In this hosts-only “Plutopians Gone Wild” episode, Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman range freely across early online culture, disaster response, politics, surveillance, AI, advertising, podcasts, and pop culture.…
Cindy Cohn joins Plutopia to discuss her new book, Privacy’s Defender, and reflects on her decades of work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from the landmark Bernstein encryption case to…
David Miles discusses his book Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold, arguing that “the common cold” is best understood as a broad category of respiratory viral illness…
Nathan Schneider joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss cooperatives, platform ownership, and the dangers of “implicit feudalism” online, arguing that many digital spaces train users to choose between powerful admins…
Dr. Edward Lenert returns to Plutopia to discuss his year-long, million-word engagement with large language models and what that experience reveals about AI, thought, trust, creativity, and danger. The conversation…
In this Plutopia podcast episode, journalist and author Helen Pearson discusses her book Beyond Belief, which traces the rise of evidence-based decision-making in medicine, government, education, conservation, and other fields,…
In this Plutopia News Network episode, science and technology journalist Tereza Pultarova discusses her path from covering space exploration to reporting on defense technology after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,…
Stephen Dulaney, a UX strategist turned AI builder, describes how losing his job pushed him to reinvent himself by collaborating with large language model–based AI agents to design, code, test,…
Paulina Borsook In this Plutopia News Network conversation, Paulina Borsook reflects on the coming reissue of her book Cyberselfish with a mix of gratitude, puzzlement, and discomfort, describing the book…
In this Plutopia podcast episode, futurist and data analyst Anne Boysen argues that today’s AI systems, especially large language models and emerging AI agents, are being adopted far faster than…
In this Plutopia News Network interview, Marc Abrahams discusses the Ig Nobel Prizes, which he founded in 1991 after becoming editor of the “Journal of Irreproducible Results.” These prizes honor…
In this Plutopia News Network episode, Jon and Scoop talk with political scholar Dr. Roy Casagranda, joining from Dubai, about Iran’s modern history, the rise of the Islamic Republic, and…
In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, we interview AI and society expert Kate Devlin about the rise of AI companions, sex robots, and the evolving relationship between…
The Plutopia News Network podcast welcomes writer, editor, and media critic Gareth Branwyn to discuss his workshop “Dreaming for Creatives,” which focuses less on dream symbolism or interpretation and more…
Shira Chess joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, arguing that online culture has always been shaped not just by code…
David Weinberger weigh AI’s real strengths, especially pattern recognition, against its major dangers: hallucinations, bias, corporate power, and energy costs.