🎩 Live from the Decentralized Web
You’re invited to our magazine launch and panel on Sept. 23
At New_ Public, we’re interested in the next generation of digital public spaces. We’ve been wondering: could the protocols and standards of decentralization offer some advantages? It’s a huge topic, plagued by a multitude of meanings and misunderstandings. But we’ve decided to take it on in a big way: our first magazine issue, as well as a live panel to kick off our launch, focuses on unexpected lessons from decentralization.
🖥 We’re part of a new, exciting tech festival online or in person in NYC
🥳 Join us for our panel on decentralization and our live magazine debut
🎟 Use our promo code and we’ll see you in person 9/23-24 at The Shed, NYC
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be at Unfinished Live — an immersive festival experience on the future of tech and the possibilities of a decentralized future — on September 23-24, online and at The Shed, Hudson Yards, NYC. This fully-vaccinated event will be two days of panels, “Clubhouse conversations, live podcasts, networking and more.” We hope you’ll join us!
New_ Public Co-director Eli Pariser will be presenting a panel: “What the Internet Can Learn from Trees (and other Lessons in Decentralization)”. The panel will feature speakers Claire Evans, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Rich Benjamin (more details below). We’ll also be debuting the first issue of our brand-new magazine. Attendees will also receive a free copy of our limited run, printed-newsprint broadsheet, which is a sampling of the digital magazine.
Because we’re a partner in the Unfinished Network, we’re excited to be able to pass on complimentary tickets to the in-person conference at The Shed to subscribers of this newsletter. Just use the promo code NEWPUBLIC100 at this link.
Sign up for Unfinished Live for free. Code: NEWPUBLIC100
Don’t miss this lineup
Unfinished has assembled an incredibly exciting list of technologists, journalists, artists, and changemakers to speak at the event, including:
Anil Dash, CEO, Glitch
Nabiha Syed, President, The Markup
Rishad Tobaccowala, Author, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data
Manoush Zomorodi, Host, NPR’s TED Radio Hour
!llmind, Record Producer, Songwriter, and Educator
Perusing the speakers page, you’ll see a lot of familiar names from our festival, Advisory Board, and the publications we’re always linking to. These folks make up the mainstage program for Unfinished Live, featuring sessions on building a more equitable internet, the cross-section of music and blockchain, reshaping the global financial system, trust and truth, smart cities, and more.
The concept of decentralization is, of course, not exclusive to cryptocurrency and the blockchain. We’ll explore different ways of thinking about decentralization in our panel, featuring two authors from the first issue of New_ Public Magazine: writer and musician Claire Evans will talk about what we can learn from the fungal networks that trees use to communicate, and artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin will share insights from the decentralized storytelling of indigenous communities. In addition, we’ll be joined by urban sociologist Rich Benjamin, who will speak to how decentralized neighborhoods and communities can energize cities — and what that might mean for the Internet.
Sign up for Unfinished Live for free. Code: NEWPUBLIC100
Covid-conscious
We all know that an in-person event can be a difficult proposition these days. Unfinished have put a lot of work into hosting this festival safely. From their team:
Unfinished Live will be a fully vaccinated event. Your health is important to us, and with that in mind, we’re requiring that all registered guests, speakers, vendors, and staff must show proof of vaccination in order to enter the event spaces. We’re keeping an eye on the news to make sure that we take all recommended precautions, and we anticipate that we will be able to keep everyone safe when we gather in September.
At the in-person event experience in NYC, we will offer an outdoor viewing experience of the mainstage livestream on the big screen behind The Shed for anyone who would prefer to gather outdoors.
We hope to meet some of you at The Shed in September.
Thinking about the OnlyFans odyssey this week reminded us of this article from 2016, “How Porn Leads People to Upgrade Their Tech”. (h/t to Casey Newton, who is speaking at Unfinished Live!)
The pornography industry isn’t creating new communication technologies, Coopersmith said, nor is it particularly prescient about what technology is likely to take off. It’s simply taken advantage of new developments before others, and has enough of a draw that people are willing to follow it.
Its position on the leading edge of technology comes partly out of necessity. “There’s a nimbleness to being in the marginalia,” Barss says. Once technologies and platforms reach mainstream status, they may become less friendly to adult content, and the social stigma attached to porn has repeatedly drawn consumers to new, largely untested technologies that provide better privacy.
The ultimate in private access to pornography came with the internet. On the web, not even the checkout-counter guy at the video store has to know what you’re up to. But even though it was another step toward isolation, Barss says the internet also injected porn with a sense of community. Early online bulletin boards and forums allowed people to share user-generated erotica and pornography, while maintaining distance and anonymity. For once, it wasn’t a porn company luring people to a platform with promises of smut; it was people creating and sharing it themselves.
– Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic
Open thread!
We’re trying something new this week. On Tuesday, around noon on the East Coast, we're going to be sending out a discussion thread. The format will be simple: a prompt from us inviting you to weigh in on a topic or question we’re interested in. We hope it’ll be a way for us to all get to know each other. Keep an eye out for it!
Flashing Lights
This is your last reminder: the deadline for our Flash Fiction Contest is September first. Email us your stories at hello@newpublic.org with ‘Flash Fiction’ in the subject line.
Deadline: 9/1/21
Theme: Social Media
Word Limit: 500 words
Prize: Original illustration, publication on newsletter
Picking out a “fancy” mask,
Josh and Wilfred
Images courtesy of Unfinished
New_ Public is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.