The Open Internet Closes
Synthetic Society
This week Tom Ascott talks to Max Beverton-Palmer, Director at the Internet Policy Unit at Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The pair discuss the idea of an open internet and how cooperation can secure its future as well as how tech companies should regulate hostile governments and organisations online and finally end up discussing is Twitter should be subsidised!
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Toxic Femininity
Synthetic Society
Welcome back to Season Two of Synthetic Society! To kick us off host Tom Ascott speaks with Nona Willis Aronowitz about femcels. FemCels, short for female incels, are women unable or unwilling to have relationships due to a mix of societal pressures and misogyny. The conversation draws on Nona's article 'The Femcel Revolution'.
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Colonialism, Connected
Synthetic Society
Kerryn Gammie and Tom Ascott discuss how archaic, colonial power structures have survived and turned into neo-colonialism, and how those structures continue to be pervasive online.
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Instagram Insurrection
Synthetic Society
Ben Decker, Founder and CEO of Memetica, talks to host Tom Ascott about the perils of misinformation on social media, if the Taliban should be allowed to have a Twitter account, and what the future of content moderation looks like.
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Diversity Equals Resilience For NATO
Synthetic Society
Tom Ascott speaks to Giedrimas Jeglinskas, NATO Assistant Secretary General, and former Vice-Minister of Defence of Lithuania.
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India's Innovative Data Unions
Synthetic Society
Can we make our data stronger, safer, and more secure by pooling it together? This week Tom Ascott speaks to Astha Kapoor, Co-Founder and Director of the AAPTI Institute in India.
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Time For The Timeline
Synthetic Society
What is time? This week Tom talks to Emily Thomas, a philosopher of time and travel, about how time and technology interact. They discuss how the timeline affects how we perceive time, if going on Twitter is like going on holiday, and the different ways technology might let us have experiences outside of time.
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Robot-Tinted Glasses
Synthetic Society
This week Tom explores how robotics and AI is changing our moral beliefs and practices with John Danaher.
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For the Needs of Society
Synthetic Society
This episode Tom speaks to Areeq Chowdhury, the founder and director of WebRoots Democracy. WebRoots was a think tank focused on progressive and inclusive technology policy which ran for almost seven years.
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Behave Yourself!
Synthetic Society
As the ways in which we can interact virtually increase, so do the ways that we can become victims of harassment. In video games, we need to design systems that help fight problematic and toxic behavior while still supporting a competitive atmosphere.
info_outlineIslamophobia has been wielded as a weapon to draw support from right wing actors as well as to disenfranchise Muslim populations.
In this episode Zahed Amanullah, a Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explains how Islamophobia has been refined, amplified and duplicated into a process that is being used globally.
He and host Tom Ascott also touch on how governments can build trust in minority communities, conspiracy theories and if social media platforms are directly profiting off of hate speech.