City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Goethe Institut San Francisco, The MIT Press, and Centre for International Security Studies at University of Sydney present

For The Protection of All Beings: An inquiry into advancing technologies and their consequences and possibilities

Saturday, October 7 and Sunday October 8, 2023. Events will be both virtual and onsite between 12 pm – 8 pm Pacific Standard Time each day.

Following in the conceptual footsteps of City Lights’ Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a pacifist journal produced in the 1960’s, this weekend symposium considers the intersection of advanced technologies and their effect upon culture and the environment. What happens when quantum computing, AI, advanced robotics, nanotech, biotech, info networks, and internet of things collide with the political sphere? What are the benefits and the hazards of these high levels of interconnectedness? The event encourages a deep inquiry into what kind of a society we are creating and offers room for thinking critically about our relationship to technologies and their effects upon the environment. Who do technologies serve? Does bias in the development of technologies primarily serve its corporate arbiters? How do we encourage cultural diversity when thinking about new and emerging technologies? Is a more fluid ontology necessary in the way we think about how technologies are utilized? Is it time for a renaissance and reemergence of “Open Source”? In the wake of San Francisco attempting to develop a “killer robot” program for its police department and a deluge of self driving cars which have pitted City government against corporate interests, is it time to develop a Declaration of Human Rights regarding technology in the advent of quantum computing and its future marriage with AI? In this event, we will bring together artists, poets, scientists, and theorists to explore these issues through lectures, panel discussions, workshops, film screenings, and exhibits.

With appearances by Celia Aragon, Meredith Broussard, Finn Brunton, Marina Cogan, James Der Derian, Jairus Grove, David J. Gunkel, Jonathon Keats, Marina Kogan, AX Mina, Ramesh Srinivasan, Fred Turner, Wendy Wong, and Xiaowei Wang. – All events are free. Registration is required.

Watch Trailer Here

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Opening Statement – (Virtual) 11:45 am Pacific Time / 2:45 pm Eastern Time

Peter Maravelis (City Lights) and Bettina Wodianka (Goethe Institut San Francisco)

Session One (Virtual) 12:00 pm Pacific Time / 3:00 pm Eastern Time

Jairus Grove – Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need a device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.

In Savage Ecology, Jairus Grove offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet’s trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

Jairus Victor Grove is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Hawai‘i Research Center for Future Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Session Two (Virtual) 1:15 pm Pacific Time / 4:15 pm Eastern Time

Finn Brunton – On the Threshold of the Spam Epoch

This talk looks at a confluence of current, cutting-edge technologies — large language models, generative AI, engagement metrics, algorithmic curation, among others — alongside business models and cultural and political forces, to make the case that we are crossing the threshold into the epoch of spam as one of the dominant forces in digital culture. Looking back — all the way back to Turing’s collaborators in the 1950s, through the development of mass computing and the internet, to the present ad-driven platform moment — we can see our future, and plan to avert it.

Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT, 2013) and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton, 2019), and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (with Helen Nissenbaum, MIT, 2015) and Communication (with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, meson press and University of Minnesota, 2019).

Session Three (Virtual) 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time / 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time

Fred Turner – Seeing Silicon Valley: the Place, not the Myth

Since the earliest days of the public internet, pundits and marketers have promised that digital media would help us build a new and better society on an imaginary electronic frontier. No matter how obviously false it may be, that myth still blinds many to the kind of world that technology industries have built on the ground in Silicon Valley. This talk will explore that world through the lives of some the region’s uncelebrated local residents. Their experiences, it concludes, reveal the kind of society toward which we may all be hurtling – a society playful and precarious, with an economy open to all, but on radically unequal terms.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. He continues to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe.

Session Four (Live at the Kanbar Forum, The Exploratorium, Pier 15, San Francisco, CA 94111-1455) Doors 6:00 pm / Lecture 6:30 pm Pacific Time

Ramesh Srinivasan – Technologies of Life: Embracing the Interconnections between People, Beings, Past, Present, and our Dreams (A Live Workshop)

REGISTER HERE

It seems like today is a time of anxiety and perpetual crisis – one shock after another producing a numbing effect – with an effect of supposedly greater fragmentation and alienation . From the profiteering versus suffering associated with COVID-19 to the false choices offered between neoliberalism and neofascism, we live in a time where it has become easy to assume that conflict, opposition and apathy if not perceived ill will (from others) are here to stay. In-group/Out-group binaries proliferate across media, old and new, and models such as game theory have only increased in their supposed salience to describe choices and behavior.

A huge aspect of the dawn of such thinking can be tied to digital technologies that target us as psychographic and data-bodied *individual* subjects. These are systems that monetize and support the most powerful investors and execs on our planet while leaving the rest of us to live in bubbles of hysteria, facilitated by dopamine-inducing algorithms that choose the sensational and outrageous. These borders don’t just lie with social media, which has come to take over our news, telephone and media networks, but also in AI systems and invasive biometric technologies that fragment us based on traumas of the past, inducing racist, sexist, classist, and geographic forms of division.

Yet is such the inherent destiny of technology, let alone our people and planet? Is this what technology truly is, let alone has been? It need not be, Ramesh Srinivasan argues, through examples he provides from around the world along with philosophical and conceptual tools that re-imagine systems of all kinds, recognizing that another world is not only possible, it is already here.

This Talk/Workshop paves the way for new sociotechnical utopias that ask us to question what it means to be human and more importantly alive, and whether we can truly develop relationships with one another (humans and non-humans) based on mutuality and the underlying spirit and belief that we are all in this together. Far from starting and ending in the domain of speculative theory, Ramesh Srinivasan will share numerous examples that point a path forward toward interbeing and interconnection; one that celebrates rather than eradicates or obfuscates different ways of knowing, being, and believing.

Ramesh Srinivasan speaks about the intersection of technology, innovation, politics, business, and society. He is a leading voice pointing the way toward a digital world that supports democracy, economic security and business interests. He blends his skills as a leading academic, author, engineer, social scientist, storyteller, policy adviser, and thought leader to shine a light on how technology and innovation, from all quarters and countries, will make a balanced world possible, for all. His mission is to help repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet. He is the author of the books: Beyond the Valley, Whose Global Village?, and After the Internet.

Session 5 – (Live at the Kanbar Forum, The Exploratorium, Pier 15, San Francisco, CA 94111-1455) 8:00 pm Pacific Time

James der Derian in conversation with Jonathon Keats – War and Peace in the age of Quantum Mechanics

Featuring a special film preview of segments from “Project Q: War, Peace and Quantum Mechanics”.

REGISTER HERE

An investigation into the geopolitical and societal implications of quantum innovation in computing, communications and artificial intelligence. As governments, corporations and universities pour funds into quantum science, and breakthroughs in quantum technology gather pace, important questions about the reality of a quantum future remain unanswered. How will quantum technologies change the world? What is the ‘quantum race’? Who is winning and who is losing? How can the nuclear arms and space races help us understand the quantum race? What are the risks and benefits of quantum innovation to global peace and security? In an increasingly interconnected world can quantum theory provide new models for global politics?

James Der Derian is Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies. HIs research and teaching interests are in international security, information technology, international theory, and documentary film. He is author most recently of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2009) and Critical Practices in International Theory (Routledge, 2009), and co-editor with Costas Constantinou of Sustainable Diplomacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He has produced three film documentaries with Udris Film, Virtual Y2K, After 9/11, and most recently, Human Terrain, which won the Audience Award at the 2009 Festival dei Popoli in Florence and has been an official selection at numerous international film festivals. His most recent documentary, Project Z: The Final Global Event (co-produced with Phillip Gara), premiered at the 2012 DOK Leipzig Film Festival. He is also author of On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement and Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War; editor of International Theory: Critical Investigations and The Virilio Reader; and co-editor with Michael Shapiro of International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics. His articles on international relations have appeared in the Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Affairs, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Harvard International Review, Millennium, Alternatives, Cultural Values, and Samtiden. His articles on war, technology, and the media have appeared in the New York Times, Nation, Washington Quarterly, Global Agenda, and Wired.

Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He is currently a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, an advisor in metadisciplinary studies at the University of Zurich, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and Flux Projects. He co-directs the Interspecies Justice Working Group at Colby College and the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Cultural Heritage. As an artist, he is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. A monograph about his work, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag.

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Session Six – (Virtual) 11:00 am Pacific Time / 2:00 pm Eastern Time

David J. Gunkel – Person, Thing, Robot : A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond

This talk explores why robots defy our existing moral and legal categories and how we may need to revolutionize the way we think about them.

Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are technological artifacts—and thus, things. On the other hand, they seem to have social presence, because they talk and interact with us, and simulate the capabilities commonly associated with personhood. In Person, Thing, Robot, David J. Gunkel sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, Gunkel argues for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new moral and legal ontology for the twenty-first century and beyond.

David J. Gunkel is Presidential Research, Scholarship, and Artistry Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University and Professor of Philosophy at Lazarski University in Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of Robot Rights, Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix, and The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (all MIT Press).

Session Seven – (Virtual) 12:00 pm Pacific Time / 3:00 pm Eastern Time

Wendy H. Wong – We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age

Our data-intensive world is here to stay, but does that come at the cost of our humanity in terms of autonomy, community, dignity, and equality? In We, the Data, Wendy H. Wong argues that we cannot allow that to happen. Exploring the pervasiveness of data collection and tracking, Wong reminds us that we are all stakeholders in this digital world, who are currently being left out of the most pressing conversations around technology, ethics, and policy. This book clarifies the nature of datafication and calls for an extension of human rights to recognize how data complicate what it means to safeguard and encourage human potential.

As we go about our lives, we are co-creating data through what we do. We must embrace that these data are a part of who we are, Wong explains, even as current policies do not yet reflect the extent to which human experiences have changed. This means we are more than mere “subjects” or “sources” of data “by-products” that can be harvested and used by technology companies and governments. By exploring data rights, facial recognition technology, our posthumous rights, and our need for a right to data literacy, Wong has crafted a compelling case for engaging as stakeholders to hold data collectors accountable. Just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights laid the global groundwork for human rights, We, the Data gives us a foundation upon which we claim human rights in the age of data.

Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs. To learn more about her work visit her website.

Session Eight – (Virtual) 1:00 pm Pacific / 4:00 pm Eastern

Panel Discussion – Humans in the Digital Future – Moderated by Wendy H. Wong with Cecilia Aragon, Meredith Broussard, Marina Kogan, and Fred Turner

An acceleration of advancing technologies permeates our lives. As they intersect, inequity and a violation of basic human rights becomes of utmost concern. This panel asks the question: How we need to be thinking about our relationship to the digital? What would constitute a kind of “Biil of Human Rights” allowing us to become “stakeholders” in the development and deployment of advancing technologies vs passive spectators. Each of the panelists arrive to this discussion with their own unique thinking about the subject.

Cecilia Aragon is the director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on enabling humans to explore and gain insight from vast data sets. This emerging field, known as human-centered data science, is situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and data science/artificial intelligence.

Data journalist Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.”

Marina Kogan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her research interests are in Crisis Informatics, Social Computing, and Network Science. Specifically, she studies how people coordinate, self-organize, collectively problem-solve, and form communities online, especially in the high-tempo, high-risk environment of crisis. More broadly, she is interested in how social media platforms — as both complex and sociotechnical systems — affect and are affected by social behavior.

Session Nine – (Virtual) 2:15 pm Pacific / 5:15 pm Eastern

AX Mina and Xiaowei Wang – Dreaming Up The Tech We Want: A hands-on tarot workshop from Five and Nine

Why:
Tech and tarot might seem like polar opposites — the rational vs the spiritual, the logical vs emotional, yet Silicon Valley has been predicting futures for a long time now. Silicon Valley’s power lies in its ability to storytell and give shape to the future through creating visual language, vocabulary and archetypes. We see ourselves as many of the archetypes that Silicon Valley creates — the charming CEO to the introverted engineer.

Tarot functions similarly. For example, the entrepreneur as The Magician tarot card giving VCs a performance to remember, or delving into the power hungry world of the The Devil card. As a tool, tarot is a powerful mixture of myth, story, ideology and possibility. In this workshop we’ll create and shape the visual language of the future we want to see, outside Big Tech, together, using tarot.

Main workshop activity:
Lecture on tarot and tech, followed by a hands on virtual activity, creating new tarot cards that reflect the tools and ideologies of the tech we want to see in the world. Attendees will use the provided materials to make their own tarot cards either in small groups or individually.

AX Mina (aka An Xiao Mina) is an author, artist and futures thinker who follows her curiosity. She co-produces Five and Nine, a podcast about magic, work and economic justice.

Xiaowei Wang is a technologist, a filmmaker, an artist, and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. They are working toward a PhD at UC Berkeley, where they are a part of the National Science Foundation’s Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century Research Traineeship. They are the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and other stories of tech in China’s Countryside published by FSG Originals x LOGIC.

Five and Nine Futures is a research, design and strategy consultancy that helps mission-driven organizations and individuals build better futures through the lens of work, care and magic. We have run futures innovation workshops for hundreds of people in venues like Unfinished, NEW INC at the New Museum, The Shipman Agency and re:publica Berlin. With more than 40 years of combined experience in technology, organizational strategy and management, and thought leadership, co-founders AX Mina, Dorothy R. Santos and Xiaowei R. Wang support individuals, SMEs, startups, non-profits and major corporations alike through strategic consulting, executive coaching and design innovation.

Session Ten – (Live at The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, 94103) 4:30 pm Pacific

Jonathon Keats – Deep Time Photography for Future Generations

What will San Francisco look like in a century? Will the city still be inhabited? How will the flora and fauna of California change with the changing climate? In this workshop, you’ll make a camera with a 100-year-long exposure time, allowing future generations to observe the impact of the decisions people make today, and encouraging the present generation to consider the long-term wellbeing of the natural and built environment.

About Jonathon Keats

Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities.

He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes.

He is currently a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, an advisor in metadisciplinary studies at the University of Zurich, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and Flux Projects. He co-directs the Interspecies Justice Working Group at Colby College and the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Cultural Heritage.

As an artist, he is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. A monograph about his work, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag.

Session Eleven – (Live at The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, 94103) 6:00 pm Pacific

Finn Brunton – Understanding Obfuscation: Surveillance, Escape, and Making Noise (A Live Workshop)

This workshop introduces the community to the concept of obfuscation in digital surveillance, and its relationship to other anti-surveillance, privacy-protecting techniques. We will look at a variety of examples of how signals have been concealed in noisy data from technology to art and nature, explore practical applications, and consider the implications and the moral questions of deliberately obscuring our own data with plausible nonsense.

Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT, 2013) and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton, 2019), and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (with Helen Nissenbaum, MIT, 2015) and Communication (with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, meson press and University of Minnesota, 2019).

Session Twelve – (Live at The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, 94103) Time 7:30 p.m.

Closing Panel – Navigating the Complex Tapestry of Technology and Society – with Finn Brunton, Jonathon Keats, and Nina Dewi Toft Djanegara. Moderated by Bettina Wodianka

How does the historical evolution of technology inform our present and future, and what lessons can we glean from its ever-changing narrative? In envisioning technology as a powerful tool for positive societal change, what concrete actions and initiatives hold the potential to shape a more equitable and inclusive future? Amidst our hyperconnected world, what are the broader implications of technology on issues such as privacy, ethics, and democracy, and how can we navigate these multifaceted challenges? How do art, philosophy, and interdisciplinary approaches expand our perception of technology’s role in shaping our world, and what new insights and possibilities emerge from these intersections?

Join us for the closing panel of “For The Protection of All Beings,” where we embark on a profound exploration of the intricate relationship between advanced technology and society. The panel discussion aspires to catalyze a transformative discourse that transcends the boundaries of conventional thinking. Drawing upon their diverse expertise in philosophy, technology, and ecology, the panelists aim to forge a visionary path forward. They seek to inspire innovative solutions and ethical frameworks that harness the power of emerging technologies to safeguard and nurture all forms of life on our planet, and thereby paving the way for a more balanced and resilient future for all beings.

Nina Dewi Toft Djanegara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was formerly the Associate Director of the Technology & Racial Equity Initiative at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, where she oversaw programming, research, and strategic development on technology and racial justice. Her own research examines the use of facial recognition to govern U.S. borders and interrogates the sociocultural significance of the face as a symbol. In particular, she draws upon an ethnographic and archival methods to understand how facial recognition technology makes claims about identity, citizenship, and belonging.

Dr. Bettina Wodianka holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from University of Basel and is Curator at the Goethe-Institut San Francisco. She studied theatre science, literature science and psychology at the LMU Munich. From 2011 to 2016, she was a researcher at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel, and a doctoral candidate in the Swiss National Science Foundation‘s graduate study program Intermedial Aesthetics. She initiated and curated projects and artistic interventions at the intersection of technology, science and art, most recently the interdisciplinary initiative C/Change investigating how emerging technologies, when imbued with intentional design, can open up new channels for cross-cultural connection in a changing world.

This series is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/

Saturday, October 7, 2023, 12:00 pm PST

For The Protection of All Beings: An inquiry into advancing technologies and their consequences and possibilities – Day One