Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Where Do We Go From Here? Contextualizing This American Moment

I went to the LA Times Festival of Books (April 13-14). I'm posting my notes on the various panel discussions I attended.

The eighth panel discussion I attended was "Where Do We Go From Here? Contextualizing This American Moment."

Here is an edited panelist biography via the LA Times website.

Nicolas Berggruen is Founder and Chairman of the Berggruen Institute. He is coauthor of "Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East" and is copublisher of The WorldPost. He is also Chairman of Berggruen Holdings.

Nathan Gardels is Cofounder of the Berggruen Institute and Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost, a partnership with the Washington Post. He is the coauthor of Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between East and West, a Financial Times best book of 2012.

Professor Jennifer Rothman is nationally recognized for her scholarship in the intellectual property field, and has become the leading expert on the right of publicity. She researches and writes primarily in the areas of intellectual property and constitutional law. Her book on the subject, "The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World" was released last year by the Harvard University Press.

Named one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. Drawn from the popular "Team Human" podcast, Rushkoff's latest book of the same name is an extension of the ideas he discusses on the pod.



And the following are my notes from the panel discussion:

Nicolas Berggruen. Is capitalism working in an optimal way? Capitalism still gives everyone a chance, but is also creating a bigger divide. How is everyone included? Society owns a piece of business from the beginning. People who put up the capital would own most of it.

Are we in a crisis of democracy, capitalism and geopolitics? Tweaks here and there are not enough. We need a new way to balance citizens and government. We need new ways of thinking about how democracy works. Fundamental changes need to be made.

Nathan Gardels. We have a rise of populism in the West and a rise of China in the East. We are dealing with social media and wondering how democracy works. Due to China’s growth, democracies need to get their act together. The more social media impacts our democracy, the more we need checks against social media via institutions. The digital economy separates how we make money versus wealth. We should consider a society where all citizens have ownership, equity. We are moving into a world where robots will take our jobs.

Uber and Lyft are corporate ownership. Why can’t a community set up a shared profit-sharing. Productivity growth is different from working.

Pre-distribution of ownership over robots is necessary. Redistribution makes things worse in terms of inequality.

Jennifer Rothman. We have the right to stop unapproved use of our images. Our right of privacy has narrowed. We can reverse this via the right of publicity, sometimes we can’t own our own likeness.

If you don’t own your own image that is concerning. We are transferring ourselves.

Ownership of our information. Her book lets us know we have rights via publicity. Everything you do can be livestreamed. How do we get usage of information correct.

Douglas Rushkoff. Retrieve values from history. Humans are being used by technology. Human beings are just being used as eyeballs. Technology that uses people gets us to do things against what is in our best interest. Silicon Valley needs to come up with something that will stop us from isolating ourselves from each other.

What would Uber be if the drivers own the company. Pre-distribution so that workers can provide data (R&D) for future robots that will take their jobs. Capitalism is an invented system.

Digital inventors are trying to figure out how to become billionaires.