RadicalxChange Replayed – Détails, épisodes et analyse

This is the audio version of RadicalxChange and Serpentine Arts Technologies' latest white paper titled Rethinking Art Ownership: Partial Common Ownership as a Step Towards a More Symbiotic Ecosystem.

Through a collaboration between Serpentine Arts Technologies and RadicalxChange Foundation, it was written by Paula Berman (RxC), Victoria Ivanova (Serpentine), and Matt Prewitt (RxC).

This episode was narrated, co-produced, and audio engineered by Aaron Benavides and produced by G. Angela Corpus.

This audio version is a RadicalxChange Production.

In this exciting and inspiring talk, Professors Charlotte Kent and Fred Turner discuss the great potential art holds in creating shifts in the public consciousness through examples of historical art movements, art’s impact on technology and society at large, and its effective way of communicating democratic ideals.

They also cover the background and process behind Fred's latest book "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America", a collaboration with notable photographer Mary Beth Meehan. 

This episode was originally produced for the 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.

Speakers

Charlotte Kent
Charlotte Kent, PhD (@Lucy2Scribbles) is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University and an arts writer. Her work theorizes how visual and linguistic rhetorical devices constrain what we see by exploring their historical and political context. Her current research investigates the absurd in contemporary art and speculative design. She writes for academic journals (Word and Image, Leonardo, Journal of Visual Culture, etc) and general audience magazines (Art Review, BOMB, Wired, among others), with a monthly panel and column on Art and Technology for The Brooklyn Rail, where she is also an Editor-at-Large. Prior to academia, she developed education for the eyecare industry and managed an art school located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center, St. John’s College, and Philips Academy Andover. She currently lives in New York City.

Fred Turner
Fred Turner (@fturner) is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley;  The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties;  From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

This is a RadicalxChange production.

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George Floyd's death has shocked the world and sparked an uprising across the US. This is a discussion around response and reactions to the moment and probing for a way forward.

 Speakers 

Brianna Agyemang is the renowned co-founder of #TheShowMustBePaused​ & The Brownie Agency. Agyemang is also Sr. Artist Campaign Manager at Apple’s artist-services division, Platoon. 

Ahmed H. Ahmed is the Director, Partnership & Professional Learning at Overcoming Racism. He facilitates race and equity professional development and provides coaching and support for partner organizations while expanding its scope and impact. A Boston University alumnus, Ahmed taught middle school mathematics, science, and reading in Atlanta, GA, before beginning his teacher coaching and development career. Ahmed received his certification from the Center for Transformative Teacher Training (CT3) as a Real-Time Teacher Coach (RTTC), implementing specialized intervention strategies to support teachers in developing strong skills and mindsets around classroom management and culture through a lens of cultural competency while coaching school leaders in the development and implementation of school-wide visions for culture. 

Jessica Lynch is a founding partner at Generation Titans, a social impact firm with a race and equity lens. At Generation Titans, Jessica has worked with organizations like American Eagle, Girls Who Code, Ben & Jerry’s, and Google on community engagement strategies and DEI efforts.

Moderator

Jermaine Johnson is a manager and producer at the Beverly Hills-based 3 Arts Entertainment. Jermaine represents a wide variety of writers, directors, journalists, and comedians from many different backgrounds. Amongst these clients are Attica Locke (award-winning author of BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD), Azie Dungey (UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT, SWEETBITTER, TWENTIES), Cord Jefferson (WATCHMEN, SUCCESSION, THE GOOD PLACE), Fatimah Asghar (BROWN GIRLS, IF THEY COME FOR US), Eve Ewing (IRONHEART, ELECTRIC ARCHES), JUSTIN HILLIAN (THE CHI), JIA TOLENTINO (TRICK MIRROR) and more. He prides himself on finding fresh voices in places where others don’t often look and giving them a platform to share their unique points of view and opinions. 

Land has been central to economic inequality for centuries. Today, we sometimes see homeownership as a path to the middle class, but it is important to see how this particular asset still drives inequality. This panel discusses the past and present of ideas like Henry George's land value tax, hoping to draw lessons for the real economy. 

Speakers

Jo Guldi is a scholar of the history of Britain and its empire who is especially involved in questions of state expansion, the contestation of property under capitalism, and how state and property concepts are recorded in the landscape of the built environment. These themes informed her first book, Roads to Power, which examined Britain's interkingdom highway and its users from 1740 to 1848. They also inform her current research into rent disputes and land reform for my next monograph, The Long Land War, which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control, the ideology of "squatting" in post-1940 Britain, and the creation of the "participatory map" for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.

Alisha C. Holland is an associate professor in the Government Department at Harvard University. She studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of large-scale infrastructure projects.

Moderator

Matt Prewitt is RadicalxChange Foundation’s president, a writer and blockchain industry advisor, and a former plaintiff's side antitrust and consumer class action litigator and federal law clerk.

Look at any review of the past decade, and you will find Bitcoin standing strong as the one experiment that defined information technology for the past ten years. Such is its global relevance that 2019 marked the first time both the President of the United States of America and the President of the People's Republic of China referred to blockchains directly in their words. While Mr. Trump praised the US Dollar might serve as the leading global reserve currency, President Xi arguably contributed to hit the market hard when one of his speeches about blockchain technology inadvertently prompted BTC to go from a monthly low to a monthly high in less than one hour. Searches for the word "blockchain" on WeChat went from a 750,000 daily average up to 9 million, impacting bitcoin's price on a 42% upward rally. The day Xi spoke was precisely 24 hours after Mark Zuckerberg testified to the US Congress on his corporate cryptocurrency's merits, Libra. The growing geopolitical relevance of these networks is hard to deny. This talk will cover how cryptographic protocols will impact democracy in the coming decade.

SPEAKERS

Santiago Siri is the founder of Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by Y Combinator and Templeton Foundation, building open source censorship-resistant digital democracies. Also, co-founder of Partido de la Red, a political party that ran for elections with candidates committed to people's wants in 2013. Partner of Bitex.la, leading bitcoin exchange in South America operating from Buenos Aires since 2014. Author of "Hacktivismo," published in 2015 by Random House. Argentine.

Steven McKie is a crypto veteran of 8 years, now Managing Partner of Amentum Capital. Previously Head of Growth and Product Content at Purse, he expanded Purse's operations with value-added partnerships in multiple regions globally and assisted in building out the bcoin developer team and support team. McKie also hosts and edits BlockChannel, a podcast and educational publication focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum and recently assisted with launching the Handshake public blockchain. He received his BSBA in Information Systems & Technology at Old Dominion University in '14.

One promise of civ-gov tech is that it helps optimize democratic government, particularly in the cities where most people live. This panel explores how well that promise is being kept and how to improve things if it's not.

SPEAKERS

Amanda Brink is a Wisconsin-based political operative with over 12 years of experience in the field. A utility infielder, happy to assist with campaign management, overall strategy, fundraising, organizing, operations, compliance, digital, press, training, recounts, logistics, advance, and more. Former O.F.A., H.F.A., Tony for WI, Burns for W.I., Dems in Philly, D.N.C., WisDems, Raj for Madison, and more. Currently working for Organizing Empowerment, helping organizations put relationships back into organizing.

Michelle Kobayashi M.S.P.H. is the Senior Vice President for Innovation for Polco/National Research Center. She began her career as a research analyst for the City of Boulder in 1989 and then helped to found National Research Center (N.R.C.) in 1995. Michelle has 30 years of experience conducting research, surveys, and policy studies for local, state, and federal government. She has authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books on research techniques and trained hundreds of government and non-profit workers on evaluation methods, survey research, and uses of data for community decisionmaking and performance measurement. Last year, N.R.C. and Polco, a tech company providing a digital engagement platform, merged, creating new opportunities for Michelle to modernize her survey work and the methods she uses to bring residents and stakeholders' voices into local governing.

Micah L. Sifry is the Founder and President of Civic Hall, curator of the annual Personal Democracy Forum, and editor of Civicist, Civic Hall's news site. From 2006-16 he was a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found. Micah currently serves on the boards of Consumer Reports and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Civic Tech in the Global South (co-edited with Tiago Peixoto) (World Bank, 2017); A Lever and a Place to Stand: How Civic Tech Can Move the World (PDM Books, 2015), with Jessica McKenzie; The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) (OR Books, 2014); and Wikileaks and the Age of the Transparency (OR Books, 2011). In 2012, Micah taught "The Politics of the Internet" as a visiting lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School. From 1997-2006, he worked closely with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization focused on comprehensive campaign finance reform, as its senior analyst. Before that, Micah was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years. He is the author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America(Routledge, 2002), co-author with Nancy Watzman of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), co-editor of Rebooting America, and co-editor of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991).

MODERATOR

Joel Rogers is the Sewell-Bascom Professor of Law, Political Science, Public Affairs, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directs COWS, a national resource and strategy center on high-road development that also operates the Mayors Innovation Project, State Smart Transportation Initiative (with Smart Growth America), and ProGov21. Rogers has written widely on party politics, democratic theory, and cities and urban regions. Along with many scholarly and popular articles, his books include The Hidden Election, On Democracy, Right Turn, Metro Futures, Associations and Democracy, Works Councils, Working Capital, What Workers Want, Cites at Work, and American Society: How It Really Works. Joel is an active citizen as well as an academic. He has worked with and advised many politicians and social movement leaders and has initiated and helped lead several progressive N.G.O.s (including the New Party [now the Working Families Party], EARN, W.R.T.P., Apollo Alliance [now part of the Blue Green Alliance], Emerald Cities Collaborative, State Innovation Exchange, and EPIC-N (Educational Partnership for Innovation in Communities Network). He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 living Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.

In 2020, ideological conflicts reached a fever pitch, and the media landscape has become extraordinarily disorienting. Are we simply heading into a more fragmented era? This panel aims to find the light at the end of the tunnel, discussing all kinds of approaches to discover common ground for a more nuanced and vital politics. 

SPEAKERS 

Paula Berman is a researcher and builder at the intersection of technology and democracy. She is a founding member of Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by Y Combinator and Templeton World Charity Foundation, building open-source censorship-resistant digital democracies. 

Jennifer Lyn Morone is the RadicalxChange Foundation CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience about technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as The Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer. 

Mark R. Reiff is the author of five books, including In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization (Cambridge University Press, 2020); On Unemployment, Volume I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has taught political, legal, and moral philosophy at the University of Manchester, the University of Durham, the University of California at Davis, Sonoma State University, and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Before returning to academia in 1998, he was a practicing lawyer, representing clients in commercial litigation matters for many years. In 2008-09 he was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. His current book project is called The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism. Abstracts of all his work, plus excerpts from his books, samples of his papers, and more, are available on his website: www.markreiff.org. 

MODERATOR 

Leon Erichsen is an entrepreneurship and technology evangelist at RadicalxChange Foundation, a nonprofit organization building next-generation political economies. Previously, he has worked as a venture analyst for the Blockchain Labs of Accelerator Frankfurt, a crypto-focused go-to-market program for early-stage startups. He graduated with the Class of 2020 in Management, Philosophy & Economics (B.Sc.) at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, where he directed the student initiatives FS Blockchain and FS Model United Nations.

Quadratic Funding powers Gitcoin Grants, an application that has become a "Significant Pillar of the Ethereum Ecosystem," according to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Learn about the why, the how, and the what behind Gitcoin Grants and Gitcoin's plans to take Quadratic Funding mainstream, with a QF application that will help local downtowns recover from COVID-related economic distress.

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin.co -- a blockchain-based network for growing open-source software with incentivization mechanics. He has a BS in Computer Science, ten years of engineering leadership experience in startups and Open Source Software, and is a community organizer in the Boulder Colorado Tech Scene. Kevin believes strongly that Open Source Software Development should be sustainably funded. Gitcoin a one-stop-shop that gives Software Developers the skills & connections to survive and thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem. You can find out more about Gitcoin at https://gitcoin.co and Kevin at https://owocki.com

Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, & the Settling of Unpayable Debts, 2020, is Max Haiven's most recent publication to date. Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of 'ordinary' structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge. Its expression is found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence, and the relentless degradation of common life. In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of 'surplus populations' worldwide, and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts – both as reparations owed and as a methodology of oppression. For this conference, Marc Garrett, co-director of Furtherfield (UK), interviews Max Haiven about his book discussing how its themes, ideas, and social contexts, relate to our everyday and cultural experiences and what this means.

SPEAKERS

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences. He is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014). His latest book, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization, was published by Pluto in Fall 2018. His book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts will appear in May 2020.

Marc Garrett is co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the arts collective Furtherfield, beginning on the Internet in 96. Furtherfield has two physical venues, a gallery and a Commons lab, both situated in the park, in Finsbury Park, London. Co-founder DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, an arts, blockchain & web 3.0 technologies research hub for fairer, more dynamic & connected cultural ecologies & economies now - http://decal.is/ Has curated over 50 contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, projects nationally and internationally. Curated the renowned major exhibition Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century, at Laboral, Spain. Main editor of the Furtherfield web site. Written for various books and articles about art, technology and social change. Two key Furtherfield publications include co-editing of Artists Re:Thinking Games with Ruth Catlow and Corrado Morgana 2010, and recently on Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain with Ruth Catlow, Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner 2017. State Machines: Reflections & Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, & Art. Edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2019. Will be publishing another book in 2020 called, Frankenstein Reanimated: Conversations with Artists in Dystopian Times. Just ended his Phd at the University of London, Birkbeck College.

Radically rethinking property rights has always been a core part of RadicalxChange’s mission. Outdated models of owning versus renting land or holding stock in a company have created many societal problems. In this panel, we will hear from several entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers building new kinds of communities. Common to all panelists is a desire to unlock new types of human prosperity by moving past outdated models of ownership. 

SPEAKERS 

Mathew Dryhurst is an artist and researcher based in Berlin Germany. His research focuses on technical and ethical protocols. He makes music and creates art with Holly Herndon, and their albums PROTO and Platform (4AD) have provoked international critical acclaim. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Strelka Institute and European Graduate School. He previously served as Director of Programming at Gray Area in San Francisco. Most recently, Dryhurst co-founded the podcast series Interdependence alongside Holly Herndon. 

Joeri Torfs is the Operational Director of the Quality of Life World Foundation Joeri is driven by knowledge and learning, his allergy to rules and authority made him choose to become an entrepreneur. He found his true calling in software development. He enjoys finding and building structures from chaos and challenging the status quo. His purpose is to free humanity from the enslavement of society by building and using systems, frameworks, and tools capable of converting human intuitive participative and collaborative energy into constructive outcomes. He’s convinced that together we can increase our quality of life by accepting life's challenges, building trust, letting go of control and rely on frictionless participation and collaboration in a framework that evolves with societal needs.

MODERATOR

John Surico is a journalist and urban planning researcher. His reporting can be found in The New York Times, CityLab, VICE and numerous other outlets, where he primarily writes about cities, transit and open space. Previously, he was a research fellow at Center for an Urban Future, a leading think tank in New York, and taught undergraduate journalism at NYU. He is currently pursuing an MSc at University College London's The Bartlett in Transport and City Planning. He is based in Oxford, UK.