Episodes
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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 Leger (@JanineLeger) / Xtimour kosters (@timourxyz) / XEdge City (@JoinEdgeCity) / XEdge City
Janine and Timour’s Social Links:Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ (@m_t_prewitt) / X
Matt’s Social Links: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) -
In this episode, Project Liberty Founder Frank McCourt joins Matt for a second round to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by rapidly developing AI technologies. Building on their previous chat about digital infrastructure, they explore whether AI will exacerbate social media, digital advertising, and data centralization issues, or fundamentally change them. McCourt emphasizes fixing the internet’s design flaws to ensure AI benefits society, advocates for returning data ownership to individuals and stresses the need for political engagement to align AI with democratic values. Tune in for this enlightening conversation and what we can do moving forward.
Links & References:
References:
RadicalxChange(s) | Frank McCourt: Founder of Project Liberty (Part I) on Reclaiming the InternetKhmer Empire | WikipediaThe Decline of the Khmer Empire | National Library of AustraliaRestrictions on TikTok in the United States | WikipediaTikTok sues to block prospective US app ban | CNN BusinessHow Silicon Valley gamed the world's toughest privacy rules - POLITICOEuropean Union fines Meta $1.3 billion for violating privacy laws : NPRThe Dangers of the Global Spread of China’s Digital Authoritarianism | Center for a New American Security (en-US)China’s Techno-Authoritarianism Has Gone Global | Human Rights WatchChina trying to develop world ‘built on censorship and surveillance’ | Privacy News | Al JazeeraProject LibertyPeople’s Bid For TikTok - Project LibertyBios:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is a civic entrepreneur and the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future through its work across the real estate, sports, technology, media, and capital investment industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Frank is proud to extend his family’s 130-year legacy of merging community and social impact with financial results, an approach that started when the original McCourt Company was launched in Boston in 1893.He is a passionate supporter of multiple academic, civic, and cultural institutions and initiatives. He is the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a far-reaching, $500 million initiative to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data. The project includes the development of a groundbreaking, open-source internet protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which will be owned by the public to serve as a new web infrastructure. It also includes the creation of Project Liberty’s Institute (formerly The McCourt Institute,) launched with founding partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, and Sciences Po in Paris, to advance research, bring together technologists and social scientists, and develop a governance model for the internet’s next era.
Frank has served on Georgetown University’s Board of Directors for many years and, in 2013, made a $100 million founding investment to create Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He expanded on this in 2021 with a $100 million investment to catalyze an inclusive pipeline of public policy leaders and put the school on a path to becoming tuition-free.
In 2024, Frank released his first book, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.
Frank’s Social Links:
Project LibertyProject Liberty (@pro_jectliberty) / XProject Liberty (@pro_jectliberty) • InstagramMcCourt Institute (@McCourtInst) / XMatt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ (@m_t_prewitt) / X
Matt’s Social Links: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) -
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Today, in Part I of a two-episode conversation, Matt Prewitt is joined by civic entrepreneur and Founder of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt, who is on a mission to reclaim the internet and prioritize human rights in our digital landscape. Drawing parallels between the early public oversight of television and the current state of the internet, Frank highlights the commodification of our data and identities online. He advocates for new protocols and a movement inspired by historical fights against oppression to secure genuine data rights and agency online. As we look to the future, Project Liberty's endeavors may play a crucial role. This interview is a fantastic opportunity to hear more about Frank's thinking.
Links & References:
References:
Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age by Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael J. CaseyTim Berners-Lee - WikipediaFACT SHEET: CHIPS and Science Act Will Lower Costs, Create Jobs, Strengthen Supply Chains, and Counter China | The White HouseMythbusting: The Facts On Reports About Our Data Collection Practices | TikTok NewsroomSesame Workshop - WikipediaGDPRThe Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets - European CommissionThe EU’s Digital Services ActTCP/IP | Internet protocol suite - WikipediaHTTP - WikipediaDistributed Social Networking Protocol - WikipediaTechnology | Project LibertyCommon Sense - WikipediaBios:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is a civic entrepreneur and the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future through its work across the real estate, sports, technology, media, and capital investment industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Frank is proud to extend his family’s 130-year legacy of merging community and social impact with financial results, an approach that started when the original McCourt Company was launched in Boston in 1893.He is a passionate supporter of multiple academic, civic, and cultural institutions and initiatives. He is the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a far-reaching, $500 million initiative to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data. The project includes the development of a groundbreaking, open-source internet protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which will be owned by the public to serve as a new web infrastructure. It also includes the creation of Project Liberty’s Institute (formerly The McCourt Institute,) launched with founding partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, and Sciences Po in Paris, to advance research, bring together technologists and social scientists, and develop a governance model for the internet’s next era.
Frank has served on Georgetown University’s Board of Directors for many years and, in 2013, made a $100 million founding investment to create Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He expanded on this in 2021 with a $100 million investment to catalyze an inclusive pipeline of public policy leaders and put the school on a path to becoming tuition-free.
In 2024, Frank released his first book, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.
Frank’s Social Links:
Project LibertyProject Liberty (@pro_jectliberty) / XProject Liberty (@pro_jectliberty) • InstagramMcCourt Institute (@McCourtInst) / XMatt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ (@m_t_prewitt) / X
Matt’s Social Links: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) -
In today’s episode, Matt Prewitt engages in a thought-provoking dialogue with Tahir Amin, the Co-Founder and CEO of the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK). Together, they delve into the history of the patent and trademark systems – flaws and all, especially within the pharmaceutical realm. Tahir, drawing from his experience as a former intellectual property lawyer turned reform advocate, sheds light on how these systems have been manipulated by large corporations to prolong monopolies rather than foster invention. He proposes substantial reforms to address these systemic issues, advocating for a fundamental restructuring of the patent system. This insightful conversation highlights the complexities and challenges within the patent system and the quest for a more just and equitable approach to intellectual property.
Links & References:
References:
I-MAKWorld Trade Organization (WTO)"Battle of Seattle" | 1999 Seattle WTO protestsHistory of patent law - WikipediaWhy Intellectual Property Rights? A Lockean JustificationJustifying Intellectual Property by Robert P. Merges Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution – ArtI.S8.C8.1 Overview of Congress's Power Over Intellectual PropertyUnited States Patent and Trademark Office - Wikipedia33:14 Statstisc Peace and Science - when generics patentWhen Do Generics Challenge Drug Patents? | C. Scott Hemphill and Bhaven N. SampatInvesting in Ex Ante Regulation: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Patent Examination | NBER | Michael D. Frakes & Melissa F. WassermanHow a Drug Company Made $114 Billion by Gaming the U.S. Patent System - The New York TimesThe Burden of Patent Thickets – I-MAK4 Economic evaluation | NICE health technology evaluations: the manual | GuidanceDo not get sold on drug advertising - Harvard HealthUSA and New Zealand | Direct-to-consumer advertising - WikipediaBiosimilars Basics for Patients | FDA. Biologics, Biosimilars and Patents: A Beginner's Guide – I-MAKPatent Reform – I-MAKBios:
Tahir Amin LL.B., Dip.LP., is a founder and CEO of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a non-profit organisation working to address the structural power and inequities of the intellectual property (IP) system and how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in IP law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-defining and re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest and commons, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow economic and health inequities to persist. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, a TED and Echoing Green Fellow. He has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international and intergovernmental organisations, including the Medecines Sans Frontieres, the European Patent Office, World Health Organization, United Nations Environment Programme, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on IP and unsustainable drug prices.
Tahir’s Social Links:
Tahir Amin (@realtahiramin) / XInitiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (@IMAKglobal) / XTahir Amin - Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer - I-MAK | LinkedInMatt 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) / XAdditional Credits:
This episode was recorded and produced by Matt Prewitt.This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In this final episode of our short series, host Matt Prewitt speaks with Indy Johar, architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs. Together they discuss the topic of ownership through the lens of theories of governance. Indy advocates for decentralized protocols in property governance, emphasizing complex contributions and contextual responsiveness – moving away from control-oriented systems towards ennobling frameworks that empower individuals and foster deeper engagement.
RadicalxChange has been working with Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs, together with Margaret Levi and her team at Stanford, on exploring and reimagining the institutions of ownership.
This episode is part of a short series exploring the theme of What and How We Own: Building a Politics of Change.
Read more in our newsletter What & How We Own: The Politics of Change | Part III.Links & References:
References:
The Code of Capital | Princeton University Press by Katharina PistorDaniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191Partial Common Ownership | RxC Wiki[The Bellagio Model: an evidence-informed, international framework for population-oriented primary care. First experiences]Hayekian economic policy - ScienceDirectJames Lovelock - WikipediaThe Economics of Care | Elizabeth HillBios:
Indy Johar (he/him) is an architect, co-founder of 00 (project00.cc), and most recently Dark Matter Labs.
Indy, on behalf of 00, has co-founded multiple social ventures from Impact Hub Westminster to Impact Hub Birmingham. He has also co-led research projects such as The Compendium for the Civic Economy, whilst supporting several 00 explorations/experiments including the wikihouse.cc, opendesk.cc. Indy is a non-executive director of WikiHouse Foundation & Bloxhub. Indy was a Good Growth Commissioner for the RSA, RIBA Trustee, and Advisor to Mayor of London on Good Growth, The Liverpool City Region Land Commissioner, The State of New Jersey - The Future of Work Task Force - among others.
Most recently he has founded Dark Matter - a field laboratory focused on building the institutional infrastructures for radicle civic societies, cities, regions, and towns.
Dark Matter works with institutions around the world, from UNDP (Global), Climate Kic, McConnell (Canada), to the Scottish Gove to Bloxhub (Copenhagen)
He has taught and lectured at various institutions including the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; Architectural Association, University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and New School.
He writes often on the https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org
Indy’s Social Links:
Indy Johar (@indy_johar) / XIndy Johar - London, United Kingdom, Project00.cc | about.meIndy Johar – MediumMatt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ (@m_t_prewitt) / X
Matt’s Social Links:Additional Credits:
This episode was recorded and produced by Matt Prewitt.This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In today’s episode, guest host Margaret Levi interviews Matt Prewitt, President of RadicalxChange Foundation. With the tables turned from our last episode, Margaret interviews Matt on rethinking property rights. Beginning with a reflection on the state of political liberalism, Matt dives into the mechanics of Partial Common Ownership (also known as “Plural Property”) and it being part of the solution to manage assets in a fairer, more efficient way and how experimentation like PCO can lead toward a politics of change.
Adam Smith | WikipediaLiberalism | WikipediaLiberalism - Ronald DworkinPartial Common Ownership AKA Plural Property | RxC WikiPCO Art | RxC WikiRadical Markets by Glen Weyl and Eric PosnerElinor Ostrom | Wikipedia
RadicalxChange has been working with Margaret Levi and her team at Stanford, together with Dark Matter Labs, on exploring and reimagining the institutions of ownership.
This episode is part of a short series exploring the theme of What and How We Own: Building a Politics of Change.
Read more in our newsletter What & How We Own: The Politics of Change | Part II.
Links & References:
References:Bios:
@m_t_prewitt | X
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:Margaret Levi is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University.
Margaret Levi | Website@margaretlevi | X (Twitter)
Margaret’s Social Links:Additional Credits:
This episode was recorded and produced by Matt Prewitt.This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
Welcome back to RadicalxChange(s), and happy 2024!
In our first episode of the year, Matt speaks with Margaret Levi, distinguished political scientist, author, and professor at Stanford University. They delve into Margaret and her team’s groundbreaking work of reimagining property rights. The captivating discussion revolves around their approach's key principles: emphasizing well-being, holistic sustainability encompassing culture and biodiversity, and striving for equality.
RadicalxChange has been working with Margaret Levi and her team at Stanford, together with Dark Matter Labs, on exploring and reimagining the institutions of ownership.
This episode is part of a short series exploring the theme of What and How We Own: Building a Politics of Change.
Tune in as they explore these transformative ideas shaping our societal structures.
Read more in our newsletter What & How We Own: The Politics of Change | Part I.Links & References:
References:
Desiderata: things desired as essential.Distributive justiceElizabeth Anderson - Relational equalityDebra Satz - SustainabilityWhat is wrong with inequality?Elinor "Lin" Ostrom - Common ownershipOstrom’s Law: Property rights in the commonsIndigenous models of stewardshipIndigenous Peoples: Defending an Environment for AllColorado River situationA Breakthrough Deal to Keep the Colorado River From Going Dry, for NowHow did Aboriginal peoples manage their water resourcesFurther Reading Recommendations from Margaret:
A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past and Future (2021) by Federica Carugati and Margaret LeviDædalus (Winter 2023): Creating a New Moral Political Economy | American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Edited by Margaret Levi and Henry Farrell)The works of Elizabeth Anderson, including Private Government (2017) and What Is the Point of Equality? (excerpt from Ethics (1999))Justice by Means of Democracy (2023) by Danielle AllenKatharina PistorBios:
Margaret Levi is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University. She is the former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) Levi is currently a faculty fellow at CASBS and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, and the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Political and Social Sciences. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. In 2014, she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, in 2017 gave the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture, and in 2018 received an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. She held the Chair in Politics, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, 2009-13. At the University of Washington she was director of the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies.
Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books, including Of Rule and Revenu_e (University of California Press, 1988); _Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law. Her research continues to focus on how to improve the quality of government. She is also committed to understanding and improving supply chains so that the goods we consume are produced in a manner that sustains both the workers and the environment. In 2015 she published the co-authored Labor Standards in International Supply Chains (Edward Elgar).
She was general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and is co-general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. Levi serves on the boards of the: Carlos III-Juan March Institute in Madrid; Scholar and Research Group of the World Justice Project, the Berggruen Institute, and CORE Economics. Her fellowships include the Woodrow Wilson in 1968, German Marshall in 1988-9, and the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in 1993-1994. She has lectured and been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, the European University Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the Juan March Institute, the Budapest Collegium, Cardiff University, Oxford University, Bergen University, and Peking University.
Levi and her husband, Robert Kaplan, are avid collectors of Australian Aboriginal art and have gifted pieces to the Seattle Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Women’s Museum of Art, and the Nevada Museum of Art.
Margaret’s Social Links:
Margaret Levi | Website@margaretlevi | X (Twitter)Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:
@m_t_prewitt | XAdditional Credits:
This episode was recorded by Matt Prewitt.
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) -
In this episode of RadicalxChange(s), host Matt Prewitt engages in a deep and thoughtful conversation with Barry Threw, Executive & Artistic Director of Gray Area. They explore Barry's diverse career integrating art, technology, and humanities for economic, social, and ecological regeneration, and examine the cultural shifts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Barry and Matt saunter through anecdotes from Burning Man to Joan Didion to the technocratic molding of the Silicon Valley phenomenon — an exciting pathway of cultural importance to walk along.
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas RushkoffSlouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - WikipediaBurning Man - WikipediaEffective altruism - WikipediaSilicon Valley's brand of philanthropy
References:Bios:
Barry Threw is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, a San Francisco nonprofit cultural incubator applying art and technology toward social good. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, cultural producer, and strategist to cultivate forward-looking, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. His previous leadership positions have generated innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses spanning art, music, internet, built environment, and experiential & immersive media: as Software Director with Keith McMillen Instruments, developing advanced technology to bridge traditional string instruments with computers to spark a Western new classical music movement based on the technologies and aesthetics of the 21st century; as Technical Director with Recombinant Media Labs, presenting surround cinema at installations and festivals around the world; as a founding Partner at Fabricatorz, a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Lisbon; and as Director of Software with Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative technology studio specializing in the design and execution of immersive and interactive experiences worldwide, and the first company to do architectural projection mapping. He organizes the #NEWPALMYRA project, an online community platform focused on the virtual reconstruction and creative reuse of cultural heritage. He played a key role in developing and operating the Vatican Arts and Technology Council, a nondenominational external advisory body for the Vatican, which advanced goals of environmental stewardship, humanitarian compassion, and spreading experiences of spirituality worldwide through an experimental art and technology lab.
Barry’s Social Links:
Barry Threw | Website@barrythrew | XBarry Threw | InstagramConnect with Gray Area:
Gray Area | Website@GrayAreaorg | XGray Area | InstagramGray Area | YouTubeGray Area | Facebook
@m_t_prewitt | XMatt’s Substack: Matt's Writings
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:
@RadxChange | TwitterRadicalxChange WebsiteRxC | YouTubeRxC | InstagramRxC | LinkedInJoin the conversation on Discord.Credits:
Produced by G. Angela Corpus.Co-Produced, Edited, 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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In today’s episode, Deepti Doshi, Co-Director of New_ Public (and leader in the intersection of social media, community organizing, and leadership development) speaks with Matt Prewitt on how to create online spaces that foster interconnection, mutual dependency, and democratic outcomes. Together, they explore the need for socio-technical expertise and community stewards to work together to design a healthier and more equitable digital ecosystem. They give consideration to the role of technology and tools in creating democratic spaces, and the potential impact of generative AI on social spaces and democracy. They share a hopeful and exciting outlook for building a more democratic political economy online.
References:
Marshall Ganz (American scholar for grassroots organizing)2012 Nirbhaya Case (TW: Sexual Assault) Arab SpringLola Omolola (Nigerian journalist who founded the Female IN (FIN) group on Facebook - formerly “Female In Nigeria”)John Dewey (American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer (1859–1952)Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Danielle Allen - The New York TimesNew_ PublicCommunity by Design | New_ PublicBios:
Deepti Doshi co-leads New_Public with Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud. New_Public is a product studio for healthy digital public spaces; spaces where people can connect with one another, build understanding across differences, and work towards shared goals, and that are built to maximize plurality, equity, and cohesion - not financial returns.Her work has focused on the intersection of social media, community organizing, and leadership development. Deepti was a Director at Meta, where she helped set up Meta's New Product Experimentation team, created the Community Partnerships team to build products (namely, Groups), programs, and partnerships that support community leaders, and led Internet.org across Asia.
Prior to Meta she founded Haiyya, India’s largest community organizing platform, Escuela Nueva India, an education company that serves the urban poor, and the Fellows Program at Acumen Fund to build leaders for the social enterprise sector.
Deepti is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and the Wharton Business School, and holds a bachelors degree in Psychology. She is a TED Fellow, an Aspen Institute First Movers Fellow and Ideas Scholar, and her work has been featured in multiple publications. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Adrien, and two boys, Aiden and Luca. When not working, you can find her playing tennis, cooking, meditating, or planning the next block party.
Deepti’s Social Links:
@deeptidoshi | TwitterDeepti Doshi | InstagramDeepti Doshi | LinkedInConnect with New_ Public:
New_ Public - Website@WeAreNew_Public | TwitterNew_ Public | InstagramNew_ Public | LinkedInNew_ Public | Substack NewsletterMatt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
@m_t_prewitt | TwitterMatt’s Substack: Matt's Writings
Matt’s Social Links:Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:
@RadxChange | TwitterRadicalxChange WebsiteRxC | 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)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) -
In today’s ep, Matt Prewitt speaks with Victoria Ivanova, R&D Strategic Lead of Serpentine Arts and curator-strategist-writer, about the role art and culture have in society in preserving democratic ideals while offering critical and actionable solutions for the emerging technological era.
They delve into the historical and present significance of art, its crisis of meaning in the age of accelerationism and powerful AI, and the potential for Plural Property (Partial Common Ownership) to create a more fair and dynamic market for art; thereby rethinking art ownership and promoting a more equitable future.
This conversation and the collaboration between RadicalxChange and Serpentine Arts offer new perspectives on the intersection of art, technology, and society.Links:
Rethinking Art Ownership (blog post) by Paula Berman, Victoria Ivanova, & Matt PrewittRethinking Art Ownership (audio version)Rethinking Art Ownership (video version - audio + text)References:
6:04 Gustave Courbet (French painter leading the Realism movement)7:00 Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) anti-slavery novel by American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe7:01 A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) collection of Russian realist short stories by Russian novelist, poet, and playwright Ivan Turgenev8:54 Italian Futurism12: 45 Salon des Refusés14:52 French painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" (Duchamp, 1917)15:54 Conceptual art24:51 Nick Land (English philosopher and theorist)Accelerationism26:03 Nick Srnicek (Canadian writer and academic) and Dr. Alex Williams (British political theorist and lecturer)Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics27:11 Ursula K. Le Guin (American novelist)29:15 Jakob Kudsk Steensen (Danish artist)31:38 Marshall McLuhan (Canadian philosopher)49:11 Norbert Wiener (American mathematician and philosopher)55:38 Systems Esthetics (1968, Artforum) by Jack Burnham (American artist, writer, and theorist of art and technology)55:55 Santa Fe Institute for Complexity58:59 GPT-4 (ChatGPT AI created by OpenAI)01:04:12 Ezra Klein’s “My View on A.I.”1:33:55 EQUANIMITY | Cambridge English DictionaryBios:
Twitter: @VivLaNovaWebsite: Victoria Ivanova
Victoria Ivanova is a strategist and writer with a background in human rights, currently working as R&D Strategist at Serpentine, a leading contemporary art organisation located in London, where she leads Future Art Ecosystems – a project for the construction of 21st-century cultural infrastructure for art and technology.
Victoria’s Social Links:Connect with Serpentine Arts Technologies:
Sign up for the Future Art Ecosystems newsletter.Continue the conversation in FAE's Telegram.Check out Serpentine’s Twitch channel.
Twitter: @m_t_prewittMatt’s Substack: Matt's Writings
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:Connect with RxC:
Follow @radxchange on Twitter.Visit RxC's website.Join the conversation on Discord.Credits:
Produced by G. Angela Corpus.Edited 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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
Shrey Jain, an applied scientist at Microsoft Research Special Projects, speaks with Matt Prewitt on a very timely and topical subject: AI and – more specifically – the dangers it poses to the nature of natural human communication (“context collapse”). They take a deep dive into the current threats to privacy by expanding beyond the often discussed cryptographic sense into “privacy as contextual integrity”, and the immediate opportunity to embed ethical guardrails into this ever-changing realm of generative AI through possible solutions of designated verified signatures in “plural publics”.
Shrey’s recently published paper co-authored with Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl “Plural Publics” is linked in the episode notes.
Georg Simmel and The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret SocietiesJohn Dewey on The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry on JSTORScamming in AI via The Washington Post - They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam."Privacy as Contextual Integrity" by Helen NissenbaumAlso see: Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of... (book)Jaron Lanier on How to Fix Twitter—And All of Social Media - The AtlanticAI Education - Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The AtlanticShrey Jain, Divya Siddarth, and E. Glen Weyl. “Plural Publics.” Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, March 20, 2023.
Links & References:Bios:
Shrey Jain (he/him) is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft Research Special Projects. His research area is AI Security and Cryptography with a specific focus on information integrity in an era of generative AI. Shrey's work has been featured in CBC News, The Globe and Mail, Financial Times, National Post, CTV News, and the Toronto Star.
Shrey’s Social Links:
Twitter: @shreyjaineth
Connect with Shrey on LinkedIn
Shrey’s Substack: Glasswing
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.Matt’s Social LInks:
Twitter: @m_t_prewitt
Matt’s Substack: Matt's Writings
Connect with RadicalxChange:
Follow us on Twitter.
Visit our website.
Join the conversation on Discord.Credits:
Produced by G. Angela Corpus.Edited 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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In today's episode, Will Holley (Founder of 721 Labs), Graven Prest (Co-Founder of the Geo Web project), and Kevin Seagraves (CEO of NiftyApes) are three mission-focused entrepreneurs who join host Matt Prewitt in a roundtable discussion on the topic of Plural Property — RadicalxChange's umbrella term for Partial Common Ownership, Harberger Taxation, Self-Assessed Licenses Sold via Auction or SALSA, and Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax or COST.
NOTE: This is a regular season episode of the RadicalxChange(s) podcast. Our mini season of "A New Era of Democracy" will continue following this episode.
Links for Today’s Episode:
RxC Plural Property Concept Page
721 Labs
CityDAO
Geo Web
NiftyApes
Harberger Style Lending Auctions
Will Holley (he/him) is the founder of 721 Labs, a research and development company focused on Ethereum token standards and mechanism design. He is also the founder of CityDAO’s Network City initiative, the first IRL experiment using Partial Common Ownership, Harberger Taxes and Quadratic Funding to coordinate efficient private market funding of public goods. Will first engaged with Radical ideas and Web3 in 2020, after selling his last startup, a collectibles marketplace. A software engineer by training, Will previously worked in the fine art world, building machine learning models to predict auction results for Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Graven Prest (he/him) is an entrepreneur and mechanism designer in the Web3 space. He's the co-founder of the Geo Web project (@TheGeoWeb)—an open protocol that creates consensus for browsing digital media anchored to physical locations (i.e. geospatial augmented reality). The network protocol uses partial common ownership to administer its digital land market and fund public goods.
Kevin Seagraves (he/him) has been building in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017. He was the lead engineer of Gitcoin Grants v0, co-author of EIP-1337, and a co-founder of the ETHSecurity community. Later he went on to lead product at Charge before returning to the Gitcoin family and contributing to the Moonshot Collective and Scaffold-eth. He is now the CEO at NiftyApes, building tools for NFT traders, and is the creator of Harberger Style Lending Auctions.
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Connect with RxC:
Follow us on Twitter.
Visit our website.
Join the conversation on Discord.Episode Credits
Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced, Edited, and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.Produced by G. Angela Corpus and Aaron Benavides.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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
This episode is a continuation of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.
In today’s episode, we welcome Professor of Communications and Political Science Zizi Papacharissi who discusses her latest book, After Democracy with host Matt Prewitt. In this thought-provoking conversation, they examine how social media affects our culture, our relationships, and consequently our democratic processes, while exploring potential ways to imagine new and better forms of democracy by “living with technology, not through technology.”Zizi Papacharissi, PhD, is Professor and Head of the Communication Department, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a University Scholar at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published nine books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oculus, and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her 10th book, titled After Democracy: Imagining our Political Future, is out now, from Yale University Press.
Zizi Papacharissi’s Professional WebsiteMatt Prewitt is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Episode Credits
Originally produced by G. Angela Corpus and Aaron Benavides for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In this exciting episode, Matt Prewitt speaks with the inquisitive and captivating Christine Lemmer-Webber, who is CTO of the Spritely Institute and whose lifelong work focuses on advocating user freedom. This philosophical and technical discussion focuses on the many ways to look at ethical methods of building technology without usurping the free agency of others; a pluralistic view of examining technical design with different lenses.
NOTE: This is a regular season episode of the RadicalxChange(s) podcast. Our mini season of "A New Era of Democracy" will continue following this episode.Things Mentioned:
Spritely InstituteScheme Primer from Spritely InstituteRandy Farmer!FOSS and Crafts podcast (hosted by Christine Lemmer-Webber and Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber)The terms "context collapse" and "collapsed contexts" (the latter coined by technology and social media scholar danah boyd in the early 2000s).Neohabitat gameChristine gives a shout-out to Leilani Gilpin's paper on accountability layers (re: machine learning systems)Donate to the Spritely Institute! Funders email [email protected].
Christine Lemmer-Webber (she/they) has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. She founded the MediaGoblin project because she believes that in order to allow people to express their agency, putting networking technology in the hands of users in a way that empowers them is fundamental. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization, which as of 2020, is the most popular and widely deployed web-based decentralized social network protocol to date. Christine established the open-source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications - work that now continues here at the Spritely Institute under her guidance as CTO.Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Production Credits
Produced by G. Angela Corpus.Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, 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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
Learn more on our website: radicalxchange.org
Collaborate with us on Github: github.com/RadicalxChange
Join the conversation on Twitter: twitter.com/RadxChange
Sign up for our newsletter: bit.ly/RxCnewsletter
Relive our events on YouTube: youtube.com/c/RadicalxChange
Organize with us on Discord: bit.ly/joinrxcdiscordConnect 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) -
This episode is part of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.
Lauded poet, author, and activist Anasuya Sengupta joins Matt Prewitt on this episode to discuss the culture of Wikipedia, the embedded power dynamics of digital technologies, and how plurality plays a role in empowering the global South's presence on the internet.
Links:
State of the Internet’s Languages Report | Whose Knowledge?
State of the Internet’s Languages websiteAnasuya Sengupta (@anasuyashh) is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the minoritized majority of the world) online. She’s led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. Anasuya is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. She was a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).
Matt Prewitt (@m_t_prewitt) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.Credits
Originally produced by Aaron Benavides for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
This episode is part of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.
Rosa O’Hara moderates a discussion between Audrey Tang and Jo Guldi on Taiwan’s expeditious response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of the g0v movement, the democratic power of embracing new forms of civic technology, and more.
Audrey Tang (@audreyt) is Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation. She is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, she has served on the Taiwan National Development Council’s open data and K-12 curriculum committees and has led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey has worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”
Jo Guldi, PhD. (@joguldi) is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She has published many articles about digital history methods, participatory mapping, and the history of eviction and rent control in Britain and its empire. She is a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History, Brown University. Her latest book The Long Land War is about the definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world. She lives in Richardson, Texas.Rosa O’Hara (@RosaO_Hara) is a staff writer for Noema Magazine. She previously worked had staff jobs editing for The Washington Post and HuffPost, was a contributing reporter for Newsday (NYC), and reported for The Jakarta Globe (Indonesia). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Credits
Originally produced by Paula Berman and Rachel Knoll for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.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)This is a RadicalxChange Production.
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) -
In this conversation with James A. Evans, we examine the relationship between artificial intelligence and democracy, the tradeoffs between hybridization and speciation, and much more.
James is a professor at the University of Chicago, director of its Knowledge Lab, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of understanding. James is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and practices emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology. Still, he is also interested in other knowledge domains—news, law, religion, gossip, hunches, machine and historical modes of thinking and knowing. He supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowdsourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors (e.g., RFID tags, cell phones). He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes.
Before Chicago, he received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University, served as a research associate in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets group at Harvard Business School, started a private high school focused on project-based arts education, and completed a B. A. in Anthropology at Brigham Young University.
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) -
This episode ended up being a wide-ranging discussion that surfaced essential ideas about getting more thoughtful about the boundary between public and private power by understanding what’s infrastructure and what isn’t. The seed for this conversation was whether we should understand Google’s index of pages as a form of public infrastructure and, if so, why. This question could hardly be more relevant as public infrastructure investments dominate the conversation in the United States. But perhaps we need to broaden our view from physical infrastructure to informational infrastructure, which might indeed be even more critical.
Jo Guldi is a scholar of the history of Britain and its empire who is especially involved in questions of state expansion, the contestation of property under capitalism, and how state and property concepts are recorded in the landscape of the built environment. These themes informed her first book, Roads to Power, which examined Britain’s interkingdom highway and its users from 1740 to 1848. They also inform her current research into rent disputes and land reform for her next monograph, The Long Land War, which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control; the ideology of “squatting” in post-1940 Britain; and the creation of the “participatory map” for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.
Brent J. Hecht received a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, a Master’s degree in geography from UC Santa Barbara, and a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and geography from Macalester College. At Northwestern, Dr. Hecht holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Communication. He is the recipient of a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He has received awards for his research at top-tier publication venues in human-computer interaction, data science, and geography (e.g., ACM SIGCHI, ACM CSCW, ACM Mobile HCI, AAAI ICWSM, COSIT). Dr. Hecht also serves on the Executive Committee of ACM FAccT (formerly ACM FAT*), the premier publication venue for understanding and mitigating societal biases in artificial intelligence systems. Dr. Hecht has collaborated with Google Research, Xerox PARC, and Microsoft Research. His work has been featured by The New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and various other TV, radio, and Internet outlets.
Book links
- Algorithms of oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
- Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Credits
Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen, and Matt PrewittEditing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer MoroneIntro/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)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) -
The backstory to this episode is a lengthy research collaboration focused on how the value of data gets captured. With that in mind, how to design a tax that would fairly redistribute it. You can see the collaboration results at Datadividends.org -- a proposal for a simple, eminently implementable tax that would go to the heart of the economic distortion caused by the data economy. In this conversation with Yakov Feygin and Nick Vincent, we focus on how data and other assets get their value; compare data policy to the industrial policy of the depression era; and much more.
Yakov Feygin is responsible for developing the research plan, projects, initiatives, and partnerships for the Future of Capitalism program at the Berggruen Institute. Before joining the Berggruen Institute, Yakov was a fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and managing editor of The Private Debt Project. Yakov holds a Ph.D. in History with a focus on economic history from the University of Pennsylvania. His forthcoming book, Building a Ruin: The International and Domestic Politics of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union, will be published by Harvard University Press. He has taught courses in international political economy, money and banking, and business history and held fellowships from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Nick Vincent is a Ph.D. student in Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program and is part of the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. His broad research interests include human-computer interaction, human-centered machine learning, and social computing. His research focuses on studying the relationships between human-generated data and computing technologies to mitigate the negative impacts of these technologies. His work relates to concepts such as "data dignity," "data as labor," "data leverage," and "data dividends."
Credits
Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen, and Matt PrewittEditing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer MoroneIntro/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)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) -
Tom Atlee is the founder of the nonprofit Co-Intelligence Institute, author of The Tao of Democracy and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism, and creator of the Wise Democracy Pattern Language. He has published many articles in alternative journals, collaborated on numerous projects and books, been on several nonprofit boards, and consulted on social change projects internationally.
Born in 1947, Atlee was raised as a Quaker peace and social justice activist. On the 1986 Great Peace March, a nine-month cross-country US trek undertaken by four hundred ordinary people, he experienced bottom-up self-organization and palpable collective intelligence for the first time. This watershed experience changed his life into a search for how to evoke these collective capacities in activist groups, communities, and whole societies. Starting in the mid-1990s, his activist instincts led him to apply his discoveries to the creation of wiser forms of democracy and governance. In 2005 he began a study of evolutionary dynamics that could be used to transform social systems and is currently exploring new forms of collective sense-making and grassroots participatory democracy and economics.
Tom lives simply in a nine-bedroom, consensus-based co-op house in Eugene, Oregon, with a changing population of friends, dogs, cats, chickens, plants, books, and chores. While he spends most of his time glued to his computer, talking passionately with colleagues, or hanging out with his beloved partner, he also enjoys reading, walking, watching movies, decorating leaves, and creating poetic collages. His daughter and granddaughter live in New England.
He can be reached at [email protected]. His ideas can be explored on co-intelligence.org, tomatleeblog.com, and wd-pl.com.
An expert in the field of dialogue and deliberation, Tom has thought long and hard about the impact collective intelligence could have on democracy. His conversation with Jennifer covers several subjects, including the influence of his upbringing in the Quaker community, experiments in democratic deliberation, and how we might begin to listen to each other again during this time of extreme polarization.
Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen 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)
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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) - Show more
