Featuring: Bruce Sterling (Chairman Bruce, the godfather of cyberpunk), author Christopher Brown with his talk “True dystopia: martial law and emergency powers in fact and fiction (including times of quarantine),” The Santa Fe Institute’s Michael Garfield with his talk, Complex Systems Science & The Social Hazards of the Nonlinear Frontier, and the 1st Annual Anti Facial Recognition Fashion Show!
We’re 20 in 2020! Fighting for the Future, Hiding from the Machines (Now! With 100% more CV Dazzle)!
When: Saturday, March 14, 2020, 7-11pm
Location: 1309 Bonham Terrace, Austin, TX 78704
Open to badge holders, and the general public for a suggested donation of $20.
Join EFF-Austin, on Saturday, March 14th celebrating the 20th anniversary of our yearly SXSW gathering!
The event will take place at board member Chris Boyd’s casa, located at 1309 Bonham Terrace in Austin’s Travis heights, easy Lyft, biking, or scooter distance from the Convention Center.
Featuring talks by Bruce Sterling, Chris Brown, Michael Garfield, and a few other surprises. We will also debut our first annual Anti Facial Recognition Fashion Show. This “how not to be seen” extravaganza will feature makeup and accoutrements created by their models in a workshop led by board member Maggie Duval the week before.
Free drinks and appetizers for our guests while supplies last (BYOB is fine as well, no additional food please) and a fire pit out front. As always, our event is free to attend and doesn’t require any SX wristbands or badges. There is a suggested $20 donation, half of which will go to recoup host costs, the other half donated to Electronic Frontier Foundation. Your contributions support our continued efforts focused on the protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology
There is ample free on-street parking in Travis Heights near the party address if you are driving, but we encourage you to take public transportation if possible. If you arrive via scooter, we will have an area in the front yard where you can leave your scooter (please don’t leave them in the middle of the street).
Sponsors
Bruce Sterling
Photo by Pablo Balbontin Arenas, published under a GNU Free Documentation License., GFDL
Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped to define the cyberpunk genre. Sterling’s first ever science fiction story, Man-Made Self, was sold in 1976. He first became famous by hosting annual Christmas events to present digital art. He spent many years after this creating many science fiction novels such as Schismatrix (1985), Islands In The Net (1988), and Heavy Weather (1994). In 1992, he published his first nonfiction novel, The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier. Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan. In addition, he is one of the subgenre’s chief ideological promulgators. This has earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”.
Chris Brown
By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0
“Christopher Brown looks to be cornering the market on future dystopias,” according to The Wall Street Journal. His debut novel Tropic of Kansas was a finalist for the Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of 2018, and he was a World Fantasy Award nominee for the anthology Three Messages and a Warning. His 2019 novel, Rule of Capture, combines sci-fi with courtroom drama in a story publisher Harper Voyager described as “Better Call Saul meets 1984.” The follow-on to that, Failed State, is forthcoming in August of 2020. Chris lives in Austin, where he also practices technology law.
Michael Garfield
Complex Systems Science & The Social Hazards of the Nonlinear
The modern world is made of networks that can unleash floods of innovation…and destruction. From the megacities that drive economies and boost crime rates, to the social media platforms that connect and divide us, there’s a hidden order in networked systems. Understanding it makes the difference between thriving in complexity or flirting with collapse. In this talk, the Santa Fe Institute’s social media strategist Michael Garfield will give a guided tour of research from a worldwide community of complex systems scientists tackling wicked problems on the frontiers of 21st Century science—and perform a way of seeing that reveals potential interventions for a saner, more sustainable society.
https://santafe.edu/culture/podcast
