Denizen

Our guest for this episode is Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party, a platform for young adults who have lost someone close to them. The Dinner Party now operates in over 100 cities around the world and has been featured in media outlets such as NPR, CNN, and the New York Times. Carla is also a designer, facilitator, and strategist whose work brings creativity, joy, and connection to the roots of our most intractable problems. She is also currently writing a book called Renegade Grief.

In this episode Jenny and Carla discuss:

• Carla's experience losing her father [4:53]
• Jenny's reflections on losing her parents [8:37]
• Grief, public heath, and policy [13:43]
• Grief vs. trauma when someone close to you dies [16:00]
• Lessons in self-compassion [18:23]
• The impact of the decline of religion on grieving [21:34]
• Death and forgiveness [22:06]
• The Dinner Party and its learnings [25:44]
• The importance of community and relationships as a foundation for systems change [33:20]
• Grief and growth [38:36]
• Accepting death and living intentionally [41:46]
• Discomfort with difficult emotional experiences [46:29]
• Interconnection and grief [47:17]
• Carla's upcoming book, Renegade Grief [53:22]

Resources

• The Dinner Party
• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, Martin Prechtel
• The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, Mary-Frances O'Connor
• Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush
• I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
• Limitless with Chris Hemsworth (final episode is about death)
• Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth, Margaret Klein Salamon

In this episode we're exploring a foundational topic: trust. Our guest Davion Ziere, known as Zi, has been thinking deeply about this topic for years. He's even written a yet to be published book on it. Davion is co-director of Mobius, founder of an online community marketplace called Origyn, a recording artist, and student of many indigenous traditions. This is the first of a two part series exploring Zi's work.

In this conversation Jenny and Zi touch on:

• Trust and grief [2:54]
• Defining trust [5:31]
• Trust in pre-modern cultures [8:10]
• Learning from Zi's study of indigenous groups in Hawaii, Peru, and the Amazon [13:30]
• Why trust is a root issue to address [17:00]
• Trust of self [19:59]
• Defining self worth [26:09]
• Restoring trust and the importance of truth [30:04]
• The importance of listening [41:51]
• The first law of thermodynamics [44:05]
• Zi's values around trust [45:47]
• Moving from transaction to trust [56:08]
• Redefining ownership [57:26]

Resources

• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life, Fernando Flores and Robert Solomon
• The Truth about Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More, David DeSteno

We all know about all the things that are wrong with social media as we know it. It's a model where everything is centralized and the market dynamics foster very few competitors who just get bigger and have more power. Who builds? Who governs? Who owns? Where are the servers? Where do the applications sit? Where does the data live? It's largely in just a few companies that in many cases have walled gardens of content. This dominant model yields a tremendous centralization of power for tech executives who are incentivized by market dynamics, to grow and to extract and to capture more and more of our attention. So, how do we get ourselves out of this mess? Does the answer lie in decentralized social media?

Our guest for this episode is Evan Henshaw-Plath, veteran Silicon Valley engineer and CEO of Planetary, a decentralized social network.

In this episode we cover all things decentralized social media, including:

• The story of Twitter's "original sin" where it abandoned a federated model for a centralized one [4:14]
• A framework to think about decentralization across the Internet and social media [12:22]
• Distinctions between web3 and the dWeb (decentralized web) [15:18]
• What a protocol is, why it’s a core element of decentralized social media, and the current landscape of protocols [15:33, 23:37]
• Architecture and design considerations at protocol vs. app levels [28:39]
• Big debates in the decentralized social media space [31:31]
• Issues with blockchain based solutions [36:28]
• Evan’s vision for decent social media and what he’s up to with his startup, Planetary [38:56]

Resources:

• Denizen's writeup on decentralized social media
• Planetary's homepage
• Evan's homepage
• What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good: A TED Talk by Eli Pariser
• ‍My first impressions of web3: by Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal
• The Battle for the Soul of the Web, The Atlantic Oct 2022
• dWeb principles‍
• ‍Web3 is Self-Certifying: by Jay Graber, the CEO of Twitter's spinout Bluesky

In this episode Jenny sits down with Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall, founders of the Game B movement, to understand it's history and main tenets. Jim and Jordan have thought deeply about many facets of the Denizen inquiry, this conversation dives into many core concepts related to social and institutional redesign.

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• The genesis of Game B [3:05]
• Defining complexity science [4:04]
• Epistemology and epistemic modesty [5:26]
• Jim's original paper the Root Doc [5:49]
• The Stanton meetings and establishing a political party [7:01]
• Evolving from The Emancipation Party to Game B [9:06]
• Defining Game B [12:23]
• The dissolution of the original Game B cohort / shifting to "spore mode" [12:38]
• Main tenets of Game B [16:02]
• Design and design principles [23:04]
• Collective intelligence and technology in Game B [24:23]
• Governance, scale, and Dunbar's number [28:55]
• The importance of protocols [36:56]
• Game A's scaling advantage and self terminating nature [38:40]
• Upgrading humans in Game B with psycho technologies [42:42]
• Where Game B is now [52:20]
• How a Game B transition might take place [1:00:27]
• The relationship between theory and practice [1:03:39]
• Permaculture vs. Game B [1:11:13]
• The Circular Economy vs. Game B [1:12:04]
• Game B and Economic Growth [1:13:32]

Resources

• The Game B wiki
• Rebel Wisdom episode "The Story of Game B"
• The Jim Rutt Show
• Game B Facebook group

This episode comes along side of the launch of Tobias Rose-Stockwell's book Taming The Outrage Machine: How Technology Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy -- And What We Can Do About It. Tobias is an author, designer, and media researcher who has been working at the forefront of this topic for many years.

By investigating media's role in information flows throughout history, Tobias' book brings clarity and fresh insights to the role social media plays in society today. In this conversation Jenny and Tobias distill the book's most salient points for the Denizen audience.

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Outline of the discussion:

• The role of outrage in democratic governance [4:00]
• Technological disruptions and the dark valley [10:04]
• Martin Luther and the printing press [10:52]
• The impact of the first advertising based newspaper [14:04]
• The advent of modern journalism [18:16]
• The relationship between distribution costs and editorial incentives [22:10]
• Television and the impact of repealing the Fairness Doctrine [23:45]
• The role of human psychology and cognitive biases [27:17]
• The three design features that changed everything: the algorithmic feed [31:09]
• The three design features that changed everything: social metrics [33:54]
• The three design features that changed everything: the one click share [37:13]
• Economic incentives and multi-polar traps[41:47]
• The role of government and design vs. content level regulation [43:41]
• Hope from a historical example: radio [48:54]
• Intervention points: the individual [53:52]
• Intervention points: social media platforms [56:06]
• Intervention points: policy [59:57]
• A word of caution about decentralized social media [1:01:41]
• The speed of technological progress vs. the speed of regulatory response [1:03:10]

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