Paul Stamets: Solutions from the Underground

In this brutally honest and provocative talk, Kevin Powell offers his own life journey to illustrate how we can transform our concepts of manhood. Raised by a single mother in the inner city, Kevin’s rites of passage were typical of many heterosexual males: sports, violence, and viewing women and girls as mother figures or sexual objects, and nothing more.

What’s a surefire way to make activism more effective? Make it intergenerational. What’s the biggest obstacle? An ageist culture that pits old against young and bombards us with messages that wrinkles are tragic and old people useless. Aging is not a problem to be “fixed” or a disease to be “cured. Debunking myth after myth about late life, author and activist Ashton Applewhite passionately urges us to come together at all ages – and dismantle ageism in the process.

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore says the signs are all around us, telling us that our life-support systems are in critical condition, and only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earth’s life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. She shows how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth

Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative and co-chair of its The Next System Project, shows how we can begin to build together for the systemic change we need to save both democracy and the planet.

Elizabeth Dwoskin is the Washington Post’s Silicon Valley correspondent; covering the rise of data-hungry technology companies, online conspiracies, and Russian meddling on social media. She was part of the team that broke over a dozen stories on Russian operatives’ use of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to influence the 2016 presidential election. She shines a light on our growing awareness of the dark side of Silicon Valley, and how that awareness is reshaping public policy, our understanding of democracy, and the way tech is used and built.