Douglas Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian, and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age. He is the author of fifteen bestselling books on media, technology, and society, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. He has made such award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries as Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, and The Persuaders, and is the author of graphic novels including Testament and Aleister & Adolf. Rushkoff is the recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion, The Jacques Ellul Award for his documentary The Merchants of Cool, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, he is responsible for originating such concepts as “viral media,” “social currency,” and “digital natives.” Today, Dr. Rushkoff serves as Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he recently founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism and hosts its TeamHuman podcast. He is also a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an advisor to Meetup, Shareable, and Codecademy.

I've written books about consciousness (Higher Creativity - 1984 and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming - 1988), history of mind-amplifying technology (Tools for Thought - 1985 ), Virtual Reality (1991!), the birth of social media (The Virtual Community - 1993!), the social revolutions growing from the hybrid of mobile telephones, digital media, and the Internet (Smart Mobs - 2002!) and social media literacy (Net Smart -- 2012). TED published my e-book about the psycho-social-technological facets of augmenting human intellect (Mind Amplifier -- 2012) Note that two of my books, Tools for Thought and The Virtual Community, have been online for free since 1995. I gave a TED talk in 2005 about the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of cooperation -- viewed nearly a million times. Since that talk, I worked with Institute for the Future to provide resources for cooperation studies and have taught (six times) an online course on cooperation. I also created and facilitated online courses on mind amplifiers and thinking-knowledge tools. I taught (face to face) courses on digital journalism, social media literacies, and social media issues at Berkeley and Stanford for ten years. I instigated a community-created handbook for peer learning, published nearly 100 video interviews and blog posts about digital media and learning innovators, and helped organized a MOOC for connected educators. I've curated links publicly about my topics, and published interviews with curation experts. I've shared my paintings online since 1995. More recently, I've been making magical objects of paint and light, using wood, acrylics, and arduino-controlled LEDs. I was an extraterrestrial anthropologist on the streets of San Francisco in 1977, an investigative video documentary project I hope to continue in 2018.

Mostly I write books of the nonfiction and fiction varieties. My first novel, Autonomous, come out from Tor in September 2017. I'm also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. I am currently working on another novel for Tor, as well as a nonfiction book for W.W. Norton about ancient abandoned cities. I'm the founding editor of io9, and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. I'm currently an editor-at-large for Ars Technica, as well as a freelancer for magazines and newspapers. My nonfiction has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I'm the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Formerly, I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. I was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and have a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies,  co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998).  Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. For a decade, he explored the “cultures of consciousness” on his groundbreaking weekly podcast Expanding Mind. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and more recently earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His book on the history of LSD blotter art will be published in 2024.

Lauren McCarthy is an LA-based artist whose work examines how issues of surveillance, automation, and networks affect our social relationships. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source platform for learning creative expression through code online. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as Ars Electronica, Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lauren is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She is a Sundance Institute Fellow and was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³.

Josette Melchor is the Founder of Gray Area Foundation For The Arts, a leading San Francisco non-profit dedicated to applying art and technology to create social and civic impact. As a Community Organizer, she partners with cities to address civic issues through public activations such as the Urban Prototyping Festival. A respected Executive Director, she has implemented sustainable revenue models to stabilize organizations and led fundraising campaigns to revive the historic Grand Theater as an 800 person venue in the Mission District as well as the Oakland Fire Fund to serve hundreds affected by the Ghostship tragedy. As a Curator, Josette instigated the first exhibition that paired artificial neural networks with artists which helped establish the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google. She was gifted her first set of turntables at seventeen, which inspired her to DJ and develop an eclectic collection of music at the confluence of disco, techno and house. Her selections are influenced by over fourteen years of large-scale media arts production and relationships with well known music producers. She has led the development of hundreds of creative technology projects utilizing cutting edge technologies and alongside work at Gray Area is starting an experiential media studio Dreamboat with a small team of artists. In other words, Josette Melchor is a Human classified as a Community Organizer, Curator, Entrepreneur, DJ, Queer Mexican Woman programming life at the intersection of art and technology based in San Francisco. She founded Gray Area Foundation for the Arts– a leading nonprofit media arts center– more than a decade ago and is driven to serve diverse audiences with her work. She has also worked with notable designers and interdisciplinary research centers including: MIT Senseable City Lab, Institute of Computer Sound and Technology, Stamen Design, Code for America; artists C.E.B Reas, Robert Hodgin, Aaron Koblin, Camille Utterback, and many more. She has spoken at DLD, PICNIC, TEDx Silicon Valley, Art Center College of Design, and Stanford. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Burning Man Project and The Processing Foundation. You can visit her website here: josettemelchor.com