Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences

Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences

Former SXSW co-president and chief programming officer Hugh Forrest joins Plutopia to reflect on nearly four decades helping shape South by Southwest, [https://sxsw.com] its growth alongside Austin, and the challenges of scaling creative communities without losing authenticity. Forrest discusses how SXSW succeeded by bringing diverse creative people together, but also how rapid growth created problems of cost, accessibility, logistics, and community displacement. Now leading Gather and Grow Experiences, [https://www.gatherandgrowexperiences.com/] he advises organizations to build meaningful, locally grounded, face-to-face experiences that prioritize quality over quantity, reflect their host communities, and foster human connection in an increasingly digital, automated, and politically fragmented world. Hugh Forrest: > The most successful events and experiences — again, I like the word experiences more than events, as much as I use the word events — are very much a reflection of the local community that they’re in. And certainly, I think what we found with South by Southwest when we tried to do these events in other markets, was that you couldn’t treat this as a franchisable cookie cutter approach if it was going to be successful. If we’re going to do an event in Blank-blank city that’s going to be successful, it really has to reflect the the values, the the strengths, the interests of that particular city. So I don’t know that there’s a playbook on that. If anything, the playbook is reflect where you are. The post Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences [https://plutopia.io/hugh-forrest-growing-experiences/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!

In this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/] discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and evolution of cryptography. He also shares advice from his new book Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/]: keep software updated, use two-factor authentication—especially on email and financial accounts—and rely on a password manager to avoid password reuse. Steve Bellovin: > I think the most important things you can do are keeping your software up to date and using two-factor authentication. Especially on the most important accounts, and that especially includes your email account. Which other than maybe your bank account is your most important password, most important account, because it’s used to reset all of your other passwords. So two-factor authentication, keeping your software up to date, and, given reality, probably you should use a password manager because you cannot keep track of a hundred or more strong (I’m not fond of that word) different passwords. Password reuse is a much greater sin than a quote weak unquote password. LINKS * Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/] * “Netnews: The Original Story” [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/netnews-hist.pdf] * On the Early Days of Usenet: The Roots of the Cooperative Online Culture [https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/534] VIDEO ON YOUTUBE The post Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked! [https://plutopia.io/steven-bellovin-dont-get-hacked/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence

Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780861549887] Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storytelling over scientific nuance, while commercial incentives increasingly shape what health advice reaches the public. The conversation explores the erosion of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of health influencers and wellness marketing, the promises and pitfalls of patient empowerment, the quantified-self movement, GLP-1 drugs, and the growing role of AI in medicine. Throughout, Cohen emphasizes the challenge of navigating a digital health ecosystem where expertise competes with attention, commercial interests, and algorithmic amplification, leaving patients to determine whom—and what—to trust. Deborah Cohen: > Obviously, you want to sell newspapers — if you’re a mainstream media, you want to get eyeballs on the screens. But this is all monetized on social media. So if you have a video that goes viral, you potentially stand to gain financially. Also, a lot of influencers work with companies for product placement, to advertise products. And there’s a massive market in healthcare. So there was one study that suggested — and this is a couple of years old, it’s a US study — that there’s over 3 million health providers on TikTok alone. So, We’re getting our information from people very much with a commercial incentive to sell. VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: The post Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence [https://plutopia.io/deborah-cohen-bad-influence/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Patient Power in the Age of AI

Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language models in healthcare, including hallucinated scientific references, poor interoperability, rare-disease knowledge gaps, and the need for patient-directed AI rather than institution-controlled systems. The conversation frames AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a cognitive aid that can help patients, caregivers, and communities ask better questions, validate information, and regain power in a broken healthcare system. Gilles Frydman: > How do we find ways to? Help people who are not trained as scientists to get the latest scientific information so that they can get the best care in case they get diagnosed with serious stuff. Hugo Campos: > How much agency do I have, and how much agency? does AI give me? And I put AI in these two different categories that tend to be opposing in terms of agency, which are what I’ve been calling institutional. AI versus patient directed AI. Dave deBronkart: > My best talks have been entirely about the trajectory of empowerment. Not specific to healthcare, but empowerment in general through the last half century and how access to information alters that. LINKS * Society for Participatory Medicine [https://participatorymedicine.org] * Collaborative Healthcare Action Measurement Platform (CHAMP) [https://participatorymedicine.org/champ/] * Gilles Frydman at LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillesfrydman/] * Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology: A New Skill for Patient Empowerment [https://nam.edu/perspectives/critical-ai-health-literacy-as-liberation-technology-a-new-skill-for-patient-empowerment/] by Hugo Campos and Liz Salmi * e-Patient Dave: Democratizing Healthcare [https://www.epatientdave.com/] * Patients Use AI (Substack) [https://patientsuseai.substack.com/] VIDEO FROM OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL: The post Patient Power in the Age of AI [https://plutopia.io/patient-power-in-the-age-of-ai/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Plutopia Tribal Chat

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. They reflect on the early internet’s topic-centered communities, The WELL, AOL, Genie, ham radio, and the cooperative spirit that emerged during crises like the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, contrasting that with today’s tech-bro bunker mentality and surveillance economy. The conversation moves through Flock license plate readers, Ring doorbells, AI-generated video captions, offshore Chinese data centers, Texas precinct organizing, robocalls, streaming ads, listener-supported media, and podcast sponsorships before veering into favorite shows and films, including Decoding the Gurus, The White Canon, The X-Files, Dune, Star Trek, Nope, and Project Hail Mary. The episode works as a loose, funny, and occasionally cranky Plutopia roundtable about how technology, media, politics, and culture have changed since the dial-up days—and whether any of it still leaves room for community, trust, and good conversation. The post Plutopia Tribal Chat [https://plutopia.io/plutopia-tribal-chat/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].