Each time you visit this page, you’ll find a different randomized selection of Evolutionary Talks to expand your heart, mind, and soul.
♥ Enjoy & Evolve ♥
🠗 🧙🏽♂️ randomized 🧙🏽♂️ 🠗
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Dr. Eben Moglen
Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media
re:publica Talk [2012]
“Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity’s most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals. Our existing achievements in these directions are under assault from companies trying to bottleneck human communications or own our common culture, and states eager to control their subjects’ minds. In this talk–one of a series beginning with “The dotCommunist Manifesto” and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”–I offer some suggestions about how the Free World should meet the challenges of the next decade.”
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Civilization, Computers & Society, Culture, Democracy, Eben Moglen, Free & Open Software, Free Culture, Freedom, Freedom of Thought, Open Source, re:publica, Technology
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Douglas Rushkoff
Coercion:
Why We Listen to What “They” SaySociology Book [2000]
❝ Noted media pundit and author of Playing the Future Douglas Rushkoff gives a devastating critique of the influence techniques behind our culture of rampant consumerism. With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of media ecology today, consumerism in America, and why we buy what we buy, helping us recognize when we’re being treated like consumers instead of human beings. ❞
Categories: Books, Interviews, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Advertising, Capitalism, Coercion, Cyber Culture, Democracy, Douglas Rushkoff, Freedom, History, Liberty, Marketing, Media, Networks, Propaganda, Psyche-Warfare, Technology, The Internet, The Market
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Peter Joseph
Origins & Adaptations III
Z-Day Talk [2015]
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks, The Zeitgeist Movement
Tags: Civilization, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Economics, Evolution, Futurism, Peter Joseph, Science, Social Pathology, Society, Technology, The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement, TZM, Z-Day
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Juno Mac
The Laws that Sex Workers Really Want
TED Talk [2016]
“Everyone has an opinion about how to legislate sex work (whether to legalize it, ban it or even tax it) … but what do workers themselves think would work best? Activist Juno Mac explains four legal models that are being used around the world and shows us the model that she believes will work best to keep sex workers safe and offer greater self-determination. “If you care about gender equality or poverty or migration or public health, then sex worker rights matter to you,” she says. “Make space for us in your movements.” (Adult themes)”
Categories: Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: Capitalism, Culture, Exploitation, Injustice, Juno Mac, Law, Progress, Prohibition, Sex, Sex Work
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Jason Silva
We Are the Gods Now
Festival of Dangerous Ideas Talk [2013]
“JASON SILVA is an extraordinary new breed of philosopher who meshes philosophical wisdom of the ages with an infectious optimism for the future. Combining intriguing insights and a mastery of digital filmmaking, Jason delivers philosophical shots of espresso, which unravel the incredible possibilities the future has to offer the human race.
Tags: Computers & Society, Culture, Evolution, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Freedom, Futurism, Jason Silva, Technology, Transhumanism
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“Walter Houston Clark has defined “religion” as an individual’s inner experience of a Beyond, especially as evidenced by active attempts to harmonize his or her life with that Beyond. The Johns Hopkins experiments suggest that a large fraction of mentally healthy people with spiritual interests can have a profound experience of a Beyond—a mystical-type experience—with the aid of several hours’ preparation and a supervised psilocybin session. Furthermore, most of the study volunteers report that encounter as among the most spiritually significant of their lives and as bringing sustained benefits. How do we get from such experiences (however occasioned) to “religion” in Clark’s sense, and in the sense of a group pursuing spiritual ends? Perhaps that transition is, as Brother David Steindl-Rast claims, inevitable. The talk will address that process, and will argue that some social organizations have strong but unacknowledged religious aspects. It will also ask how nascent religious groups can form in ways that minimize the pathologies that so often have given the “r-word” a bad name, while channeling sociality to cultivate individual and collective well-being.
Robert Jesse is Convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP; csp.org). CSP’s interest in non-ordinary states focuses on the betterment of well people, in contrast to the medical-model treatment of patients with psychiatric diagnoses. Through CSP, Bob was instrumental in forming the psilocybin research team at Johns Hopkins University, and he has co-authored three of its scientific papers. He also lead the writing of an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the União do Vegetal’s use of a sacramental tea containing DMT, a controlled substance. A unanimous Court upheld the UDV’s right to its practice. Bob has long participated in the development of the Bay Area spiritual community that draws liberally from the non-creedal, non-hierarchical ways of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends). His formal training is in electrical engineering and computer science.”
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Johns Hopkins, MAPS, Psilocybin, Psychedelic Science, Psychedelics, Psychology, Religion
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Absolutely epic talk omfg.. about the need for a real Truth & Conciliation Commission in America, so that we may be able to form a common memory of our history as the only way to rebuild any sort of national community. Crucial info fam, scope this! Much respect to Mark Charles for sharing this perspective.
“The son of an American woman of Dutch heritage and a Navajo man, Mark Charles offers a unique perspective on three of the most misinterpreted words in American History. Written in the Papal Bulls of the 15th Century, embedded in our founding documents in the 18th Century, codified as legal precedent in the 19th Century and referenced by the Supreme Court in the 20th and 21st Centuries, the Doctrine of Discovery has been used throughout the history of the United States to keep “We the People” from including all the people. Mark Charles is a dynamic and thought-provoking public speaker, writer, and consultant. The son of an American woman (of Dutch heritage) and a Navajo man, he speaks with insight into the complexities of American history regarding race, culture, and faith in order to help forge a path of healing and conciliation for the nation. Mark serves as the Washington DC correspondent and regular columnist for Native News Online and is the author of the popular blog “Reflections from the Hogan.” Mark is a founding partner of a national conference for Native students called “Would Jesus Eat Frybread?” Mark’s forthcoming book on the Doctrine of Discovery entitled Truth be Told is being published by InterVarsity Press and will be available in 2019. Mark is active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram under the username: wirelesshogan.”
Categories: Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: America, Catholicism, Colonialism, History, Indigeneity, Law, Mark Charles, Racism, Religion, The People
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Peter Joseph
Where Are We Now?
TZM Lecture [2009]
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks, The Zeitgeist Movement
Tags: Civilization, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Economics, Evolution, Futurism, Peter Joseph, Science, Social Pathology, Society, Technology, The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement, TZM, Z-Day
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Steven Pearlstein
Can American Capitalism Survive?
Politics & Prose Book Lecture [2018]
Epic lecture on the false tenets of neoliberalism, summerized well by the book’s subtitle: “Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal, & Fairness won’t Make Us Poor.” An absolutely brilliant dismantling of capitalist ideology, a must-see.. ♥ Neonn
“Pearlstein’s chronicle of the last few decades of democratic capitalism documents that the “greed is good” era has left out major tenets of Adam Smith’s vision. Instead of fostering the social capital ensuring that benefits reach all socio-economic strata, the system has suffered increasing income disparity, causing many to lose faith in the free market economy. Pearlstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University, gives a succinct and clear diagnosis of capitalism’s malaise and offers practical steps for healing it, including a guaranteed minimum income paired with universal national service, tax incentives for companies to share profits with workers, ending class segregation in public education, and restoring competition to markets.”
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Capitalism, Culture, Economics, Ideology, Neoliberalism, politics & prose, Socialism, Society, Steven Pearlstein
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Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Why We Must Confront the Painful Parts of US History
TED Talk [2020]
“To move forward in the United States, we must look back and confront the difficult history that has shaped widespread injustice. Revisiting a significant yet overlooked piece of the past, Hasan Kwame Jeffries emphasizes the need to weave historical context, no matter how painful, into our understanding of modern society — so we can disrupt the continuum of inequality massively affecting marginalized communities.”
Categories: Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: Education, History, Inequality, Racism, Slavery, Wealth
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❝ The author of The Book of Questions claims that humankind and technology have merged into a new global entity, a living extension of humankind acting through a complex system of computers and offering a promise of ever-greater prosperity. ❞
Categories: Books, Literature, Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: Evolution, Futurism, Globalism, Gregory Stock, Humanism, Machines, Metaman, Mythology, Optimism, Philosophy, Spirituality, Superorganism, Transhumanism
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KRS-ONE
The History of Hip Hop
Black History Month Keynote Lecture [2014]
“Hip Hop Legend KRS-One came to Cal State LA for a Black History Month keynote and dropped some knowledge and enlightenment on our Golden Eagles. Here’s the full speech.”
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Black History, Culture, Enlightenment, Hip-Hop Culture, KRS-ONE, Shamanism
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❝ In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think. ❞Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Awakening, Bay Area, Counterculture, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Cyberculture, Cybernetics, Evolution, Fred Turner, History, Humanism, Optimism, Progress, Silicon Valley, Stuart Brand, The 60s, Utopia, Utopianism, Whole Earth Network
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Dr. Carl Hart
MDMA for the People:
Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of HappinessMAPS Talk [2020]
“Carl Hart, Ph.D., is the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. His research focuses on the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs. He is particularly interested in what social and psychological factors influence drug use and their effects, and using evidence-based research to formulate more humane drug policies.”
Categories: Lectures, MAPS, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Cognitive Liberty, Dr. Carl Hart, Drugs, Ecstasy, Healthcare, Liberty, MAPS, MDMA, Mental Health, Psychedelic Medicine, Psychedelics, Psychiatry, Raving, Society
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❝ A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, “democratic transhumanism,” by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human – “posthuman” or “transhuman” – the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: A.I., Citizenship, Cyborgs, Democracy, Ethics, Evolution, Futurism, Healthcare, History, Humanity, James Hughes, Life, Medical Ethics, Medicine, Posthumanism, Science, Technology, Transhumanism, Universal Healthcare
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Jen Wilding
From the Great Escape to an Improved Reality
Zeitgeist-Day Talk [2013]
Categories: Symposia, Talks, The Zeitgeist Movement
Tags: Civilization, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Economics, Escapism, Evolution, Futurism, Jen Wilding, Science, Social Pathology, Society, Technology, The Zeitgeist Movement, TZM, Z-Day
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Peter Joseph
Where Are We Going?
TZM Lecture [2009]
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks, The Zeitgeist Movement
Tags: Civilization, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Economics, Evolution, Futurism, Peter Joseph, Science, Social Pathology, Society, Technology, The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement, TZM
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Ralph Nader
To the Ramparts
Politics & Prose Book Lecture [2018]
“Since the release of Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, Nader has led the charge against destructive and exploitative corporate power. The co-founder of public interest groups including Public Citizen, Critical Mass, Commercial Alert, and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, Nader continues to demonstrate the efficacy of grassroots activism for democratic change. His new book is a searing analysis of how Big Business, abetted by the flaws of recent presidential administrations, created the political climate that put Trump in the White House. As provocative as ever, Nader takes both Democrats and Republicans to task for their failures to curb corporate excesses and their abandonment of the poor and middle-classes.”
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Civics, Culture, Economics, Grassroots Activism, Hatred, Politics, politics & prose, Ralph Nader
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Johann Hari
Everything You Think You Know about Addiction Is Wrong
TED Talk [2015]
“What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do — and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.”
Categories: Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: Addiction, Addiction Recovery, Addiction Treatment, Depression, Drugs, Healthcare, Heroin, Human Nature, Johann Hari, Mental Health, Opioids, Progress, Psychology, Rat Park, Science
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Terence McKenna
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Psychedelic Philosophy Lecture [1998]
“Join Terence McKenna, author, explorer and philosopher for a think along deconstruction of the deepening worldwide weirdness. With his characteristic hope and humor, McKenna examined time and its mysteries, the nature of language, the techniques of ecstasy, high technology and virtual cyberspace, the role of hallucinogenic plants in shamanism and the evolution of human cultures, and the foundations of post-modern spirituality. The lecture and discussion was didactic, syncretic, challenging, eclectic, eidetic and irreverent intellectual adventure.”
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Apocalypse, Culture, Enlightenment, Eschaton, Psychedelics, Shamanism, Terence McKenna
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Dr. Carl Hart
Let’s Quit Abusing Drug Users
TED MED Talk [2015]
“Carl Hart, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Columbia University, offers a provocative, evidence-based view of addiction and discusses how it should impact drug policy.”
Categories: Symposia, Talks, TED
Tags: Addiction, Addiction Recovery, Cocaine, Cognitive Liberty, Conflicts of Interest, Conspiracy, Dr. Carl Hart, Drug Policy, Drugs, Ethics, Health, Healthcare, Liberty, Progress, Science, TED MED, Transparency
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❝ The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel’s “Cosmist Manifesto” gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities. ❞
Categories: Books, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: A.I., Apocalypse, Ben Goertzel, Computers & Society, Cosmism, Counterculture, Culture, Evolution, Futurism, Humanism, Manifesto, Nanotechnology, Philosophy, Posthuman Age, Posthumanism, Practical Philosophy, Psychedelics, Singularity, Technology, Uploading
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❝ Does the science of evolution really prove that life, humanity, and the universe as a whole are meaningless accidents? On the contrary, as science has shown how everything in the universe is subject to evolution, including matter, life, and human culture, these very facts reveal that the process of evolution is unmistakably progressive. And, as Steve McIntosh demonstrates, when we come to see how evolution progresses, this reveals evolution’s purpose-to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness. McIntosh argues that the purpose of evolution is not intelligently designed or otherwise externally controlled; rather, its purpose is being creatively and originally discerned through the choices of the evolutionary creatures themselves. Without relying on spiritual authorities, the author shows how the scientific story of our origins is actually a profound and sacred teaching compatible with many forms of contemporary spirituality. Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins presents a fresh and compelling view of evolutionary science and philosophy, and shows how a deeper understanding of evolution itself can lead directly to a more evolved world. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
Tags: Creativity, Evolution, History, Humanity, Integral, Life, New Age, Origins, Purpose, Science, Spirituality