Free Forum Q&A: JARON LANIER, Author of WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?

Written on November 26th, 2013
lanier-who  

 

Aired: 11/24/13

After its recent IPO, Twitter is valued at nearly $25Billion. Now what is Twitter? Millions of tweets created and shared by users plus some ads. But how many users get a piece of that $25Billion? Well, none.

Where would Facebook be without Friends? What would Twitter, Amazon, Yelp, and any network whose value is based on our data, be without us – sharing photos and feelings, making purchases, registering opinions. More than programming or advertising, TV has always been about selling our eyeballs. Likewise, today’s online giants are selling our visits, our clicks, our shares.

JARON LANIER, in his new book, WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?, writes: “At the height of its power, Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. Today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography is Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

He believes the emerging business model in which companies with relatively few employees profit off the participation of all of us, could doom any hope of a rebirth of the middle class. Lanier wants to solve a problem not many are talking about, and he envisions a radical solution — “a highly humanistic economy – one that will reward people for the valuable information they share with networks and the companies that control and profit from them.

www.jaronlanier.com

 

Free Forum Q&A – DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Author of The Bully Pulpit Roosevelt vs Robber Barons

Written on November 19th, 2013
DKG-TBP  

 Aired: 11/17/13

The gap between rich and poor is huge and growing…legislative stalemate paralyzes the country…corporations fight federal regulations…the influence of money in politics is greater than ever…new inventions speed the pace of daily life.

Sound familiar? Those headlines from the early 1900s set the scene for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book The Bully Pulpit-a history of the first decade of the Progressive era – a time when courageous journalists and an ambitious president took on the Robber Barons – the 1% of their day – and won.
Goodwin tells the tale through the long friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft – a relationship that serves both until it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that cripples the progressive wing of the Republican Party and helps elect Woodrow Wilson.

 

Getting equal billing in her account is the golden age of journalism led by the muckraking press at McClure’s magazine. Together a bold and progressive press and a strong and progressive president served the people of the US rather than the super wealthy and the corporations. What lessons can we learn to help us turn this country around a century later?

www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com

 

Free Forum Q&A- THE SQUARE, Sundance Audience Award Winning Documentary re Egypt’s revolution(s) JEHANE NOUJAIM, Director KARIM AMER, Producer KHALID ABDALLA, Participant

Written on November 13th, 2013
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d? Even more, how have they felt?

 

Aired: 11/10/13

How much do you know about what has taken place in Egypt since the start of 2011? Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of August 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. But what have these events evolved on the ground? Even more, how have they felt?

I saw a film recently that answers some of those questions – not literally. Too much has happened too fast to do that. This is not a look back, not an expert analysis. The documentary, THE SQUARE, puts you in Tahrir Square as revolution swirls around you. From the overthrow of a 30-year dictator, through military rule, and culminating with the forced military removal of the Muslim Brotherhood president in the summer of 2013, the film follows a handful of Egyptian activists as they battle leaders and regimes, and risk their lives to build a new society of conscience.
I have the privilege of speaking with three of the principals involved in the making of the film and the revolution — JEHANE NOUJAIM, Director, KARIM AMER, Producer, and KHALID ABDALLA, participant.
 


How much do you know about what has taken place in Egypt since the start of 2011? Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of August 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. But what have these events evolved on the ground? Even more, how have they felt?

Free Forum Q&A – JAY HARMON, Author of THE SHARK’S PAINTBRUSH: How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

Written on November 5th, 2013
JH-Shark  

 Aired: 11/3/13

 

Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.

After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as
we can from what works?

This week’s guest, JAY HARMON is doing just that, translating nature’s lessons and models into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. He’s the author of THE SHARK’S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. I believe biomimicry – a way of looking and working and designing – has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. I find this one of the most exciting developments in the world at this time.

 

www.thesharkspaintbrush.com

www.paxscientific.com

 

 

Free Forum Q&A- ANDREW BACEVICH, author of BREACH OF TRUST: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Written on October 7th, 2013

 

breach-bacevich  

 Aired: 10/06/13

 

 

Aired: 10/06/13

What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to “support the troops?” If you’re like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, “Yeah, how? Where?” In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that’s flying over Pakistan or Yemen? 

Today’s guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don’t matter. 

The United States has been “at war” for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened between America’s soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an “abstraction” and military service “something for other people to do.” 

In his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of privatecontractors unable to achieve victory.