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This time on the Plutopia podcast, our evil alien overlords, Jon and Scoop, talk about their favorite science fiction films and TV series.

Filmmaker Friedrich Moser is on a crusade for truth. His new film "How to Build a Truth Engine" features investigators from the fields of technology, journalism, folklore and neuroscience who show that if you can hack the information feed, you can hack somebody's mind.



Friedrich Moser:

Anything that happened in the world would become the cornerstone of a new conspiracy story, like a small story. In some you have this web of conspiracy stories that grow together and then on top of that you see the formation of a real conspiracy. And that's the conspiracy that led to January 6th and the capital riot because a lot of people who were there, and I'm not talking about the Proud Boys - I'm not talking about those, but like normal ordinary people. A lot of people who were there genuinely believed that they were there to save democracy. So their feedback loop system of the model of the world that is in the mind and the real world had been cut off by relying exclusively on this online community for information. And that's a really dangerous thing.

In her new book, Rebel Health: A Field Guide to the Patient-Led Revolution in Medical Care., Susannah Fox focuses on the health care needs of patients and caregivers. She points out the need for better communication and networking for anyone who has difficulty navigating the American healthcare system.



Susannah Fox:

With all of the technology that we have now, at the base of it, it's really about the connection between and among people who are facing the same challenge, who are lost in the maze of healthcare, who find out that they're not alone. And that moment that you find that just in time someone like you, it's the same incredible excitement that we all felt in the early days of being online, it's the same feeling that people have now on TikTok and whatever is the latest platform.











Susannah Fox is a health and technology strategist. She is a former Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she led an open data and innovation lab. She has served as the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and she directed the health portfolio at the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

On the March 21st Plutopia Livestream, woke Plutopians discussed the financial woes of that orange-haired politician, the Biden impeachment hearings, RFK Junior, student loans, the University of Austin, South by Southwest and much more. "I think it was a sock puppet..."

David Gans has a long history of making music, writing about music, and broadcasting music.



He recently added a new entry to his musical résumé, teaching "Psychedelia and Groove: The Music and Culture of the Grateful Dead," a continuing studies course at Stanford University.



But what I proposed was a class that was going to be very, very loosely structured. And I said, "Here are six things that we will address in these six sessions, but they won't be rigidly divided into these things, because everybody that I invite to talk about this with me will have expertise in all these areas."



I said, "We'll talk about the history, we'll talk about songwriting, we'll talk about improvisation, we'll talk about the culture, the deadhead culture, and how the Grateful Dead impacted the music and the world around them. And we'll talk about the Grateful Dead's amazing way of interpreting music - it's one of the most important things they did was take music from outside the Grateful Dead and make it their own."



David regularly streams performances at https://www.youtube.com/@dgans.



Photo by Nancy Carbonaro

Jen Persson is director of the UK Civil Liberties Group, Defend Digital Me.



She campaigns for a safe, fair, and transparent collection of children's data in education and elsewhere.



What happens when you start collecting school records is that they're about children, but those records age as the people do, and now we have a record of about a third of the UK population who have been in state education over the last 20 years. So anyone under 47 also has a national pupil record, and it is de facto becoming a go-to national identity database. It is something that other departments and even the police have started to use as how to find people. And that for me is a really concerning development and something that was foreseen and argued about 20 years ago. And I think any collection of data that is starting should be asking the same questions now about thinking about how they would be down the line. So that's kind of one aspect of what we do is around government - state-collected information about children. And then we also look at things like technology that's used in education, so things like biometrics, AI, apps, and platforms.







Jen is an advocate for digital privacy and human rights, is director of the digital privacy organization, Defend Digital Me. She writes about government plans to use personal data from education, health, and other parts of the public sector, for purposes beyond our reasonable expectations.





Relevant Links



danah boyd (research on teens online)



UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child



Sonia Livingstone



Center for Democracy and Technology



Electronic Frontier Foundation



Open Rights Group



Privacy International



KOSA