Plutopia News Network

Johannes Grenzfurthner: Hacking at Leaves

Austrian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Johannes Grenzfurthner joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss his two new films: Hacking at Leaves, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_at_Leaves] an experimental documentary sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and rooted in the struggles of Navajo communities, U.S. healthcare failures, and hacker-led mutual aid; and Solvent, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvent_(film)] a found-footage horror film shot on his grandparents’ farm in Austria that explores buried Nazi histories and intergenerational silence. In a wide-ranging conversation, Grenzfurthner reflects on the creative processes behind both films, his collaborations with actors like John Gries, Austria’s unresolved relationship with its fascist past, and the parallels he sees between the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the United States. The discussion expands into capitalism, technology, healthcare, political polarization, and cultural memory, revealing how Grenzfurthner uses film to probe both personal and systemic hauntings—and why he believes confronting roots, not just symptoms, is essential to understanding contemporary crises. Johannes Grenzfurthner: > For people who have not seen it yet, it (Solvent) is a found footage film. So it’s a point of view. So you see it from the perspective of the main character, the expat who gets hired to look for some old historic Nazi documents in an old farmhouse. There is a character played by myself who plays the grandson of that old Nazi character, who died a couple of years, or disappeared a couple of years, before the action in the film takes place. They hire a couple of historians, kind of like a salvage operator who specialized in tracking lost, hidden goods and stuff like that. They they go through the the remnants, they go through this decrepit farmhouse, trying to find the Nazi box with all the documents that the Nazi collected back in the days during the Second World War in a Polish concentration camp — and they discover more than the documents. They actually never discover the documents, but they discover more, it’s pretty much like a Nazi demon story, and I turned my own grandfather into the Nazi demon. LINKS: * Hacking at Leaves on the Internet Archive [https://archive.org/details/hacking_at_leaves_release_version] * Where to watch Solvent [https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/solvent] The post Johannes Grenzfurthner: Hacking at Leaves [https://plutopia.io/johannes-grenzfurthner-hacking-at-leaves/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier [https://www.schneier.com/] joins the hosts to discuss his new book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780262049948] Schneier frames democracy as an information-processing system that aggregates citizens’ preferences into policy, and defines AI broadly as computer systems doing tasks once done by humans. He argues that AI is fundamentally a power-amplifying tool: in the hands of small-d democrats it can strengthen participation, transparency, and decision-making, but in the hands of authoritarians or monopolistic tech corporations it can just as easily supercharge surveillance, manipulation, and control. Throughout the conversation, he emphasizes that many fears attributed to “AI itself” are really fears about capitalism, corporate power, and concentrated ownership of technology, and he offers real-world examples where AI is already helping journalism, courts, voters, and legislatures. Rather than utopian hype or doom, Schneier advocates a clear-eyed, politics-first view: AI’s impact on democracy will depend less on the technology and more on who controls it and how we choose to govern its use. Bruce Schneier: > But what we want to say is AI is a tool. It’s a power-enhancing tool. In the hands of someone who wants better democracy, it’s a tool for better democracy. In the hands of an authoritarian, it’s a tool for better authoritarianism. And that’s what it’s going to do. And a lot of times, people confuse the evils of AI with the evils of the corporations controlling the AI. And I think that is the most important thing that I say to the people who say nothing’s good here. And you’re right, in a lot of ways, nothing’s good there. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s the fault of the monopolists. It’s the fault of Silicon Valley. It’s the fault of the white male tech billionaires. That’s where You want to address > > > > > > > LINKS: > > > * TED talk: Dustin Ballard [https://www.ted.com/talks/dustin_ballard_is_ai_ruining_music] > * Story in The Verge on Swiss model Aspertus [https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/770646/switzerland-ai-model-llm-open-apertus] > * Text of “Franchise”, [https://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/HON301/franchise.pdf] by Isaac Asimov > * DonorAtlas [https://www.donoratlas.com/] > * Albanian procurement minister Diella [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diella_(AI_system)] > > The post Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy [https://plutopia.io/bruce-schneier-rewiring-democracy/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Próspera: Governance as a Service (GaaS)

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, hosts Jon, Wendy, and Scoop talk with Próspera [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera] VP of Growth Lonis Hamaili [https://fee.org/articles/why-i-left-silicon-valley-for-a-honduran-startup-city/] and community development consultant David Armistead [https://www.thrivingbusiness.solutions/team] about Próspera, a privately managed “governance as a service” special economic zone in Honduras. Lonis explains that Próspera operates with its own autonomous legal, regulatory, and tax framework, somewhat analogous to Hong Kong or Dubai’s DIFC. It aims to attract global business, generate high-wage local jobs, and experiment with streamlined, market-driven regulation using mechanisms like insurance-based oversight and private arbitration courts. The conversation covers Próspera’s rapid growth since breaking ground in 2020, with hundreds of companies incorporated, thousands of jobs created, and a mixed public–private council that shares lawmaking power, along with revenue-sharing agreements that send a portion of tax revenue to the Honduran government. The guests also address criticisms and concerns, such as fears of deregulation, exploitation, power infrastructure, local opposition, and comparisons to micro-nations or freeports; arguing that Próspera is apolitical in practice, relies on voluntary participation, bans eminent domain, and is legally protected despite the repeal of Honduras’s ZEDE law. They close by touching on frontier ideas like longevity medicine, potential AI legal status, and possible expansion to other countries, framing Próspera as a real-world testbed for new governance and economic models rather than a fully formed utopia. Lonis Hamaili: > With Próspera we’re inventing a new industry we call governance as a service. Essentially we partner with host countries, in this case Honduras, and create these zones that have very special and autonomous laws, regulations and practices. You can think of it as a little bit like Hong Kong in China. At least as it used to be, where Hong Kong is part of China, but it has its own completely independent political and economical systems. Similarly, with Prospera here in Honduras, we have our own independent system. However, it’s privately managed, right? So we help with the governance operations which include providing the laws, the security, the justice system. Our business model is access. The post Próspera: Governance as a Service (GaaS) [https://plutopia.io/prospera-governance-as-a-service-gaas/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Jennifer Granick: Surveillance and Cybersecurity

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, [https://www.aclu.org/] about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how long-standing rules limiting government use and combination of personal data have eroded, enabling massive dossiers on citizens and immigrants built from government records, data brokers, apps, and new technologies like ubiquitous location tracking, spyware, and facial recognition. She highlights how border zones and immigration enforcement operate as Fourth Amendment “gray areas,” how ICE and other agencies exploit data broker loopholes, and how surveillance harms vulnerable people, from abortion seekers to benefit recipients wrongly flagged as frauds. The conversation also covers the politics and dangers of spyware, the importance and limits of tools like Signal, [https://signal.org/]the role of hackers and security researchers in exposing abuses, and the way popular media normalizes surveillance as necessary for safety. Jennifer closes by stressing practical self-defense steps, the need to understand one’s “threat model,” and the importance of legal and political resistance, reminding listeners that although the situation is alarming, organized pushback can still win real protections. Jennifer Granick: > I think one of the biggest new things is that the rules that we had have kind of been thrown away. There were just these expectations that data I gave to the government in order to get Medicare or in order to get food stamps or something of that nature was going to stay used for those purposes. And there are rules about how the government is permitted to combine databases of information and when it’s allowed to do that. And what we’ve seen is a complete ignoring of those rules and this amalgamation of different databases of information into a dossier of people in the country, not just people who are immigrants, but also people who have been born here and were citizens as well. And you put together all these disparate pieces of information and it tells you a lot, maybe almost everything about somebody. The post Jennifer Granick: Surveillance and Cybersecurity [https://plutopia.io/jennifer-granick-surveillance-and-cybersecurity/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Pete Cochrane: Pursuing Truth

Technologist and former British Telecom [https://www.bt.com/] chief scientist Peter Cochrane [https://cochrane.org.uk/bio/] joins the Plutopia to talk about his lifelong pursuit of truth and his work on a “truth engine” that used AI to grade the reliability of news sources and authors. Cochrane argues that real truth is hard, costly, and collaborative — unlike social media, which feeds users comforting falsehoods that match their worldview — and warns that losing a shared grip on truth threatens civilization. Drawing on his career in communications, AI, and cybersecurity, Peter explains how he boosted lie detection rates by tracking sources over time, factoring in bias, and adding linguistic and psychological analysis, pushing accuracy toward 95%. The conversation widens into science as an ongoing search rather than final certainty, the distortions of corporate media, the risks and inevitability of AI-driven systems like driverless cars, and his own experiment living with AI-assisted hearing. Throughout, Cochrane stays optimistic but insistent on building human and machine ethics, noting that technology should be judged by whether it improves on fallible humans and helps us keep truth at the center of society. Peter Cochrane: > Truth is very expensive. It costs you a lot of time, energy, concentration. You have to have these inner arguments. You have discussions with other people and you gradually zero down to an opinion based on the facts. Whereas on Facebook it is easy. You you just believe it. And it’s so outrageous — that it fits your world model. That’s the worst aspect. The whole of social media is tuned to your social or world model, and they just feed you the stuff that reinforces your belief system. I think that can be said of most religions, they do the same thing. Uh they feed you the story from being a child continually till it becomes perfect. The post Pete Cochrane: Pursuing Truth [https://plutopia.io/pete-cochrane-pursuing-truth/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].