PopTech Blog

PopTech 2017: Instigate is honored to introduce an extraordinary group of speakers who make a habit of challenging the status quo.

Please welcome Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and author of You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen; Sarah Lacy, founder and CEO of Pando, an investigative journalism outlet, and Chairman Mom, a mommy-war-free community for professional moms; Dan Ariely, professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke and founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight; Marika Anthony-Shaw, former violinist/violist of Grammy-winning Arcade Fire and founder of Plus 1; Duff McDonald, financial journalist and author of The Firm and The Golden Passport; Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families; Kevin Poulsen, award-winning journalist, one-time hacker and author of Kingpin — How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground; and Amar Bakshi, founder and creative director of Shared Studios, an art, technology and design collective that enables members of diverse communities to interact across great distances.

Grab your ticket. Sharpen your debate skills. Defy complacency. It’s time to explore what’s possible!

Two weeks ago we revealed PopTech 2017: Instigate as well as a few of the many speakers who will be joining us in Camden this October. Stay tuned for our next speaker announcement in mid-May!
 
Planning to join us? We’re now over 60% sold out and tickets will increase from $1,750 to $2,000 starting this Monday, May 1. Grab yours before it’s too late! 

Last week we unveiled PopTech 2017: Instigate, where we will explore the actions, responses and movements shaping our future. We are honored and delighted to have Moran Cerf return as our esteemed host. A few of the many speakers who will be joining him on stage include Rukmini Callimachi, NYT correspondent covering Al Qaeda and the Islamic State; actor and director Mark Duplass; Natalia Oberti Noguera, CEO and Founder of Pipeline Angels; and Abdul El-Sayed, candidate for Michigan governor. The instincts of our curatorial team are setting the tone for what promises to be the most provocative PopTech in our history. More speakers to be announced in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

We’re thrilled to announce that we’re over 50% sold out. Tickets are $1750 through April 30. Beginning May 1, tickets will be available at $2000.

Did you know we offer group packages? Over the last few years, this has been a wildly popular offering that has contributed significantly to PopTech’s unique sense of community. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us. (FYI - These packages can represent an average savings of $500 per ticket. They also give you an excuse to book an amazing house rental.)

Don’t miss out! There’s no longer room for complacency, only possibilities. Come join us and be part of the solution.

Photo: Roman Boed, Creative Commons License  

Inspire. Motivate. Take action.

The last decade has brought shifts of epic proportions across social, cultural and political realms. It is time to translate our emotional reactions to progress and adversity into positive action. PopTech: Instigate will guide you to understand and participate in communities from the influential to the incendiary, the persuasive to the provocative. There’s no longer room for complacency, only possibilities.

Join us October 19-21 in Camden, Maine for our 21st annual gathering. Bring your determination, spirit, and appetite for debate and discussion. Additional speakers will be announced over the coming weeks. Tickets are $1750 through April 30 and will increase to $2000 beginning May 1. Space is limited so secure your spot today!

This contributed article was originally published on Thrive Global. 

Though mobile phones have reached the hands of 6 billion people of a global population of 7 billion, and Internet access has reached nearly 4 billion, the new technology revolution is neither global nor cross-cultural. But as I argue in my just-released book, Whose Global Village?, we can re-think technology to support diverse cultures by working directly with these communities to design, develop and imagine new possibilities. The book tells stories of my collaborations with Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples in Mexico, activists in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, and rural communities in India to describe an Internet that is written in the image of many rather than few.

Global village — An unfulfilled dream
The Internet was mythologized to bring the world together, yet the ways we are connected are defined by a limited number of elites rather than the diverse cultures and communities that now use digital technology. Hence, the dream of the ‘global village’ is left unrealized because those who designed new technology’s networks, infrastructures, and browser platforms originate from the wealthiest cities, nations, universities and corporations in our world.

Today, when we go online what we see and experience both isolates and connects us. We see social media posts and web pages produced by others but fail to recognize how the selection of these are curated by algorithms. We are also divided along linguistic and cultural lines, most notably from Chinese language websites and social media platforms, such as Wechat. On top of this, the Internet’s very infrastructures, the fiber optic cables that run underneath the world’s oceans, reinforce relationships of inequality, which can be seen for example in the relatively few connections in the image below between the continents of South America and Africa.

The Internet’s Fiber Optic Cables: Revealing Relationships of Inequality

While we the Internet’s users may be distributed across the world, the power over who owns, profits and designs most of the systems we use remains concentrated amongst a few incredibly wealthy corporations that own, manage, and manipulate different networks by which users are connected. From mobile telephony to social media, it is those at the top of the economic pyramid that benefit from the data provided by users located across the world. With the notable exception of China, these corporations are located in Europe and North America, with various collaborators and subsidiaries across the world.

With over 1 billion users each, we mistakenly treat commercial platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google today as if they are public spaces, ignoring that they must remain primarily accountable to their shareholders as for-profit companies. Engineers and designers within these companies, rather than their diverse users, are given great power in shaping how these tools are developed and the agendas they serve.

And now we are in a strange moment, where a wave of right-wing populist movements across the world have brought to power leaders who have benefitted from the ways in which search and social media platforms alike have placed their users in bubbles of fragmentation. The attacks on corporate, popular, and independent news media by new leaders such as Donald Trump speak to an attempt to do away with older broadcast media platforms in lieu of the ‘personalized’ social media and search platforms of today.

Bottom-up first
99% of the world’s population is thus excluded from decisions made around the future of the Internet and digital technology. Billions of people in this manner are treated as passive users. Their creativity and agency is restricted to adapting, appropriating, or hacking technologies that already exist. Despite promising movements in free software and open source, even many first-world technology users are expected to comply with platforms that gather and monetize data for their creators. If these users choose not to use these systems, they may face other inequalities because so many political, economic, and social operations have moved online.

Re-imagining technology
My just-released book argues that we must think about what digital technologies, such as the Internet, mobile phones, or social media platforms, may mean when re-imagined from the perspective of diverse cultures and communities across the world. We can think of interfaces for systems that work with the metaphors and literacies of users, for example supporting communities whose languages are oral, rather than written.

For example, we can develop interfaces that promote oral communication, which is so important to many speakers of indigenous languages. The much higher adoption of mobile phones, which are now in the hands of 6 billion people, compared to text-based web technology speaks to the potential of these tools to empower languages that are less written than spoken. It is also a reminder of the powerful role of community radio across the world, as a cheap, oral, easily repairable technology that can be administered by its users.

We can think about design approaches that shape how information is circulated and shared in ways that are consistent with diverse cultures and communities that have begun to use Internet technologies. This could involve giving users some power over what information is shared with whom, what data goes into the ‘cloud’ and for providing communities with different types of accounts based on the standing an individual user has within the larger group.

We can give user communities power over how information they access or share is represented via databases. While we never ‘see’ these fundamental building blocks of technology, users must be made more aware of how their information is stored and retrieved. We must, therefore, open up to users more flexible and fluid models that give them power over how the information they share with one another or the larger digital world is represented and classified.

Finally, and very timely at this time, is the critical importance of opening up the ultimate black box of personalization and search algorithms that drive Google and Facebook. An algorithm is merely a sequence of actions performed on some body of information. We can develop algorithms that better resonate with the traditions and practices of diverse cultures and communities, and make them more transparent to diverse users so they have choice and power over the systems that serve them.

With the concerns some have around where the Internet has gone, and the understanding that the newest technologies of our time can better support democratic visions of social and economic justice, it is time to embark on a future where technologies serve a range of visions, values, and purposes that diverse communities hold and not just those of networked elites across the world.

By Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, author of Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World. (February 2017). Reprinted with Permission from NYU Press. You can follow Ramesh on Twitter @rameshmedia.

This post was authored by 2013 Bellagio/PopTech Fellow Patrick Meier and was originally posted on WeRobotics. Patrick is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of WeRobotics, which scales the positive impact of humanitarian aid, development and environmental projects through the use and localization of appropriate robotics solutions.

The Amazon is home to thousands of local indigenous communities spread across very remote areas. As a result, these sparsely populated communities rarely have reliable access to essential medicines and public health services. Local doctors in the region of Contamana report an average of 45 snakebites per month and no rapid access to antivenom, for example. We recently traveled to the rainforest to learn more about these challenges, and to explore whether cargo drones (UAVs) could realistically be used to overcome some of these problems in a sustainable manner. We’re excited to share the results of our field tests in this new report (PDF); Spanish version here. For high-resolution photos of the field tests, please follow this link. Videos below.

Our cargo drone flights were carried out in collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health and local doctors. The field-tests themselves were coordinated by our local WeRobotics lab: Peru Flying Labs. Anti-venom was flown from the town of Contamana to the more remote village of Pampa Hermosa about 40 kilometers away. A regular boat (canoe) takes up to 6 hours to complete the journey. Our drone took around 35 minutes. 

At night, we flew the drone back to Contamana with blood samples. While cargo drone projects typically use very expensive technology, WeRobotics prefers to use affordable and locally repairable solutions instead. Behind the scenes footage of the actual cargo drone flown in the Amazon is available in the video below.

Thanks to the success of our first drone deliveries, we’ve been invited back by the Ministry of Health and local doctors to carry out additional field tests. This explains why our Peru Flying Labs team is back in the Amazon this very week to carry out additional drone deliveries. We’re also gearing up to carry out deliveries across a distance of more than 100km using affordable drones. In parallel, we’re also working on this innovative Zika-control project with our Peru Flying Labs; drawing on lessons learned from our work in the Amazon Rainforest.

We’ll be giving a free Webinar presentation on all our efforts in Peru on Wednesday, February 22nd at 11am New York time / 4pm London. Please join our email-list for more information.

To support our local Flying Labs teams in Peru, Nepal and/or Tanzania with donations, kindly contact Peter Mosur (peter@werobotics.org). For media inquiries on the Amazon Rainforest project and WeRobotics, please contact Dr. Patrick Meier (patrick@werobotics.org). Ministry of Health officials and other local partners are also available for interviews.

This post was authored by PopTech 2016 speaker Scott Goodstein. It was originally shared in a recent Revolution Messaging email blast. Scott is the CEO of Revolution Messaging, the progressive left’s leading digital firm recently known for developing the digital strategy and operations for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Last night, President Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary withdrew his nomination after losing support from Senators on both sides of the aisle. Daily Action helped connect over 35,000 calls to Congress to fight the nomination.  

Less than two months after the launch of Daily Action, 230,000 people have signed up to get daily texts and make calls to fight against Trump’s extremism.

Two weeks ago, Daily Action connected 120,000 calls from activists, averaging 24,000 calls per day. Just last week we shared that there were 537,626 connected minutes to date. Today, we hit 1,030,000.

Powered by our Revere suite of tools, Daily Action uses Calling, Mobile, Direction and Landing technology to mobilize progressive activists across the country. It’s the same calling technology that drives White House Inc.

Daily Action has been bombarding Congressional offices and filling up voicemails — and lawmakers are taking notice. Already, Republicans have walked back their plans to gut the Congressional ethics office and delayed the confirmation hearings of dangerous cabinet nominees.

But these wins are not enough. Together, we will keep fighting against extremism, one call at a time. Our team will continue to provide discounted best-in-class calling technology to the progressive resistance.

Thank you for all that you have done — and all you will do — to organize against hate. 

In Solidarity,
Scott

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we rounded up a handful of PopTech talks that take on mysteries and questions about love, marriage, and infidelity. Enjoy! 
 
In conversation with Moran Cerf, psychologist Esther Perel (PopTech 2016) exposes the fascinating nuances of success, failure and the constant evolution of human partnership. 

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher (PopTech 2014) teaches us a thing or two about the science behind attraction and how and why we fall in love.

Professor and author Stephanie Coontz (PopTech 2009) explores our notions of love, marriage, and where it's headed as an institution.  

Photo: Franck Mahon via Creative Commons

This post was written by Leila Janah, a 2010 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow. It was originally shared in an LXMI email blast. Leila is the Founder and CEO of Samasource and LXMI. You can follow her on Twitter @leila_c.

I've tried to avoid commenting too much on Trump's election to avoid demonizing Republicans and people in my network who support him.

But at a certain point, policy transcends politics. No one can avoid speaking out against Trump now that he's made our country hostile to immigrants, refugees, and people of diverse faiths.

President Trump's ill-conceived ban on refugees and immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries attacks the rights of legal US residents and heightens, rather than reduces, the risk of radical Islamic terrorism.

The immigration ban pits America against our allies and lowers our standing in the world, making our companies less competitive (Google cofounder Sergey Brin went to SFO to stand with protestors) and destroying our reputation as a progressive business leader attracting the world's top talent.

Halting the US refugee program puts tens of thousands of lives in needless peril. As it is, we admit far fewer refugees than much smaller countries, like Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, and Kenya.

Refugees are not free-loaders seeking to cause trouble. Refugees are Holocaust and genocide survivors, victims of extreme religious and political persecution, and families broken by violence.

We are a nation whose strength comes from our compassion and diversity, whose core philosophy welcomes the many waves of immigrants who have always made our country great.

We are not Trump. We are not hate, bigotry, and persecution. It is our collective obligation to do whatever we can to ensure that religious diversity and our (relatively tiny) refugee program aren't sacrificed for the political purposes of an increasingly erratic leader.

Hours after the #MuslimBan, a mosque was set on fire in Texas and thousands of people had flooded into US airports to protest the immigration ban. Is this "making America great again?"

If you're as appalled as I am, take action now in two ways:

1. Donate to the ACLU which funds legal campaigns to protect the fundamental rights Trump threatens. If you can't donate, follow the ACLU and share their content across your social networks. Entrepreneurs Tony Fadell and Chris Sacca have pledged to match donations up to $100K if you tweet them your receipts.  

2. Subscribe to the New York Times and uphold solid reporting of these issues. President Trump has repeatedly bullied journalists and attacked the Times. Truth matters.

We are all complicit in this if we don't take a stand. Let's fight for the America we believe in.

Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images 

This post is contributed by Asi Burak and Laura Parker. Their new book, "Power Play: How Video Games Can Save the World" is now available. 

The year he turned 30, the prolific comic book artist Art Spiegelman embarked on his most ambitious project yet. He figured the best artists die young, so he’d better put his remaining time to good use. “I needed to justify being alive,” he said recently, speaking on the phone from his studio in Manhattan.

In 1986, Spiegelman published the first volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, tackling a subject that’s almost impossible to address even in more traditional art. The comic book chronicles the experiences of Spiegelman’s father, a Polish Jew, from the years leading up to World War II through his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, and (non-Jewish) Poles as pigs.

Spiegelman’s expectations were low. Most of the publishers he’d approached had rejected the work, writing long and thoughtful responses with the same bottom line. Finally, Pantheon Books agreed to publish the book, but not before they advised him to go and hide somewhere in the countryside and avoid reading reviews. But they needn’t have worried: the response to Maus was thunderous. Since then, it has sold over a million copies in the US alone, and been translated into 30 languages. Spiegelman went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards. Suddenly, PhD students around the world were writing academic papers on Maus.

Slowly, comic books began to shift from the pulp fiction shelf to non-fiction, even politics. People began to refer to comic books as “graphic novels.” Works like Palestine, Persepolis, From Hell and V for Vendetta were celebrated as ushering in a new era for the artform. It became fashionable to read comic books on the subway.

Although there are many parallels, the cultural popularity of video games has spread much faster than that of comic books. In 2015, New York’s Madison Square Garden hosted its first video game tournament in front of 20,000 attendees; Amazon bought the live-streaming video game service Twitch for $970 million; and leading museums from around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Smithsonian in Washington D.C., added video games to their permanent collections.

Contemporary video games no longer fit into a handful of prescribed genres—shooters, adventure games, role-playing games, and so on. We have blockbuster mobile games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush. We also have independent games, innovative projects that subvert popular gaming genres by feeling artistic and even personal: among them, Braid, Journey, Gone Home and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead. 

But to us, there is no genre of games more compelling than ‘games for change’: those created not simply to entertain, but to incite positive social change and help solve the thorniest problems in the world. 

We were mostly impressed and excited by the pioneers behind these games—designers, scientists, journalists, even a former Supreme Court Justice. Their work has addressed a broad range of pressing issues, from global conflict resolution and women’s rights to cancer.

And yet, despite this momentous progress, it’s not uncommon to hear people dismiss video games as hopelessly violent, as just for kids, as a bad influence and a giant waste of time.

What we’ve aimed to do is settle this debate once and for all. Can we tell the powerful stories of these pioneers and capture some of the ups and downs that come with the journey? Can we put together the definitive historic record of these innovators’ work, how they persevered to remake the medium, and in turn paved the way for a new generation of designers to take the reins?

As part of our research we focused on:

• Raising awareness and learning: Video games that aim to enhance our understanding of the world around us and of each other. When done well, games of this type are not didactic or preachy. 
• Global issues: the growing popularity of games targeted at specific social issues around the world—women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, for example, or high rates of pregnancy-related deaths in India.
• Science and medicine: how video games can advance science or solve acute scientific or medical problems through innovative approaches like crowdsourcing or neuroscience. 
• The future: the promise of virtual reality to generate empathy with unprecedented immersion.
• Creating games: why the next generation of game makers think of coding and game design almost as a second language. 

These are not normal times. People are growing skeptical about the real impact that digital technologies are having, and the role of media in our lives. We find that instead of healing divides, the current political discourse is fractured and constrained to silos and echo chambers. Instead of fulfilling the promise of the internet, wide access to information helps to amplify propaganda and non-vetted reports. The same tools that seemed so revolutionary when they were first introduced are now being utilized to misinform and blur the facts.

What we want to offer at this time is hope: that video games could actually foster our ability to understand and relate to perspectives of people different from ourselves. We are able to demonstrate with evidence and research, as well as compelling stories, that video games could be very different than their common perception in our society–they could be an incredible force for good.

So: don’t turn your console off and go to bed. Sit up and play.

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Based on the introduction to Power Play by Asi Burak and Laura Parker. Copyright (c) 2017 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press.