Episode description

Playing for Team Human today is technology and society researcher Molly Sauter. Molly will be helping us see how stupid some “smart city” visions really are. Molly and Douglas discuss the extractive, “mining ethos” of the tech investment swarm, and how this mentality does harm to communities from Silicon Valley to Toronto, Canada. Is your city the next VC Guinea pig in the technocratic experiment to grow cities and extract their value?

Check out Molly’s fantastic book on another type of “swarm”: The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Swarm-Hacktivism-Disobedience-Internet/dp/1623564565

Plus their most recent writing referenced on today’s show: 

Why is Anyone Listening to Tim O”Reilly? 

And Google’s Guinea-Pig City 

Support Molly’s work at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oddletters

Douglas opens the show with a monologue on the perils of futurist thinking and its inherent linear conception of progress. Is it time to retrieve a circular, more presentist understanding of the world? 

Stay tuned for tickets and announcements on our first Team Human live show in New York, June 21st at Alchemist Kitchen.

You can sustain this show via Patreon. And please leave us a review on iTunes.

This show features intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. Mid-way you heard music clips from TH friends and guests R.U. Sirius and Stacco Troncoso

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes. Visit teamhuman.fm for more!

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