Plutopia News Network

Paul Robbins: Resilience

Austin environmental activist Paul Robbins [https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-robbins-8755922a/] joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss the 2025–26 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, [https://environmentaldirectory.info/] framed around “resilience” in the wake of Winter Storm Uri [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_13%E2%80%9317,_2021_North_American_winter_storm] and recurring disasters, and packed with practical guidance on low-cost outage survival, home-scale energy and water conservation, and local food security. Paul describes the obsessive labor behind producing the first hard-copy edition since COVID, updating years of web-published reporting, editing hundreds of graphics, and synthesizing material “not reported anywhere else.” The hosts dig into systemic failures that made Uri so devastating, including inequality (wealthy residents can buy resilience, most can’t). The conversation expands to looming stresses from AI/data centers and cryptocurrency on the Texas grid, debates over dispatchable clean energy and storage beyond intermittent wind/solar (including emerging battery chemistries and geothermal “fracking for heat”), and the accelerating water crisis: groundwater competition, costly aquifer-storage schemes, and the limits of desalination and atmospheric water capture. Ultimately, Paul argues that government won’t act boldly without public pressure, urging collective local activism to demand better planning, R&D investment, conservation, and regional food production, and he closes by sharing where listeners can find the Directory in Austin. Paul Robbins: > The Directory has a chapter in it on low-cost solutions that will get you through a power outage. So, in terms of survival, that might help a bit. TI’ve written in other past directories, and this is on my website still, about alternative energy and clean energy that can be used in buildings, water conservation that can be used In homes. There’s all manner of things that can be done on an individual level. Cover of the Austin Environmental Directory [https://plutopia.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/austinenvironmental-289x300.jpg]https://environmentaldirectory.info/ The post Paul Robbins: Resilience [https://plutopia.io/paul-robbins-resilience/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Deborah Hyde: Skeptical Inquiry into the Supernatural

Deborah Hyde [https://deborahhyde.com] joins the Plutopia News Network podcast to explore why sane, rational people can sincerely report supernatural experiences — ghosts, werewolves, UFOs — without those experiences necessarily reflecting reality. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, social influence (including “mass sociogenic” phenomena), history, and folklore, she argues that anecdotes matter as human testimony but have limits as evidence because they aren’t controlled data. The conversation ranges from the many cultural uses of werewolf stories (allegory, scapegoating, witch-trial paranoia, even sympathetic tales) to Satan as a monotheistic “accounting device” for evil, and to modern belief systems like flat earth and anti-vax thinking as expressions of agency, fear, and distrust of expertise. Hyde emphasizes respectful skepticism — honoring people’s experiences while questioning interpretations — and notes how popular media reshapes folklore, why skeptics must be comfortable with ambiguity, and how studying “unreal” creatures still reveals real truths about human nature. Deborah Hyde: > We do accept that human beings have lots of very strange experiences, and let’s dig into why the experiences may not represent reality, why perfectly sane people can have these experiences. And you can have independent neurological explanations, psychological explanations. Social explanations are a huge one. There are so many examples throughout history of mass sociogenic conditions where people go through dancing manias or something like that. Social influences on people really do make a difference to their perceptions and to their behaviour. That’s the whole point of it just being somebody’s experience, because you’re not dealing with data, you’re not dealing with controlled experiments or anything like that, you are dealing with anecdotes. And anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean nothing, but there is a limit to what it means. LINKS * The Skeptic [https://www.skeptic.org.uk/] * X.com: @jourdemayne [https://x.com/jourdemayne] * Bluesky: @deborahhyde.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/deborahhyde.bsky.social] * Instagram: @deborahhydefolklore [https://www.instagram.com/deborahhydefolklore/] * YouTube: @ deborahhydefolklore [https://www.youtube.com/@deborahhydefolklore] Photo by Karl Withakay. Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0] The post Deborah Hyde: Skeptical Inquiry into the Supernatural [https://plutopia.io/deborah-hyde-skeptical-inquiry-into-the-supernatural/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

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].