The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge body of instructional videos available at low or zero cost on YouTube and sites like Khan Academy.Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider, added 31 million new users in 2020, compared to just 8 million new users in 2019. The second-place MOOC provider, edX, added 10 million users in 2020, twice the number of new students who joined the year before. Evidently, millions of students of all ages want to use their stuck-at-home time to learn something useful.But how effective, really, are online course materials? How do MOOCs fit in with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And what do K-12 schools and institutions of higher education plan to do to incorporate elements of online learning into their curricula and meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences after the pandemic passes?This week we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of its most popular MOOCs. Together with co-author Luke Yoquinto, Sarma published a book last August called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.Though it was written before the pandemic hit, the book offers a timely look at how educators at the K-12 and university level could make smart use of technology to build a new, broader educational pipeline that's more user-friendly and open to millions more people. Sarma says that will mean implementing more of the learning tricks researchers already know about, such as spaced repetition and interleaving, and finding better ways to scale up the coaching and contextual learning that are so effective in in-person settings like MIT's famous 2.007 robot competition.For a transcript and more details and links, see our full show notes at http://www.soonishpodcast/408-technology-and-educationNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Soonish

Technology and Education After the Pandemic

In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago. during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total solar eclipse that sliced across the continent on August 21, 2017, I had a couple of other unplanned adventures. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I unintentionally got conscripted as a fake Confederate soldier in a bizarre reenactment of Pickett's Charge. I also met a few of the Black residents of Future City, Illinois, who helped me understand the irony of the town's name.  I tried to wrap it all together in a way that grappled with the political moment—immediately after the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia—while still recognizing that there are moments we're granted a larger perspective, perhaps none grander than a solar eclipse.Music by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Lee Rosevere, and Tim Beek.Full episode details at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/201-shadows-of-august

"We've Needed Something to Bring Us Together"

In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker of your digital existence. But today we live, more or less, in the world Cooper conceived. So if Cooper says the wireless revolution is still just in its opening stages, and that mobile technology promises to help end poverty and disease and bring education and employment to everyone, it’s probably worth listening.In this episode of Soonish, we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his book, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.Before the 1970s, Motorola was known mainly for making the two-way radios used by police dispatchers and the AM/FM radios in the dashboards of cars. But Cooper, head of the company’s communication systems division, was convinced that the company’s future lay in battery-powered handheld phones tied to a network of radio towers, each broadcasting to its own “cell.” Moreover, he knew it would take a spectacular demonstration of such wireless technology to keep the Federal Communications Commission from giving AT&T the huge chunks of radio spectrum it wanted to build its own network of in-dashboard car phones.Cooper convinced his bosses to let him lead a crash, 90-day program to build a prototype cellular phone that it could show off to the media and the FCC. The project to build the DynaTAC (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was a success, and in the end AT&T never got the spectrum it wanted.It took another decade for Motorola to commercialize the technology, largely because of FCC foot-dragging over spectrum allocation for consumer cellular industry. But Cooper’s 1973 demo opened the door to the world we now know—including, many generations of devices later, the rise of podcasting.Cooper will turn 92 at the end of this month, and he still buys every new model of smartphone, just to try it out. He thinks there’s lots of room left for improvement—and that the next generation of mobile devices may not look like phones at all, but will instead go inside our ears or even inside our bodies, where they’ll help to detect and prevent disease.When someone has had had a front-seat view to so many decades of high-tech innovation, perhaps they can’t help feeling rosy about humanity’s ability to think its way out of present-day challenges like the pandemic, climate change, or inequality in educational and economic opportunities.“The problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved,” Cooper says. “But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. Pretty much the only advantage the human brain has over machine is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us.”NotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.For the full show notes and a transcript of this episode go to http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-407-cell-phone-futureChapter Guide00:08 Soonish theme00:24 Officer of the Deck01:42 Left-Right Confusion04:06 The Father of the Cell Phone 06:52 Geeking Out08:41 Living in the Future10:50 Disproving Technological Determinism17:19 An Alternative History of the Cell Phone  19:45 The Fate of All Monopolies23:35 Midroll Announcement from The Lonely Palette24:46 Why Phone Makers Still Don’t Have It Right31:49 The Sources of Cooper’s Optimism37:42 End Credits and Acknowledgements39:19 Promo: Subtitle’s “We Speak” Miniseries

The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling

Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to celebrate. But Cascio argues that if Republicans retain control of the Senate (a matter that now hinges on a pair of ferociously contested runoff elections in Georgia), Biden's win will amount to, at most, an "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" moment. It will give Biden and Harris the opportunity to tackle the biggest crises facing the country—the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the economic havoc it's wrought. But it won't leave much room to pursue the structural reforms needed to tame white grievance, end minoritarian rule, and get government working again. But there's always 2022. In other words, this election wasn't the beginning of the end of the long fight to save democracy and protect the rights of all citizens in this country. But it might be the end of the beginning. Chapter Guide00:08 Soonish theme00:22 We Did It!01:32 Reality Sinks In04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio05:28 Check-in06:31 Setting the Scene 08:48 The Troubling News10:19 The Depths of our Polarization13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories24:57 Violence Against Democracy27:38 The Weakness of Norms30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology37:57 Cliodynamics 40:30 Back to BANI45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from IconographyFind the full show notes and a transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The End of the Beginning

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché that he’s the symptom, not the disease. Boxed in by demographic change, the Republican party has devolved over the past half-century into a force that taps racial and economic anxieties to win elections, erodes faith in government by deliberately and cynically undermining government, and exploits Constitutional loopholes and Congressional procedure to exercise endless minoritarian rule. Democrats, of course, are beset by their own internal divisions—and by a growing thirst for revenge.To reverse this toxic dynamic, we’ll need reforms that give both parties a fair shot at legislating and lower the risk of tyranny by the minority or the majority. It’s a tall order, given that we’re more sharply divided along ideological, geographical, and economic lines than at any point in American history. Which is why the necessary reforms could end up going so deep that we come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.This episode draws on a range of ideas from thinkers such as journalist David A. French, political scientists Adam Przeworski and William Howell, and sociologist and science fiction author Malka Older, along with an assortment of other commentators on the topics of polarization, federalism, and the possibility of secession or breakup. And in the best Soonish tradition, there’s also a little dose of Apollo 13.You'll find the full show notes and transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.You can also read an essay version of "American Reckoning" on Medium.The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Painted face photo by Oskaras Zerbickas on Unsplash. Thanks Oskaras!

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true, and underneath all the name-calling and dog-whistling on the campaign trail this year, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.In the series I bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about partisanship, polarization, the duties of citizenship, and the future of democracy, including (in Part 1) Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America and Protect The Results, Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Robert McElvaine at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. The episode explains why the threat of communal violence is so real right now. It also puts the current unrest in historical context, and looks at ways for citizens to usher the country through this perilous moment—for example, by mobilizing nonviolently to ensure that the election is fair and free.The prospect of a Trump win in November—whether fair or fraudulent—is horrifying. The thing is, a Trump loss would create its own set of problems. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in a 2019 Atlantic magazine article entitled “How America Ends”:"The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost."What form that fight might take is the unsettling and unanswered question now lingering over the nation. Armed extremists, like the participants in the Michigan kidnapping plot exposed this week, hope violent action will spark mass chaos and civil war. We can thwart extremist individuals and groups one by one. But can we stop the politicians who stoke extremism for their own cynical ends?Part 2 of this special two-part episode, coming Monday, moves beyond the election to ask how we might reconfigure our politics to defuse the kinds of tensions that got us into this mess. Because the real question isn’t how we’re going to get through the election without a violent meltdown—it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.See the full show notes for this episode at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-404-american-reckoning-pt1The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show!Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.American flag photo by Peggy Zinn, shared on Unsplash.

American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them

Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump.Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.Chapter Guide00:00 Content Warning00:16 Soonish Opening Theme00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage01:13 What Is Donald Trump?02:36 Never Another Trump04:22 Disaster Response05:07 Introducing Will Howell07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency19:31 The F Word (Fascism)20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”22:12 The Party of White Grievance 23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left28:01 A Middle Way28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration31:31 Best-Case Scenario33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements35:12 Recommendation: The ConstantNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Really!Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonishFollow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!

After Trump, What Comes Next?

Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about the flaws that make the Electoral College system uniquely vulnerable to a disruptor like Trump.In the final presidential debate of 2016, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he’d accede to the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton were to win, Trump refused to answer. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” the candidate said. Douglas tells Soonish that this intentionally subversive response raised a specter in his mind that he hasn’t been able to dispel.“Whatever damage a candidate could cause to our system by refusing to concede, imagine the kind of damage that an incumbent could cause to our system by refusing to concede,” Douglas says. “How well equipped is our system to deal with that type of eventuality? The rather alarming conclusion is it's very poorly equipped indeed.”The problem isn’t merely that the the Electoral College system is unrepresentative by design, or that its winner-take-all nature makes it possible for a candidate to assume office without winning a plurality of the popular vote (an outcome that befell the nation in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016). It’s also that the Constitution and the laws Congress has put in place around national elections fail to specify which votes count in the not-so-rare cases where electors don’t vote as pledged, or where states nominate competing slates of electors.The opportunities for mischief multiply when an election is so close that the outcome might turn on contested ballots, such as the notorious hanging-chad punch card ballots of 2000 or the mail-in ballots that coronavirus-wary voters are likely to use in record numbers this fall and that Trump is already noisily denouncing. “At times I've described it as this Chernobyl-like defect built into our electoral system,” Douglas says. “If everything lines up the wrong way, this meltdown could occur.”Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID00:08 Opening Theme00:21 "I'll Keep You in Suspense"02:05 Trump Defeats Clinton02:51 Meet Lawrence Douglas04:35 Bad Design and Total Election System Failure06:19 Dear Listeners08:07 A Warning to Americans09:24 What Makes a Victory Decisive?11:27 Trump Moves the Goalposts12:14 Faithless Electors16:12 SpongeBob for President19:45 Competing Slates25:26 Lies and Meta-Lies28:18 Spoiler #1: Election Day Snafus30.28 Spoiler #2: Foreign Interference32:30 Spoiler #3: Covid-1933:33 Beyond Ordinary Politics38:19 "If I Don't Win, I Don't Win"39:30 Short-term Tactics for Preventing Election Disaster40:35 Long-term Strategies for Fixing our Elections42:21 The Constitution Kinda Feels Like a Suicide Pact42.46 End Run: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact45:07 My Simple Hope45:58 End Credits and Hub & Spoke PromoThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Marine One photo by Victoria Pickering, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

Unpeaceful Transition of Power

Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our political and economic institutions back in shape so that they can cope better with the next challenge?This April I had the opportunity to speak about all things coronavirus with my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. Jamais is widely known for his work with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and he has a bit of a reputation as the “dark futures” futurist—the one who isn’t afraid to dwell on how things could go wrong. It turned out he’d been thinking about many of the same questions, and that he’d been developing a new analytical framework for just such an occasion. It’s called BANI, and it offers new insights into our strange historical moment, when institutions left brittle by years of deliberate neglect now face shattering stresses. In this episode, Jamais and and I tour the BANI concept and discuss how we could come out of pandemic with some new tools for confronting catastrophe.Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID  00:08Soonish Theme00:22 Futurism in a Time of Pandemic02:03 Introducing Jamais Cascio04:12 Explaining VUCA08:32 Meet BANI10:43 How BANI Fits Our Moment. Part I: Brittleness in the Pandemic13:48 Part II: Anxiety14:17 Part III: Nonlinearity15:10 Part IV: Incomprehensibility16:01 Pandemics as Wild Cards18:48 Planning for Pandemics19:56 The War Against Expertise21:44 Responding to Brittleness and Anxiety23:50 Responding to Nonlinearity26:03 Responding to Incomprehensibility 27:46 Paths Forward: Thinking More Like Futurists30:30 Muddling Through32:36 End Credits, Acknowledgements, and Hub & Spoke Promos

Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic

Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can teach us about the power of imagination, and how the stories we tell help us to write the future.Cunningham has been at The Washington Post for nine years, and in addition to creating Moonrise, she produced and hosted the limited-run podcasts Presidential and Constitutional. She spoke with Soonish from the Post's studios in Washington, D.C., on October 29, 2019, and in this episode we're sharing a version of the conversation that's been edited for length and clarity.See the episode page on the Soonish website for full show notes. And for an even deeper dive, including a chat about Lillian's writing process, the music for Moonrise, and the new Apple TV+ series "For All Mankind," check out this bonus segment at our website.Chapter Guide0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID01:31 Soonish Theme01:45 The Golden Age of Limited-Run Podcasts02:48 A World-Changing Podcast about the Moon Race05:08 Welcoming Lillian Cunningham to Soonish05:45 Lillian’s Journey to Podcasting08:53 Why Make a Show about the Moon Race?12:21 Beginnings: Why Start the Moon Story in 1933?17:58 The Role of Science Fiction and Futurism in the Moon Program20:52 The Soviet Side of the Moon Story24:10 Midroll Message: Recommending Words To That Effect26:07 What Makes an Expert an Expert?31:14 The Story Never Stops35:19 Will We Ever Go Back to the Moon?39:14 End Credits and Patreon Thank-Yous41:38 Promoting Hub & Spoke Newest Show, SubtitleThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Please check out Subtitle from Patric Cox and Kavita Pillay. It's the newest addition to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. The premiere episode Not So Anonymous is about the remarkable power of forensic linguistics software to unmask writers who'd probably rather stay unknown.

Making Moonrise

The moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.In this special Halloween 2019 edition of Soonish, we look at the scary vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system that were exposed after the 2016 presidential election, and we meet a company working to make it possible for everyone to vote securely on their smartphones. We hear from a retired U.S. Air Force major general who’s deeply worried about the lack of good “cyber hygiene” within state election agencies, and national security experts who fear the 2020 presidential vote could once again be manipulated and distorted by social media misinformation and disinformation. And we meet a science fiction author who says democracy is always a work in progress, but argues there’s an urgent need now for better media literacy and clearer thinking about how to strengthen the key beliefs, norms, and institutions behind democracy.Check out the complete show notes, including a full episode transcript, at soonishpodcast.org. Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID00:13 Opening Theme00:22 A Scary Story from the Senate Russia Report02:49 E-Voting Machines Without Paper Trails03:38 The Nightmare Scenario04:28 Maj. Gen. Earl Matthews on Cyber Hygiene06:33 More Money for Election Security07:23 The Big Question: Can We Achieve Fair Elections?07:52 The Anti-Sikh Riots of 198409:47 Nimit Sawhney at SXSW10:58 The Founding of Voatz13:58 How to Vote on Voatz22:03 Baby Steps and Criticisms24:19 Meet Centenal Cycle Author Malka Older27:58 Elections as Systems, and the Dangers of Disinformation30:59 Adapting to New Communications Platforms32:32 The Fragility of Legitimacy33:45 End Credits, and a Shout-Out to Open SourceNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.Episode logo photograph by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.Sound effects / foley from Freesound.org.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Please check out Open Source, one of the newest additions to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. Try the episode Do we want democracy or two-day shipping? with Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute.

Election Dreams and Nightmares

In this short bonus episode, hear the bizarre story of a college student who scaled a New England weather tower on a dare, stole a curious scientific instrument as a trophy, and inadvertently disrupted a series of climate observations going back more than 130 years. I made this four-minute, non-narrated piece in 2018 as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project. To view the show notes, a photo gallery, and a full transcript visit soonishpodcast.org/307-the-great-blue-hill-heist The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound. If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey. Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The Great Blue Hill Heist

Apple used the opening keynote presentation at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose in June to roll out the usual array of software updates and new computer hardware. But tucked into middle of the keynote was one the event's most consequential and underappreciated pieces of news: For the first time in more than three years, Apple will offer its own LCD computer monitor, the Pro Display XDR. It's a serious piece of gear, with 20 million pixels and new techniques for handling light and heat that deliver extremes of brightness, contrast, and color. And it comes with a serious price tag: $4,999. But it delivers image quality on par with professional "reference monitors" that typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, meaning it could put ultra-high-quality imaging capabilities into the hands of many more film and TV producers, graphic designers, photographers, and other professionals. (And—eventually—consumers. "All of the things that are in the Apple Pro Display XDR that make it unique right now are going to eventually become standard features five to 10 years from now, in displays that are going to be at Best Buy," veteran video engineer Michael Isnardi told us.) Soonish was there to cover the conference. And today's episode argues that when the Pro Display XDR goes on sale this fall, it could be one of those moments—similar to the introduction of HDTV in the late 1990s or Retina screens in 2010—when innovations in image-reproduction technology converge to alter the way we see the world. For the complete show notes please visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/306-i-have-seen-the-future-of-displays Chapter Guide 00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID 00:08 Content Warning 00:24 Soonish Opening Theme 00:44 The Principle of Good Enough 01:46 The Ceiling and the Floor 02:22 A Very Deep Dive into Displays 02:59 WWDC 2019 04:02 Announcing the Pro Display XDR 05:51 Spoiled by the Garage Door Opener 07:13 Resets in Visual History 07:39 Color and Light and Pixels 10:51 The Future’s So Bright 14:11 Roy G. Biv 16:28 The Battle of Winterfell 19:32 Hollywood Is Leaving You Behind 21:23 Picture Optimization Mode 22:29 What Would Walter Benjamin Say? 24:38 A New Art Form 26:01 End Credits and Acknowledgements 26:44 Culture Hustlers 27:32 Thank You to Our Top Patreon Supporters The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound. Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

I Have Seen the Future of Displays

Earlier this year Soonish took on social media in an episode called A Future Without Facebook. In that show I explained my own decision to quit the troubled platform and talked with friends and colleagues about their own reasons for staying or going. But the story of how these platforms are confounding earlier hopes for social media—and are instead blowing up our democracies—was never just about Facebook. In today’s special follow-up episode, I speak with national security expert Juliette Kayyem and former Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian about the challenges spanning all of our social media platforms—Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and many others. Algorithms designed to serve personalized content and targeted ads, for instance, have ended up fueling political polarization, aggravating radical-fringe resentment, and accelerating the spread of misinformation and disinformation. “The aspect that's different now is…the extent to which the guy sitting alone, who has these horrible thoughts, is able to find a community or a network to radicalize him and give a sense of community for that anger,” Kayyem observes. YouTube’s autoplay feature, which can lead viewers down rabbit holes full of conspiracy-theory videos, “might be one of the most dangerous features on the planet,” Krikorian comments. How can we fix it? Both Krikorian and Kayyem say what’s needed is a combination of citizen pressure, technical and business-model changes, education for individuals (so they’ll know how to judge what they see on social platforms), and legislation to make information sources more transparent and hold platforms liable for the harassment they facilitate. My chat with Kayyem and Krikorian was recorded at Net@50, a celebration of the 50th birthday of the ARPANET (the precursor to today’s Internet) organized by the World Frontiers Forum and Xconomy. Thank you to both organizations for permission to share the session. For more background and resources, including a full episode transcript, check out the episode page at the Soonish website. Chapter Guide 0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID 00:08 Special Announcement: The Constant Joins Hub & Spoke 01:59 Soonish Opening 02:15 Audio Montage: Social Media in the News 03:43 The Problem Is Bigger than Facebook 05:29 Meet Guests Juliette Kayyem and Raffi Krikorian 06:04 Question 1: How Did You Get Interested in the Problem of Social Media? 12:39 Question 2: Shouldn’t We Have Noticed This Earlier? 16:22 Question 3: Micro or Macro Solutions? 22:54 Question 4: Can Individuals Make a Difference? 24:42 Audience Question: What’s Really New Here? 27:59 Audience Question: Should We Eliminate Anonymity on the Internet? 29:17 Audience Question: Making Us Smarter 31:21 Final Credits 32:14 Check Out the “Plymouth Rock” Episode of Iconography 33:35 Thank You to Our Patreon Supporters The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound. If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey. Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

How to Fix Social Media

The adjective “visionary” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s literally true of Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh, the two illustrators featured in this week’s episode. Both men used their fertile visual imaginations and their artistic skills to create engaging, influential depictions of human space exploration and our high-tech future. Their work was seen by millions of magazine and newspaper readers throughout the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s—boosting public support for space exploration and industrial R&D at a critical time for the U.S. economy. Now, both men are the subjects of documentary films. Chesley Bonestell was born in San Francisco in 1888, survived the earthquake and fire of 1906, and went on to become an accomplished and high-paid architect, artist, Hollywood matte painter, and illustrator of book and magazine articles. From the mid-1940s onward, he specialized in painting stunning views of space vehicles and views other otherworldly locations like the Moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He lived to see humans set foot on the Moon in the 1960s and visit the gas giants via robotic probes in the 1980s, finally passing away in 1986. Arthur Radebaugh lived from 1906 to 1974 and built on his early career as an illustrator for Detroit-based advertising agencies to become a “funny-pages futurist,” producing the syndicated Sunday comic strip Closer Than We Think for the Chicago Tribune—New York News Syndicate from 1958 to 1963. In this episode we meet Douglas M. Stewart Jr. and the other producers of Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With the Future, a 2019 documentary about Bonestell, as well as Brett Ryan Bonowicz, maker of Closer Than We Think, a 2018 documentary about Radebaugh. And we hear from veteran science journalist Victor McElheny, who lived through (and documented) the era when Bonestell and Radebaugh were creating their visions of space and the future. The episode argues that futurist art, done well, can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It can teach consumer and citizens what to want and expect—whether that’s moon bases or self-driving cars or talking refrigerators—and it can inspire at least few people to become the scientists and engineers who actually go out and build those things. For more background and resources, including images by Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh and a full transcript of the episode, check out the full show notes at soonishpodcast.org. Chapter Guide 0:21 Under the Golden Gate Bridge 1:18 A Glimpse Into the Future 3:56 How Come I Never Heard of Chesley Bonestell? 4:37 Meet Arthur Radebaugh 6:45 Round Table Interview with Douglas Stewart, Christopher Darryn, and Kristina Hays 9:43 Mars as Seen from Deimos 11:50 Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future Trailer 13:30 Destination Moon 15:13 Working with Wernher von Braun 17:03 Commercial Instinct 18:03 Romantic Rockets 20:20 Midroll Announcement: Support Soonish on Patreon 22:09 Brett Ryan Bonowicz 25:12 Influencing the Jetsons 26:21 Extremely Fast and Incredibly Closer Than We Think 29:54 Imagining Catastrophe 31:21 Conclusion: Competing Styles of Visual Futurism 32:45 End Credits and Announcements The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound. Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-based collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org. If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. See https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soonish/id1185234753?mt=2 You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at Patreon. For a limited time, contributors who sign up at the $5-per-episode level or above get a Soonish coffee mug! But act now, because after June 8, 2019, the coffee mug will only be available at the $10-per-episode level or above. Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that makes this ship go, so get on board now! We need your ideas to make the show better. Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey. Give us a shout on Twitter at @soonishpodcast and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The Art that Launched a Thousand Rockets

The future is shaped by technology—but technology is shaped by us. Every month, Soonish brings you stories showing how the choices we make together forge the technological world of tomorrow. From MIT-trained technology journalist Wade Roush. Learn more at soonishpodcast.org. We're a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective! See hubspokeaudio.org.

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