Ep. 04 – Transcending (and Including) Partisan Debate with Stephanie Lepp

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This week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been covered by NPR and the MIT Technology Review, supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, and featured on Future Fossils Podcast twice — first in episode 154 for her project Deep Reckonings and then in episode 205 with Greg Thomas on Jazz Leadership and Antagonistic Cooperation.

Her latest project, Faces of X, pits actors against themselves in scripted trialogues between the politically liberal and conversative positions on major social issues, with a third role swooping in to observe what each side gets right and what they have in common. I support this work wholeheartedly. In my endless efforts to distill the key themes of Humans On The Loop, one of them is surely how our increasing connectivity can — if used wisely — help each of us identify our blind spots, find new respect and compassion for others, and discover new things about our ever-evolving selves (at every scale, from within the human body to the Big We of the biosphere and beyond).

Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation!

Project Links

Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:00:48 – Intro0:06:33 – The Black, White, and Gray of Agency0:10:54 – Stephanie’s Initiation into Multiperspectivalism0:15:57 – Hegelian Synthesis with Faces of X0:23:53 – Reconciling Culture & Geography0:29:02 – Improvising Faces of X for AI0:46:34 – Do Artifacts Have Politics?0:50:04 – Playing in An Orchestra of Perspectives0:55:10 – Increasing Agency in Policy & Voting1:05:55 – Self-Determination in The Family1:08:39 – Thanks & Outro

Other Mentions

• Damien Walter on Andor vs. The Acolyte• William Irwin Thompson• John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace”• Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell’s “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”• Liv Boeree• Allen Ginsberg• Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch• Singularity University• Android Jones + Anson Phong’s Chimera• Basecamp• Grimes• Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”• Ibram X. Kendi• Coleman Hughes• Jim Rutt

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