tbd/con update #5: pitching is closed, program coming in 1–2 weeks

Thank you to everyone who sent something in a pitch.

If you're one of the folks still finetuning your session wording, please get your details back to us as soon as you can (definitely by end of this week) so we can lock it in and share publicly. 

Everyone else: we're excited to host you, and you'll be the first to see the program, roughly one to two weeks out. It will keep evolving right up to the day.

We're now past 170 registered, and the virtual room is shaping up the way we hoped: journalists from one-person dailies to global wire-service product teams, technologists and ML folks, researchers, and people working in security, privacy, and human rights, across 15-plus time zones with about a third outside North America. 

Everyone's arriving with great questions. Similar ones kept surfacing across every discipline: 

• What is left that's distinctly human once the machine can synthesize? verification, judgment, meaning-making
• Is language the same thing as knowledge? the cognitive-surrender thread. 
• Who benefits and who loses? labor, wages, inequality, the extractive model.
• How does AI get weaponized against the most vulnerable, and who stops it?
• Real vs. fake in a "dead-internet" world; how do we design for human perspective to be more visible, not less?
• Where does this actually end — 5, 10, 25 years out?

Here's the shape we're planning: Sept. 23 will be the more structured day on a virtual conference venue on gather.town, with sessions across our four circles. Sept. 24 we're keeping loose and unconference-ish, with self-organized circles that grow out of the conversations from day one.

If you know someone who may also be interested, please let them know that they can still register to join for free here.

So no matter whether you're presenting on the 23rd, bring your questions and ideas, and help decide what the 24th becomes.

See you soon!

Patrick, David, Zig, and Madison