different layers to it. I mean, I see that, you know, the Pentagon contract—the JEDI contract—being awarded to Microsoft, much to Amazon's distress—(laughs)—and litigious distress, is a kind of a separate stream from its decision to invest 10 billion (dollars) in OpenAI. I think that's a commercial decision. I think that's a recognition that Microsoft research was not producing the—you know, Microsoft didn't have something in house that was comparable. Microsoft saw an opportunity to at last do a—you know, knock Google off of its dominant pedestal in search and make Bing the kind of long—kind of a punch line—no longer a punch line but actually something that was a product that people would actively seek out and not just use because it was preinstalled on their Microsoft devices. That is—so I see that as a market decision kind of separate from. The bigger AI question, the question of AI frameworks, yes, and this, again, has a longer history and, you know, I kind of liken AI to the Pacific Ocean. It's an enormous category that contains multitudes. Like, it's—you know, we can—oftentimes when we talk about AI or the AI that we see and we experience, it's machine learning. And part of why we have such extraordinary advances in machine learning in the last decade has—because of the harvesting of individual data on these platforms that we as individuals use, whether it be Google or Meta or others, that that has just put so much out there that now these companies can create something that—you know, that the state of the art has accelerated vastly. Government often is playing catch up, not just in tech but just in business regulation, generally. The other—you know, another example of this in the United States cases with the—in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, with what were then new high-tech tech-driven industries of railroads and oil and steel that grew to enormous size and then government regulators played catch up and created the institutions that to this day are the regulators like the FTC created in 1913. Like, you know, that's—of that vintage. So, I think that it depends on—when it comes to—the question about electoral politics, which I think is less about government entities—this is about entities, people and organizations that want to be in charge of government or governments—that is, you know, AI—new technologies of all kinds that incorporate ever more sophisticated kind of, essentially, disinformation, that—information that presents as real and it is not. The increased volume of that and the scale of that and the sophistication of that and the undetectability of it does create a real challenge to free and fair elections and also to preventing, in the American context, international and foreign intervention in and manipulation of elections but true in every context. That is, you know, getting good information before voters and allowing bad actors to exploit existing prejudices or misassumptions. That is an existing problem that probably will be accelerated by it. I think there's—there's a strong case to be made, at least in the U.S. context, for much stronger regulation of campaign advertising that extends to the internet in a much more stricter form. In that domain there's—I think we have pretty good evidence that that has not been—you know, having that back end has made the existing restrictions on other types of campaign speech and other media kind of made them moot because you can just go on a social platform and do other things. So there's—you know, this is—I think the other thing that compromises this is the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the digital—and the global reach of these digital technologies that extends any other product made—you know, any other kind of product. It just is borderless that—in a kind of overwhelming way. That doesn't mean government should give up. But I think there's a sort of supranational level of frameworks, and then there are all sorts of subnational kind of domain-specific frameworks that could occur to do something as a countervailing force or at least slow the role of developers and companies in moving forward in these products. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Prashant Hosur, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at Clarkson University. He asks, how do you—or she. I'm sorry. I'm not sure. How do you think big tech is likely to affect conventional wisdom around issues of great power rivalry and power transitions? O'MARA: Hmm. I don't—well, I think there are a—these are always—these definitions are always being redefined and who the great powers are and what gives them power is always being reshuffled and—but, of course, markets and economic resources and wealth and—are implicated in this for millennia. I think that tech companies do have this—American tech companies and the tech platforms, which I should preface this by saying, you know, none of the companies we're talking about now are going to rule forever. Maybe that just goes without—it's worth just note, you know, this is—we will have the rise and fall. Every firm will be a dinosaur. Detroit was the most innovative city in the world a hundred and ten years ago. There's still a lot of innovation and great stuff coming out of Detroit, but if you—if I queried anyone here and said, what's the capital of innovation I don't know if you would say Detroit. But back in the heyday of the American auto industry it was, and I think it's a good reminder. We aren't always going to be talking about this place in northern California and north Seattle in this way. But what we have right now are these companies that their products, unlike the products of Henry Ford or General Motors, are ones that are—go across borders with—you know, the same product goes across borders seamlessly and effortlessly, unlike an automobile where a—to sell in a certain country you have to meet that country's fuel standards and, you know, safety standards, et cetera, et cetera. You have a different model for a different market. Instead, here, you know, a Facebook goes where it goes, Google goes where it goes, YouTube goes where it goes, and that has been kind of extraordinary in terms of internationalizing politics, political trends. I think what we've seen globally is very—you know, the role of the internet in that has been extraordinary, both for good and for ill, in the last fifteen years. And then the kind of—the immense—the great deal of power that they have in the many different domains and, again, Ian Bremmer also observed this kind of the—all the different things they do and that is something that is different from twenty-five years ago where you now have companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States with products designed by a small group of people from a kind of narrow, homogenous band of experience who are doing things like transforming taxis and hotels and, I mean, you name it, kind of going everywhere in a way that in the day of the—you know, the first Macintosh, which was like this cool thing on your desk, that was—yes, it was a transformative product. It was a big deal and Silicon Valley was—became a household word and a phrase in the 1980s and the dot.com era, too. That was—you know, everyone's getting online with their AOL discs they got in the mail. But what's happened in the twenty-first century is at a scale and—a global scale and an influence across many different domains, and politics, this very deliberate kind of we are a platform for politics that has really reshaped the global order in ways that are quite profound. This is not to say that everything has to do with big tech is at the root of everything. But let's put it in context and let's, you know—and also recognize that these are not companies that were designed to do this stuff. They've been wildly successful what they set out to do and they have a high-growth tech-driven model that is designed to move fast and, yes, indeed, it breaks things and that has—you know, that has been—they are driven by quarterly earnings. They are driven by other things, as they should be. They are for-profit companies, many of them publicly traded. But the—but because, I think, in part they have been presenting themselves as, you know, we're change the world, we're not evil, we're something different, we're a kinder, gentler capitalism, there has been so much hope hung on them as the answer for a lot of things, and that is not—kind of giving states and state power something of the past to get its act together that instead states need to step up. CASA: Our next question is from Alex Grigor. He's a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge. Alex? Q: Hello. Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me? O'MARA: Yes. CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Ms. O'Mara. Very insightful and, in fact, a lot of these questions are very good as well. So they've touched upon a lot of what I was going to ask and so I'll narrow it down slightly. My research is looking at cyber warfare and sort of international conflict particularly between the U.S. and China but beyond, and I was wondering—you started with the sort of military industrial complex and industry sort of breaking away from that. Do you see attempts, perhaps, because of China and the—that the technology industry and the military are so closely entwined that there's an attempt by the U.S. and, indeed, other countries. You see increase in defense spending in Japan and Germany. But it seems to be specifically focused, according to my research, on the technologies that are coming out of that, looking to reengage that sort of relationship. They might get that a little bit by regulation. Perhaps the current downsizing of technology companies is an opportunity for governments to finally be able to recruit some good computer scientists that they haven't been able to—(laughs)—(inaudible). Perhaps it's ASML and semiconductor sort of things. Do you see that as part of the tension a conscious attempt at moving towards reintegrating a lot of these technologies back into government? O'MARA: Yeah. I think we're at a really interesting moment. I mean, one thing that's—you know, that's important to note about the U.S. defense industry is it never went away from the tech sector. It just kind of went underground. Lockheed, the major defense contractor, now Lockheed Martin, was the biggest numerical employer in the valley through the end of the Cold War through the end of the 1980s. So well into the commercial PC era and—but very—you know, kind of most of what was going on there was top secret stuff. So no one was on the cover of Forbes magazine trumpeting what they've done. And there has been—but there has been a real renewed push, particularly with the kind of—to get made in Silicon Valley or, you know, made in the commercial sector software being deployed for military use and national security use and, of course, this is very—completely bound up in the questions of cyber warfare and these existing commercial networks, and commercial platforms and products are ones that are being used and deployed by state actors and nonstate actors as tools for cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. So, yes, I think it's just going to get tighter and closer and the great—you know, the stark reality of American politics, particularly in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, is the one place that the U.S. is willing to spend lots of money in the discretionary budget is on defense and the one place where kind of it creates a rationale for this unfettered—largely, unfettered spending or spending with kind of a willingness to spend a lot of money on things that don't have an immediately measurable or commercializable outcome is in national security writ large. That's why the U.S. spent so much money on the space program and created this incredible opportunity for these young companies making chips that only—making this device that only—only they were making the things that the space program needed, and this willingness to fail and the willingness to waste money, quite frankly. And so now we're entering into this sort of fresh—this interesting—you know, the geopolitical competition with China between the U.S. has this two dimensions in a way and the very—my kind of blunt way of thinking about it it's kind of like the Soviet Union and Japan all wrapped up in one, Japan meaning the competition in the 1980s with Japan, which stimulated a great deal of energy among—led by Silicon Valley chip makers for the U.S. to do something to help them compete and one of those outcomes was SEMATECH, the consortium to develop advanced semiconductor technology, whose funding—it was important but its funding was a fraction of the wave of money that just was authorized through last year's legislation, the CHIPS Act as well as Inflation Reduction Act and others. So I'm seeing, you know, this kind of turn to hardware and military hardware and that a lot of the commercial—the government subsidized or incentivized commercial development of green technology and advanced semiconductor, particularly in military but other semiconductor technology and bringing semiconductor manufacturing home to the United States, that is—even those dimensions that are nonmilitary, that are civilian, it's kind of like the Apollo program. That was a civilian program but it was done for these broader geopolitical goals to advance the economic strength and, hence, the broader geopolitical strength of the United States against a competitor that was seen as quite dangerous. So that's my way of saying you're right, that this is where this is all going and so I think that's why this sort of having a healthy sense of this long-term relationship is healthy. It's healthy for the private sector to recognize the government's always been there. So it isn't though you had some innovative secret that the government is going to take away by being involved. And to also think about what are the broader goals that—you know, who is benefiting from them and what is the purpose and recognize often that, you know, many of the advanced technologies we have in the United States are thanks to U.S. military funding for R&D back in the day. CASA: Our next question is written. It's from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University. Regarding cybersecurity, do you think tech companies should take greater responsibility since they develop the hardware and software packages? Can the government mandate them, for instance, to have inbuilt security systems? O'MARA: Hmm. Yeah. I think—look, with great power comes great responsibility is a useful reminder for the people at the top of these companies that for—that are so remarkably powerful at the moment and because their platforms are so ubiquitous. There are—you see, for example, Microsoft has really—is a—I think what they've done in terms of partnering with the White House and its occupants and being—kind of acting as a NSA first alert system of sorts and kind of being open about that I think that's been good for them from a public relations perspective, and also—but I think it also reflects this acknowledgement of that responsibility and that it also is bad for their business if these systems are exploited. Yeah, I think that, again, regulation is something that—you know, it's like saying Voldemort in Silicon Valley. Like, some people are, like, oh, regulation, you know. But there's really—there can be a really generative and important role that regulation can play, and the current industry has grown up in such a lightly-regulated fashion you just kind of get used to having all that freedom, and when it comes to cybersecurity and to these issues of national security importance and sort of global importance and importance to the users of the products and the companies that make them there's, I think, a mutual interest in having some sort of rules of the road and that—and I think any company that's operating at a certain scale is—understands that it's in their market interest to be—you know, not to be a renegade, that they are working with. But I think having—you know, there can be a willingness to work with but they're—having a knowledge and an understanding and a respect for your government partners, your state partners, whether they be U.S. or non-U.S. or supranational is really critically important and sometimes tech folks are a little too, like, oh, politics, they don't know what they're doing, you know. We know better. And I think there needs to be a little more mutual exchange of information and some more—yes, some more technical people being able to be successfully recruited into government would probably be a help, too, so there's—on both sides of the table you have technically savvy people who really understand the inner workings of how this stuff is made and don't have simplistic answers of like, oh, we'll just take all the China-made technology out of it. You're, like, well, there's—like, it's kind of deep in the system. You know, so having technologists in the conversation at all points is important. CASA: Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. We'll take that from Louis Esparza, assistant professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Q: Hi. Thank you for your very interesting talk. So I'm coming at this from the social movements literature and I'm coming into this conversation because I'm interested in the censorship and influence of big tech that you seem to be, you know, more literate in. So my question is do you think that this—the recent trends with big tech and collaboration with federal agencies is a rupture with the origin story of the 1960s that you talked about in your talk or do you think it's a continuity of it? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. The answer is, is it both? Well, it's something of a rupture. I mean, look, this—you know, you have this—you have an industry that grows up as intensely—you know, that those that are writing and reading the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 the military industrial complex is all around them. It is paying for their education sort of effectively or paying for the facilities where they're going to college at Berkeley or Stanford or name your research university—University of Washington. It is the available jobs to them. It is paying for the computers that they learn to code on and that they're doing their work on. It is everywhere and it is—and when you are kind of rebelling against that establishment, when you see that establishment is waging war in Vietnam as being a power—not a power for good but a power for evil or for a malevolent—a government you don't trust whose power, whose motivations you don't trust, then you—you know, you want to really push back against that and that is very much what the personal computer movement that then becomes an industry is. That's why all those people who were sitting around in the 1970s in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Xerox Park—just spitballing ideas, they just did not want to have anything to do with military technology. So that's still there, and then that—and that ethos also suffused other actors in, you know, American government and culture in the 1980s forward, the sort of anti-government sentiment, and the concerns about concentrated power continue to animate all of this. And the great irony is that has enabled the growth of these private companies to the power of states. (Laughs.) So it's kind of both of those things are happening and I think, in some ways, wanting to completely revolutionize the whole system was something that was not quite possible to do, although many—it is extraordinary how much it has done. CASA: Margaret, thank you very much for this fascinating discussion and to all of you for your questions and comments. I hope you will follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretomara. Our next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Chris Li, director of research of the Asia Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, will lead a conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR's paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to you tuning in for our webinar on March 1. Bye. (END)  

The most famous photograph of Earth - the ‘Blue Marble' shot captured by NASA astronauts on Apollo 17 - was taken on 7th December, 1972.  The deep blues of the ocean, the green continent of Africa, the yellow edges of the Arabian Peninsula, and the vast empty blackness all around our planet are memorably captured within it. But what can't be said with certainty is who actually took it - as all three members of the crew have claimed they snapped the iconic image.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly trace the origins of this moment back to Stewart Brand's counter-cultural ‘Whole Earth' movement of the 1960s; explain how Jack Schmidt's presence in the Apollo crew was scientifically groundbreaking; and reveal why the photo was flipped before it was printed on the front page of newspapers… Further Reading: • ‘The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth' (The Atlantic, 2011): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/the-blue-marble-shot-our-first-complete-photograph-of-earth/237167/ • ‘Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world' (The Guardian, 2013): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog • ‘Our Blue Marble' (The Obama White House, 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwqLzSiFqlE #70s #Space #Photography Love the show? Join 

Today my guest is Lloyd Kahn, and if you don't recognize the name, you've probably seen one of his books. Lloyd published the seminal book, Shelters in 1973, documenting alternative housing ideas not limited to but including tiny houses, well before the current modern movement.Lloyd has a lifelong fascination with shelter, and this conversation, we trace the steps of how an insurance broker in San Francisco built his own home and slowly transitioned to publishing internationally about Geodesic Domes, Tiny Houses, Mobile Houses, Driftwood Shelters and more. DIY building. While many thousands of the homes that Lloyd has documented over the years are small or tiny, he's got a healthy amount of skepticism about the tiny home movement.In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Lloyds books, his original influences of the counter culture of the 1960's, and how the concept of shelter has changed over the years.In This Episode:How did Lloyd's fascination with shelter begin?Why Lloyd's 1973 book Shelter is the most important of his workWhy Lloyd decided to pull his Dome Books off the shelves even though they were sellingWhy Lloyd says that Builders of the Pacific Coast is Lloyds favorite bookLloyd tells the story of meeting and building with Derek ‘Deek' DiedricksenWhy Dome homes have fallen out of favor (and Lloyd is more than okay with that!)How Lloyd got into publishing in the first placeWhat is causing the current fascination with tiny houses?Lloyds advice for first-time DIY home buildersLloyds two favorite houses of all timesLloyd's take on aging well (He's 83!)Lloyds new book coming soon: The Half Acre Homestead (it sounds amazing!)Lloyd Kahn is the former shelter editor of The Whole Earth Catalog and editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. He has published a series of books on building including Shelter and Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter. 

We are back with our third installment of the Artists Asking Artists Series on the F-Stop Collaborate and Listen Podcast.  This week's podcast, Episode 289, features two of my favorite nature and landscape photographers, Guy Tal and Alex Noriega. When I first conceived of the idea of creating this series for the podcast, Guy and Alex were the first two photographers that came to my mind knowing that Guy has been such an inspiration to Alex and both of them have been such a huge inspiration to me. I honestly believe this might be one of my favorite episodes of the podcast ever recorded, so I think you will really enjoy it! Alex did a wonderful job coming up with questions for Guy and Guy was an amazingly humble and generous guest, as always.  On this week's episode, we discuss: Suffering, depression, and artistry, Choosing to live close to nature, The importance of confidence as photographers, How Guy developed his connection to Utah, Equivalence in nature photography, Grand Landscapes and creativity, Leaving a more meaningful life through photography, The relationship of money and creativity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and landscape photography, Perfectionism in landscape photography, And a lot more! Relevant links discussed on the podcast this week: Support the podcast on Patreon. The Dark Side of Creativity book. Books by Guy Tal (listeners get 10% off anything in Guy's store using the code FSTOP10). Editing tutorials from Alex Noriega (Patreon supporters get 20% off by reaching out to Matt via Patreon). Seeking Questions gallery on Guy's website. The Whole Earth Catalog. Desert Images Book by Edward Abbey and David Muench. Here are the photographers that inspire both Guy and Alex (not an exhaustive list): Michael Gordon. Gregory Crewdson. Edward Burtynsky. Nick Brandt. Charles Cramer. William Neill. Chris Burkett. I love hearing from the podcast listeners! Reach out to me via Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter if you'd like to be on the podcast or if you have an idea of a topic we can talk about. We also have an Instagram page, a Facebook Page, and a Facebook Group - so don't be shy! We also have a searchable transcript of every episode! Thanks for stopping in, collaborating with us, and listening. See you next week. P.S. you can also support the podcast by purchasing items through our B+H affiliate link. See the full show notes on our website for more photographs and awesome info. 

Buckminster Fuller was a designer, inventor, and thinker, and a true American original. Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of a new detailed and honest biography of Fuller, "Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller." Dave talks to Alec about Bucky's life, the unusual cast of characters he attracted, and starts to get into some questions that help inform why Bucky's outsized personality might have attracted people who later went on to become attracted to various kinds of disinformation campaigns — a topic we'll explore in some later episodes. Follow Alec on Twitter at @nevalalee — and buy the book wherever books are sold. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59571984-inventor-of-the-future Keywords: Buckminster Fuller, Bucky Fuller, Inventor of the Future, Alec Nevala-Lee, Margaret Fuller, Geodesic Dome, Tensegrity, Gurdjieff, Roerich, Montreal Expo, Spaceship Earth, EPCOT, Bare Maximum, Dymaxion, 4D, Trim Tab, Robert Kiyosaki, Critical Path, Synergetics, Grunch of Giants, Werner Erhard, est training, John Denver, Ellen Burstyn, The Hunger Project, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos

WE ARE AS GODS offers a deep dive into the many sides of Stewart Brand - creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs famously called “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google existed.” an influential member of Ken Kesey's “The Merry Pranksters,” and founder of the modern environmental movement. Brand's approach to his work and life influenced many, including Steve Jobs, who have gone on to shape our modern world. Now in his 80's, he looks to leave a legacy for the long-term future with his efforts to resurrect ecosystems through de-extinction. The man who coined the phrase “we are as gods and might as well get good at it” is now under fire from former allies who believe he's gone too far, but Brand won't be easily deterred from a mission he feels is necessary to save the future of the planet. Now in his ninth decade, still committed to long term thinking, he controversially advocates for a new approach to nuclear power and the bio-reengineering of keystone extinct species. Co-directors David Alvarado & Jason Sussberg join us to talk about their own paths into the worlds of Stewart Brand, their admiration for his uncanny ability to be at the center of cultural and technological shifts, as well as getting a glimpse into his life away from the spotlight. For updates and screenings go to: greenwichentertainment.com/we-are-as-gods For VOD: APPLE TV AMAZON DVD

Season 2 of Campfire has spoken with many organizations about their visions for cities for the future. But what about Cabin itself? As it enters a new season soon, Cabin City Council Members Jon Hillis and Phil Levin join for an episode to talk about Cabin's goal of building a Network City. In this episode, Jon and Phil talk about the evolution of Cabin in its short history, the new Coliving Pass, Cabin's core values, and Import Replacement Theory.  Topics Covered: Board Game Preferences of Future of Cities Enthusiasts — (1:40)Cabin's Change from a “Decentralized City” to a “Network City”  —  (4:15)Why Network Cities are Important Now — (6:38)The Cabin Lingo — (10:08)The “Chapters” of Cabin — (12:37)Problems Cabin Faced Early On — (14:51)The Cabin Coliving Pass — (17:40)Neighborhood Zero Expansion — (20:30)DIY Building for People That Aren't Builders — (23:04)Consistent Values Across Cabin Neighborhoods — (23:55)The Ideal Cabin Neighborhood and Squad Purchases — (27:20)Jane Jacobs and Import Replacement Theory — (32:47)Whole Earth Catalog — (36:46)Bear Market Advice — (39:20)  Want to learn more about what new technologies are waiting to be released? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord to find out what's in store for us and how we make use of Web3 in both digital and physical space. See you at the next Campfire

Kevin Kelly is a man of many titles.   Krista Tippett calls him a ‘philosopher technologist', Tim Ferriss calls him ‘the world's most interesting man', and Stephen J. Dubner says simply, “If I was the Queen, I would want Kevin Kelly on my Privy Council.”   Kevin Kelly is the first person — ever! — to be hired online. When? 1983. For what job? A fascinating one! We're going to talk about it. He dropped out of college after a year to spend ten years backpacking around Asia. (His photos have just been released in a wonderful paperweight-dwarfing book called Vanishing Asia.) In the same breath he might drop stories of spending time with the Amish just as easily as chatting with Google's founders in the late 90s. His online home, kk.org, is a fountain of deeply insightful and wise blog posts, such as, 1000 True Fans and his annual bits of birthday advice (which are coming out as a book next year!)   Kevin also edited The Whole Earth Catalog, founded The Hacker's Conference, and is Co-chair of the Board of the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging long term thinking and which is, right now, building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years.   See why titles don't really work with Kevin? I mean, sure, he calls himself a ‘packager of ideas' and the Internet may know him best as ‘Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine' (which he cofounded in 1993.) But he's also written a series of prophetic bestsellers including: What Technology Wants (2010) and The Inevitable (2016). That last book came out six years ago but it lays out the future of technology over the next thirty. Clear and clairvoyant, Kevin's words helped me feel more positive about the omnipresent magnetic pull of technology we're all breathing in today. I would recommend it especially if, like me, you're occasionally prone to digging your heels in the dirt, throwing your smartphone out the window, and screaming “I don't wanna!”   Kevin Kelly is a kind, wise, and optimistic finger-pointer. And, unlike most mystics, fortune tellers, and futurists, he's got a long track record of being right.   We are very lucky to have Kevin Kelly join us on 3 Books.   Let's flip the page into Chapter 110 now…   What You'll learn: What makes for a good podcast conversation? What are the different types of vacation? How might you plan a vacation to optimize learning? Why are books a long-term technology? What does technology want? How might AI change us? How do you define optimism? How is technology both the problem and the solution? How do we learn to think longer term? What are recursive loops and how do they help explain the world? Why should we strive to engage in infinite games for growth? Why is population a concern?   You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://www.3books.co/chapters/110   Leave us a voicemail. Your message may be included in a future chapter: 1-833-READ-A-LOT.     Sign up to receive podcast updates here: https://www.3books.co/email-list    3 Books is a completely insane and totally epic 15-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. Each chapter discusses the 3 most formative books of one of the world's most inspiring people. Sample guests include: Brené Brown, David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Angie Thomas, Cheryl Strayed, Rich Roll, Soyoung the Variety Store Owner, Derek the Hype Man, Kevin the Bookseller, Vishwas the Uber Driver, Roxane Gay, David Mitchell, Vivek Murthy, Mark Manson, Seth Godin, Judy Blume and Quentin Tarantino. 3 Books is published on the lunar calendar with each of the 333 chapters dropped on the exact minute of every single new moon and every single full moon all the way up to 5:21 am on September 1, 2031. 3 Books is an Apple "Best Of" award-winning show and is 100% non-profit with no ads, no sponsors, no commercials, and no interruptions. 3 Books has 3 clubs including the End of the Podcast Club, the Cover to Cover Club, and the Secret Club, which operates entirely through the mail and is only accessible by calling 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Each chapter is hosted by Neil Pasricha, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, Two-Minute Mornings, etc. For more info check out: https://www.3books.co  

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book for Viking/Penguin is The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is currently raising funds for his new book Vanishing Asia. The book is a huge, oversized, 1,000-page celebration of old Asia. The campaign runs until May 4, 2021. During this time I am offering discounts for pre-sales purchases. Head over to my Kickstarter site for more details. IN THIS EPISODE: 1:40 Kevin sees art in everything 2:00 Vanishing Asia and it's evolution 3:30 The center of the culture has moved from books to... 9:51 Didn't we meet in Iran...? 10:29 The beginning of his journey to Asia 11:28 Leaves of Grass and Kevin's call to the editor of National Geographic 13:04 "You don't need to know anybody - just go" 14:28 The exception - Iran 18:50 Kevin's ginger story 20:14 Dar's 'mango' story 25:39 Kevin's idea for the lockdown - *Brilliant* 29:10 Kevin, Woodstock, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Wired Magazine 35:40 Kevin publishes an article in New Age - "The Network Nation" in 1984 42:01 The idea behind Wired Magazine 45:51 His belief system that drives him 47:45 "Do I really believe that - or am I parroting something I heard?" 51:38 The 'secret' to his success 58:38 THE MOST beautiful sign-off, ever kk.org Order Vanishing Asia at a discount here

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Attend the Long Now Talks in-person or via our livestream Watch & share these talks on YouTube and Long Now Join us for an illuminating evening with journalist John Markoff in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways. And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. The book will be available to purchase at the in-person talk, and sales will benefit BookShop West Portal. John Markoff writes for the New York Times, has covered Silicon Valley since 01977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 01993, and broke the story of Google's self driving car in 02010. He is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, amongst others. His new biography of Stewart Brand is Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, which will be released on March 22, 02022.

Long Time Silicon Valley journalist John Markoff unearths the roots of a tree, whose branches include, among others, Ken Kesey, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Markoff's new book, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” examines a Zelig-like character in both California's 1960s counterculture and the ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog remains a cultural bible, from which we are still singing hymns.

Veteran technology journalist John Markoff, author of the new biography “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” discusses the forces that have helped Brand forecast the future, the great value in Brand's “eco-pragmatist” perspective, and why the next tech innovation is likely to come out of left field.

A reminder: This is the free version of the Culture Journalist. For the full version of every episode, including this one; monthly culture recommendations; and more, subscribe for just five bucks a month. Also, you can now follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Hey guys,Remember when being a music fan meant falling in love with a label and collecting every single release? Today we're going to be talking about labels, and the special role they play in the creator economy —  past, present, and future.These days, when you hear about record labels, it's usually in the context of a high-profile artist going on social media to speak out about being locked into a terrible deal, or some jaw-dropping headline about how the majors are generating a million dollars of streaming revenue in an hour as artists struggle to make rent. But until relatively recently, record labels — and especially independent record labels — occupied a much more influential position in the zeitgeist. In the years before streaming became the de facto mode of discovery, one could argue that they served as a sort of organizing principle for musical knowledge, crystallizing scenes and movements under a recognizable banner that pointed listeners in the right direction and amplified artists operating outside of the commercial establishment. Think: How Dischord Records nurtured D.C.'s rich hardcore scene, or the role that Mac Dre's Thizz Entertainment played in ushering in the Bay Area Hyphy movement, or how Wax Trax! helped define the sound of Industrial music in Chicago. In the platform era, that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself, and being able to benefit from the support of a community that has your back, can be increasingly hard to come by. Which is why Yancey Strickler, a former music journalist and the co-founder of Kickstarter and The Creative Independent, had something of a eureka moment recently while revisiting Michael Azerrad's groundbreaking chronicle of the 1980s punk and indie scenes, Our Band Could Be Your Life: What if, instead of operating like independent economic agents, vying for our attention, streams, and clicks, artists squadded up and released work together? Before long, Strickler had teamed up with some friends to start Metalabel, an organization that describes itself as a “growing universe of knowledge, resources, and tools that inspire creative collaboration, cooperation, and mutual support.” The group, which includes musician Anna Bulbrook, Etsy co-creator Rob Kalin, designer Ilya Yudanov, developer Lauren Dorman, and collective internet culture expert Austin Robey, has yet to reveal what those tools consist of, or what the business model will be, beyond hinting that the project will involve blockchain in some way. (Austin told The Culture Journalist that the company has plans to become collectively owned.) But, like Other Internet's “Squad Wealth” article and Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon's “Interdependence” idea before it, the Metalabel concept offers some useful language for describing a paradigm shift that is clearly already underway. You can see it in how independent artists are teaming up to form DAOs, or media pundits hyping up the so-called “great rebundling.”Naturally, we couldn't help but want to dig deeper into the idea: Whether you're a musician, a writer, a fashion designer, or an activist, how might reframing our creative output as releases on a label free us up from the diminishing returns of the platform economy?Today, we're excited to welcome Yancy and Austin — one of the brains behind the digital musicians' cooperative Ampled, as well as Unnamed Fund and Dinner DAO — onto the show. We discuss what The Whole Earth Catalog, the creative studio MSCHF, and the centuries-old science academy The Royal Society have in common (hint: our guests say they are all examples of a metalabel), Yancey's “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” and how trying to keep up with the constant churn of content warps our priorities and values as creative people.  Become a paid subscriber to listen to this episode in full.Follow Yancey, Austin, and Metalabel on Twitter Learn more“Introducing Metalabel” Metalabel presentation at ETHDenver 2022“The dark forest theory of the internet” (Yancy Stickler)“What coops and DAOs can learn from each other” (Austin Robey)“Squad wealth” (Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti)“Hyperstructures” (Zora's Jacob Horne)Episodes to peep if you like this oneIs it time for platform socialism? with James Muldoon Is counterculture even possible on the internet? with Carly BustaWhat are NFTs? And can they save independent Music? with Mat Dryhurst This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This week it's a LARB Radio doubleheader. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf talks with John Markoff about his latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Brand is probably best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine he published regularly between 1968 and 1972, and then infrequently up until 1998. With influences ranging from the Beat poets whom Brand met as a youth in San Francisco to his experimentation with LSD, the wisdom of indigenous cultures, and the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog featured articles on sustainable living, ecology, and emerging technologies. As Markoff shows in his book, Brand — who's worked as a photographer, writer, political advisor, and environmental activist, among other things — is not an easy person to pin down. His sympathies have ranged from libertarianism to eco-pragmatism, which stresses “useful technologies,” including nuclear power. Brand is now 83 and Markoff's book is based on many years of interviews with him. In the second half of the show, Kate is joined by artist Ulysses Jenkins on the occasion of his first, long overdue retrospective, Without Your Interpretation, which runs until May 15th at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Jenkins's career spans five decades and he's known especially for his pioneering video and performance art pieces, which often explore questions of race, multiculturalism, ritual, representation, and technology. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins has been integral to the artistic evolution of the city, collaborating and forming collectives with many other important artists, including Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, David Hammons, Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa Jr., May Sun, and Kitt Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

This week it's a LARB Radio Doubleheader. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf talks with John Markoff about his latest book, the biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Brand is probably best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine he published regularly between 1968-and 72, and then infrequently up until 1998. With influences ranging from the Beat poets Brand met as a youth in San Francisco to his experimentation with LSD, the wisdom of indigenous culture, and the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog featured articles on sustainable living, ecology, and emerging technologies. As Markoff shows in his book, Brand—who's worked as a photographer, a writer, a political advisor, and an environmental activist, among other things— is not an easy person to pin down. His sympathies have ranged from libertarianism to eco-pragmatism, which stresses “Useful technologies”—including nuclear power. Brand is now 83 and Markoff's book is based on many years of interviews with him. Kate is joined in the second half of the show by artist Ulysses Jenkins on the occasion of his first, and long overdue retrospective, Without Your Interpretation, at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles until May 15th. Jenkins's career spans five decades: he's known especially for his pioneering video and performance art which often explores questions of race, multiculturalism, ritual, representation, and technology. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins has been integral to the artistic evolution of the city, collaborating and forming collectives with many other important artists including Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, David Hammons, Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa Jr, May Sun, and Kitt Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

From his time with the Merry Pranksters to his influence on Steve Jobs to his utopian “Whole Earth Catalog,” Stewart Brand epitomizes the Bay Area counterculture visionary. Brand has “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point and then moving on just when everyone else catches up,” writes technology reporter John Markoff. Forum talks with Markoff about the life, work and influence of Brand and his new biography, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.”

We are joined by David Bollier, one of the world's leading theorists and evangelists for the idea of the “commons” —  a new (old) paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues this work as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and as cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project. His classic book on the topic is Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. And his most recent book is The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking, inspired by the format and spirit of The Whole Earth Catalog, but focused on commons and commoning as a countercultural force.Follow David on twitter here.Learn more at Bollier.org.Get a copy of The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking here.Get a copy of Think Like a Commoner here.Get a copy of Free Fair and Alive here.Listen to Frontiers of Commoning here.Learn more about the Democracy Policy Network at DemocracyPolicy.network.Our theme song is from "Come Spring" by Noble Dust.

From psychedelics to cyberculture, hippie communes to commercial startups, and the Whole Earth Catalog to the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has not only been a part of many movements—he was there at the start. Now 83, he says he doesn't understand why older people let their curiosity fade, when in many ways it's the best time to set off on new intellectual pursuits. Tyler and Stewart discuss what drives his curiosity, including the ways in which he's a product of the Cold War, how he became a Darwinian decentralist, the effects of pre-industrial America on his thought, the subcultural convergences between hippies and younger American Indians, why he doesn't think humans will be going to the stars, his two-minded approach to unexplained phenomena, how L.L. Bean inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't seem interested in the visual arts, why L.A. could not have been the home of hippie culture and digital innovation, what libertarians don't understand about government, why we should bring back woolly mammoths, why he's now focused on maintenance and institutions, and more. Check out Ideas of India Subscribe to Ideas of India on your favorite podcast app. Visit our website Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Follow Stewart on Twitter Like us on Facebook Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://go.mercatus.org/l/278272/2017-09-19/g4ms

No início do século XX, grandes empresas — como Sears, Montgomery Ward e Aladdin — tinham a mania de vender casas por catálogo e entregá-las por correio nos Estados Unidos. Este assunto foi abordado no episódio 323 do podcast americano 99% Invisible, e nós achamos tão interessante que resolvemos fazer uma adaptação desse trabalho para nossos ouvintes. Além disso, também batemos um papo sobre alguns outros catálogos impressionantes do século passado. 00:30 — Remix: A Casa que Veio pelo Correio 22:50 — Conversas Sobre Catálogos LINKS 99% Invisible: The House that Came in the Mail; Sears Catalog House or Something Like It (Hopewell, VA) — Sears Modern Homes; Catálogo da Sears & Roebuck de 1908 — archive.org; Sweet's architectural catalogue — archive.org; Construction & Building Materials Directory | Suppliers — Sweets; Whole Earth Catalog — wikipedia.org; Whole Earth Catalog, Outono de 1968 — monoskop.org; MÚSICAS The Housemartins — Build Playlist no Spotify NA INTERNET foradeprumo.com Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. REDES SOCIAIS Arthur, Gabriel, Natália. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/fora-de-prumo/message

Creating and selling NFTs (OpenSea, Rarible, Mintable, all on Ethereum Blockchain), setting up a private Facebook group (closed vs secret), Profiles in IT (Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL), from The WELL to Facebook (where did we go wrong), and the first MP3 song (Toms Diner by Suzanne Vega, used to optimize compression). This show originally aired on Saturday, October 30, 2021, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

The Lindisfarne Tapes are selected recordings of presentations and conversations at the Lindisfarne Fellows' meetings. In March of 2013 William Thompson granted permission to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics to transfer the talks from the old reel-to-reel tapes to digital format so that they could be posted online and shared freely. In 2021, the Schumacher Center used the digital audio to create the Lindisfarne Tapes Podcast. Reposting should include acknowledgment of williamirwinthompson.org. Learn more about the Lindisfarne Tapes here.Brand delivered this lecture in 1974 at the Lindisfarne Summer Conference, "Planetary Culture and New Image of Humanity."

The climate art of Cape Farewell, Ian McEwan's novel Solar and the oil industry connections of Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand all come under scrutiny in episode 10 of Notes From Underground.This is a series of essays from Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project), exploring the deep context of the new climate movements. The first six episodes traced a series of lines from the moment of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes, back into the longer history of industrial society and its unacknowledged consequences. In the sequence that began with episode seven, the theme is 'knowing what we know': the encounter with the knowledge of climate change, not as a set of facts that can be held at arm's length, but an experience of knowing that leaves us changed.Notes From Underground is produced in collaboration with Bella Caledonia. You can support the making of this series by going to:https://www.patreon.com/dougaldSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover a special moment in time. Picture this if you will. It's 1968. A collection of some 1,000 of the finest minds in computing is sitting in the audience of the San Francisco Civic Center. They're at a joint conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fall Join Computer Conference in San Francisco. They're waiting to see the a session called A research center for augmenting human intellect. Many had read Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” Atlantic article in 1946 that signified the turning point that inspired so many achievements over the previous 20 years. Many had witnessed the evolution from the mainframe to the transistorized computer to timesharing systems. The presenter for this session would be Douglas Carl Engelbart. ARPA had strongly recommended he come to finally make a public appearance. Director Bob Taylor in fact was somewhat adamant about it. The talk was six years in the making and ARPA and NASA were ready to see what they had been investing in. ARPA had funded his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute. The grad instigator J.C.R. Licklider had started the funding when ARPA was still called DARPA in 1963 based on a paper Engelbart published in 1962. But it had really been going since Engelbart got married in 1950 and realized computers could be used to improve human capabilities, to harness the collective intellect, to facilitate truly interactive computing and to ultimately make the world a better place. Englebart was 25. He'd been from Oregon where he got his Bachelors in 48 after serving in World War II as a radar tech. He then come to Berkely in 53 for is Masters, sating through 1955 to get his PhD. He ended up at Stanford's SRI. There, he hired people like Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and Jeff Rulifson. And today Engelbart was ready to show the world what his team had been working on. The computer was called the oNLine System, or NLS. Bill English would direct things onsite. Because check this out, not all presenters were onsite on that day in 1968. Instead, some were at ARC in Menlo Park, 30 miles away. To be able to communicate onsite they used two 1200 baud modems connecting over a leased line to their office. But they would also use two microwave links. And that was for something crazy: video. The lights went dark. The OnLine Computer was projected onto a 22 foot high screen using an Eidophor video projector. Bill English would flip the screen up as the lights dimmed. The audience was expecting a tall, thin man to come out to present. Instead, they saw Doug Englebart on the screen in front of them. The one behind the camera, filming Engelbart, was Stewart Russel Brand, the infamous editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It seems Englebart was involved in more than just computers. But people destined to change the world have always travelled in the same circles I supposed. Englebart's face came up on the screen, streaming in from all those miles away. And the screen they would switch back and forth to. That was the Online System, or NLS for short. The camera would come in from above Englebart's back and the video would be transposed with the text being entered on the screen. This was already crazy. But when you could see where he was typing, there was something… well, extra. He was using a pointing device in his right hand. This was the first demo of a computer mouse Which he had applied for a patent for in 1967. He called it that because it had a tail which was the cabe that connected the wooden contraption to the computer. Light pens had been used up to this point, but it was the first demonstration of a mouse and the team had actually considered mounting it under the desk and using a knee to move the pointer.But they decided that would just be too big a gap for normal people to imagine and that the mouse would be simpler. Engelbart also used a device we might think of more like a macro pad today. It was modeled after piano keys. We'd later move this type of functionality onto the keyboard using various keystrokes, F keys, and a keyboard and in the case of Apple, command keys. He then opened a document on his screen. Now, people didn't do a lot of document editing in 1968. Really, computers were pretty much used for math at that point. At least, until that day. That document he opened. He used hyperlinks to access content. That was the first real demo of clickable hypertext. He also copied text in the document. And one of the most amazing aspects of the presentation was that you kinda' felt like he was only giving you a small peak into what he had. You see, before the demo, they thought he was crazy. Many were probably only there to see a colossal failure of a demo. But instead they saw pure magic. Inspiration. Innovation. They saw text highlighted. They saw windows on screens that could be resized. They saw the power of computer networking. Video conferencing. A stoic Engelbart was clearly pleased with his creation. Bill Paxton and Jeff Rulifson were on the other side, helping with some of the text work. His style worked well with the audience, and of course, it's easy to win over an audience when they have just been wowed by your tech. But more than that, his inspiration was so inspiring that you could feel it just watching the videos. All these decades later. can watching those videos. Engelbart and the team would receive a standing ovation. And to show it wasn't smoke and mirrors, ARC let people actually touch the systems and Engelbart took questions. Many people involved would later look back as though it was an unfinished work. And it was. Andy van Dam would later say Everybody was blown away and thought it was absolutely fantastic and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact. People thought it was too far out and they were still working on their physical teletypes, hadn't even migrated to glass teletypes yet. But that's not really fair or telling the whole story. In 1969 we got the Mansfield Amendment - which slashed the military funding pure scientific research. After that, the budget was cut and the team began to disperse, as was happening with a lot of the government-backed research centers. Xerox was lucky enough to hire Bob Taylor, and many others immigrated to Xerox PARC, or Palo Alto Research Center, was able to take the concept and actually ship a device in 1973, although not as mass marketable yet as later devices would be. Xerox would ship the Alto in 1973. The Alto would be the machine that inspired the Mac and therefore Windows - so his ideas live on today. His own team got spun out of Stanford and sold, becoming Tymshare and then McDonnel Douglas. He continued to have more ideas but his concepts were rarely implemented at McDonnel Douglas so he finally left in 1986, starting the Bootstrapp Alliance, which he founded with his daughter. But he succeeded. He wanted to improve the plight of man and he did. Hypertext and movable screens directly influenced a young Alan Kay who was in the audience and was inspired to write Smalltalk. The Alto at Xerox also inspired Andy van Dam, who built the FRESS hypertext system based on many of the concepts from the talk as well. It also did multiple windows, version control on documents, intradocument hypertext linking, and more. But, it was hard to use. Users needed to know complex commands just to get into the GUI screens. He was also still really into minicomputers and timesharing, and kinda' missed that the microcomputer revolution was about to hit hard. The hardware hacker movement that was going on all over the country, but most concentrated in the Bay Area, was about to start the long process of putting a computer, and now mobile device, in every home in the world. WIth smaller and smaller and faster chips, the era of the microcomputer would transition into the era of the client and server. And that was the research we were transitioning to as we moved into the 80s. Charles Irby was a presentter as well, being a designer of NLS. He would go on to lead the user interface design work on the Xerox star before founding a company then moving on to VP of development for General Magic, a senior leader at SGI and then the leader of the engineering team that developed the Nintendo 64. Bob Sproull was in the audience watching all this and would go on to help design the Xerox Alto, the first laser printer, and write the Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics before becoming a professor at Conegie Mellon and then ending up helping create Sun Microsystems Laboratories, becoming the director and helping design asuynchronous processors. Butler Lampson was also there, a found of Xerox PARC, where the Alto was built and co-creator of Ethernet. Bill Paxton (not the actor) would join him at PARC and later go on to be an early founder of Adobe. In 2000, Engelbart would receive the National Medal of Technology for his work. He also He got the Turing Award in 1997, the Locelace Medal in 2001. He would never lose his belief in the collective intelligence. He wrote Boosting Our Collective IQ in 1995 and it has Englebart passed away in 2013. He will forever be known as the inventor of the mouse. But he gave us more. He wanted to augment the capabilities of humans, allowing us to do more, rather than replace us with machines. This was in contrast to SAIL and the MIT AI Lab where they were just doing research for the sake of research. The video of his talk is on YouTube, so click on the links in the show notes if you'd like to access it and learn more about such a great innovator. He may not have brought a mass produced system to market, but as with Vanevar Bush's article 20 years before, the research done is a turning point in history; a considerable milestone on the path to the gleaming world we now live in today. The NLS teaches us that while you might not achieve commercial success with years of research, if you are truly innovative, you might just change the world. Sometimes the two simply aren't mutually exclusive. And when you're working on a government grant, they really don't have to be. So until next time, dare to be bold. Dare to change the world, and thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Craigslist Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the computer that was the history of craigslist. It's 1995. The web is 4 years old. By the end of the year, there would be over 23,000 websites. Netscape released JavaScript, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, Sony released the Playstation, Coolio Released Gangsta's Paradise, and probably while singing along to “This is How We Do It” veteran software programmer Craig Newmark made a list. And Craig Alexander Newmark hails from Morristown, New Jersey and after being a nerdy kid with thick black glasses and a pocket protector in high school went off to Case Western, getting a bachelors in 1975 and a masters in 77. This is where he was first given access to the arpanet, which would later evolve into the internet as we know it today. He then spent 17 years at IBM during some of the most formative years of the young computer industry. This was when the hacker ethos formed and anyone that went to college in the 70s would be well acquainted with Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and yes, even employees of IBM would potentially have been steeped in the ethos of the counterculture that helped contribute to that early hacker ethos. And as with many of us, Gibson's Neuromancer got him thinking about the potential of the web. Anyone working at that time would have also seen the rise of the Internet, the advent of email, and a lot of people were experimenting with side projects here and there. And people from all around the country that still believed in the ideals of that 60s counterculture still gravitated towards San Francisco, where Newmark moved to take a gig at Charles Schwab in 1993 where he was an early proponent of the web, exploring uses with a series of brown bag lunches. If you're going to San Francisco make sure to wear flowers in your hair. Newmark got to see some of the best of the WELL and Usenet and as with a lot of people when they first move to a new place, old Craig was in his early 40s with way too much free time on his hands. I've known lots of people these days that move to new cities and jump headfirst into Eventbrite, Meetup, or more recently, Facebook events, as a way of meeting new people. But nothing like that really existed in 1993. The rest of the country had been glued to their televisions, waiting for the OJ Simpson verdict while flipping back and forth between Seinfeld, Frasier, and Roseanne. Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood won Best Picture. I've never seen Seinfeld. I've seen a couple episodes of Frasier. I lived Roseanne so was never interested. So a lot of us missed all that early 90s pop culture. Instead of getting embroiled in Friends from 93 to 95, Craig took a stab at connecting people. He started simple, with an email list and ten or so friends. Things like getting dinner at Joe's digital diner. And arts events. Things he was interested in personally. People started to ask Craig to be added to the list. The list, which he just called craigslist, was originally for finding things to do but quickly grew into a wanted ad in a way - with people asking him to post their events or occasionally asking for him to mention an apartment or car, and of course, early email aficionados were a bit hackery so there was plenty of computer parts needed or available. It's even hard for me to remember what things were like back then. If you wanted to list a job, sell a car, sell furniture, or even put an ad to host a group meetup, you'd spend $5 to $50 for a two or three line blurb. You had to pick up the phone. And chances are you had a home phone. Cordless phones were all the rage then. And you had to dial a phone number. And you had to talk to a real life human being. All of this sounds terrible, right?!?! So it was time to build a website. When he first launched craigslist, you could rent apartments, post small business ads, sell cars, buy computers, and organize events. Similar to the email list but on the web. This is a natural progression. Anyone who's managed a list serve will eventually find the groups to become unwieldy and if you don't build ways for people to narrow down what they want out of it, the groups and lists will split themselves into factions organically. Not that Craig had a vision for increasing page view times or bringing in advertisers, or getting more people to come to the site. But at first, there weren't that many categories. And the URL was www.craigslist.org. It was simple and the text, like most hyperlinks at the time, was mostly blue. By end of 1997 he was up to a million page views a month and a few people were volunteering to help out with the site. Through 1998 the site started to lag behind with timely postings and not pruning old stuff quickly enough. It was clear that it needed more. In 1999 he made Craigslist into a business. Being based in San Francisco of course, venture capitalist friends were telling him to do much, much more, like banner ads and selling ads. It was time to hire people. He didn't feel like he did great at interviewing people, he couldn't fire people. But in 99 he got a resume from Jim Buckmaster. He hired him as the lead tech. Craigslist first expanded into different geographies by allowing users to basically filter to different parts of the Bay Area. San Francisco, South Bay, East Bay, North Bay, and Peninsula. Craig turned over operations of the company to Jim in 2000 and Craigslist expanded to Boston in y2k, and once tests worked well, added Chicago, DC, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and Seattle. I had friends in San Francisco and had used Craigslist - I lived in LA at the time and this was my first time being able to use it regularly at home. Craig stayed with customer service, enjoying a connection with the organization. They added Sacramento and in 2001 saw the addition of Atlanta, Austin, Vancouver and Denver added. Every time I logged in there were new cities, and new categories, even one to allow for “erotic services”. Then in 2004 we saw Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Bangalore, and Sao Paulo. As organizations grow they need capital. Craigslist wasn't necessarily aggressive about growth, but once they became a multi-million dollar company, there was risk of running out of cash. In 2004, eBay purchased 28.4 percent of the company. They expanded into Sydney and Melbourne. Craigslist also added new categories to make it easier to find specific things, like toys or things for babies, different types of living arrangements, ridesharing, etc. Was it the ridesharing category that inspired Travis Kalanick? Was it posts to rent a room for a weekend that inspired AirBNB? Was it the events page that inspired Eventbrite? In 2005, eBay launched Kijiji, an online classifieds service organized by cities. It's a similar business model to Craigslist. By May they'd purchased Gumtree, a similar site serving the UK, South Africa and a number of other countries, and then purchased LoQuo, OpusForum.org. They were firmly getting in the same market as Craigslist. Craigslist continued to grow. And by 2008, eBay sued Craigslist claiming they were diluting the eBay stock. Craigslist countered that Kijiji stoke trade secrets. By 2008 over 40 million Americans used Craigslist every month and they had helped people in more than 500 cities spread across more than 50 countries. Much larger than the other service. They didn't settle that suit for 7 years, with eBay finally selling its shares back to Craigslist in 2015. Over the years, there have been a number of other legal hurdles for Craigslist. In 2008, Craigslist added phone verification to the erotic services category and saw a drastic reduction in the number of ads. They also teamed up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as 43 US Attorneys General and saw over 90% reduced ads for erotic services over the next year and donated all revenue from ads to post erotic services to charities. Craigslist later removed the category outright. The net effect was that many of those services got posted to the personals section. At the time, craigslist was the most used personals site in the US. Therefore, unable to police those, in 2010, Craiglist took the personals down as well. Craigslist was obviously making people ask a lot of questions. Newspaper revenue from classifieds advertisements went down from 14 to 20 percent in 2007 while online classified traffic shot up 23%. Again, disruption makes people ask question. I am not a political person and don't like talking about politics. I had friends in prosecutors offices at the time and they would ask me about how an ad could get posted for an illegal activity and really looked at it from the perspective that Craigslist was facilitating sex work. But it's worth noting that a social change that resulted in that erotic services section was that a number of sex workers moved inside apartments rather than working on the street. They could screen potential customers and those clients knew they would be leaving behind a trail of bits and bytes that might get them caught. As a result, homicide rates against females went down by 17 percent and since the Erotic Services section of the site has been shut down, those rates have risen back to the same levels. Other sites did spring up to facilitate the same services, such as Backpage. And each has been taken down or prosecuted as they spring up. To make it easier to do so, the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act was launch in 2018. We know that the advent of the online world is changing a lot in society. If I need some help around the house, I can just go to Craigslist and post an ad and within an hour usually have 50 messages. I don't love washing windows on the 2nd floor of the house - and now I don't have to. I did that work myself 20 years ago. Cars sold person to person sell for more than to dealerships. And out of great changes comes people looking to exploit them. I don't post things to sell as much as I used to. The last few times I posted I got at least 2 or 3 messages asking if I am willing to ship items and offering to pay me after the items arrive. Obvious scams. Not that I haven't seen similar from eBay or Amazon, but at least there you would have recourse. Angie got a list in 1995 too. You can use angieslist to check up on people offering to do services. But in my experience few who respond to a craigslist ad are there and most are gainfully employed elsewhere and just gigging on the side. Today Craigslist runs with around 50 people, and with revenue over 700 million. Classified advertising at large newspaper chains has dropped drastically. Alexa ranks craigslist as the 120th ranked global sites and 28th ranked in the US - with people spending 9 minutes on the site on average. The top searches are cheap furniture, estate sales, and lawn mowers. And what's beautiful is that the site looks almost exactly like it looked when launched in the 90s. Still no banners. Still blue hyperlinks. Still some black text. Nothing fancy. Out of Craigslist we've gotten CL blob service, CL image service, and memcache cluster proxy. They contribute code to Haraka, Redis, and Sphinx. The craigslist Charitable fund helps support the Apache Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Gnome Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Open Source Initiative, OpenStreetMap.us, Perl Foundation, PostgreSQL, Python Software Foundation, and Software in the Public Interest. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who want to “disrupt” an industry. When I hear the self proclaimed serial entrepreneurs who think they're all about the ideas but don't know how to actually make any of the ideas work talk about disruptive technologies, I have never heard one mention craigslist. There's a misnomer that a lot of engineers don't have the ideas and that every Bill Gates needs a Paul Allen or that every Steve Jobs needs a Woz. Or I hear that starting companies is for young entrepreneurs, like those four were when starting Microsoft and Apple. Craig Newmark, a 20 year software veteran in his 40s inspired Yelp!, Uber, Next-door and thousands of other sites. And unlike many of those other organizations he didn't have to go blow things up and build a huge company. They did something that their brethren from the early days on the WELL would be proud of, they diverted much of their revenues to the Craigslist Charitable Fund. Here, they sponsor four main categories of grant partners: * Environment and Transportation * Education, Rights, Justice, Reason * Non-Violence, Veterans, Peace * Journalism, Open Source, Internet You can find more on this at https://www.craigslist.org/about/charitable According to Forbes, Craig is a billionaire. But he's said that his “minimal profit” business model allows him to “give away tremendous amounts of money to the nonprofits I believe in” including Wikipedia, a similar minded site. The stories of the history of computing are often full of people becoming “the richest person in the world” and organizations judged based on market share. But not only with the impact that the site has had but also with those inspired by how he runs it, Craig Newmark shatters all of those misconceptions of how the world should work. These days you're probably most likely gonna' find him on craigconnects.org - “helping people do good work that matters.” So think about this, my lovely listeners. No matter how old you are, nor how bad your design skills, nor how disruptive it will be or not be, anyone can parlay an idea that helps a few people into something that changes not only their life, but changes the lives of others, disrupts multiple industries, and doesn't have to create all the stress of trying to keep up with the tech joneses. You can do great things if you want. Or you can listen to me babble. Thanks for doing that. We're lucky to have you join us.