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10th Anniversary Bay Area Book Festival Brings Top Authors, Critical Conversations,
and Family Fun
The Bay Area Book Festival is throwing a 10th anniversary party, where festivalgoers will be treated to the top-tier speakers the festival is known to showcase as well as new attractions, including a full day of workshops for emerging writers, three evening headliner events, a reimagined Outdoor Fair in the park (Sunday only) and the inaugural Native California stage. The icing on the birthday cake? Almost everything is free.
This year’s ticketed headliners include the incomparable Joan Baez, cultural commentator Naomi Klein and a trio of book-to-screen superstars (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Piper Kerman and Alka Joshi). Free programming features nearly 100 speakers, including Jonathan Lethem, Amy Tan, Steve Phillips, Forrest Gander, and Berkeley poet laureate Aya de León, as well as rising stars like Tommy Orange, R.O. Kwon, gina Breedlove and poet Brontez Purnell. Dozens of panels will encompass pressing issues such as Democracy, Equity, Immigration, Climate, Artificial Intelligence, and more. There will also be talks that elevate BIPOC voices, climate fiction and poetry as tools for climate justice, LGBTQIA voices, and more.
The festival’s first-ever Writers’ Day offers 10 free writing workshops for emerging and published writers � including youth andd teens � led by creative writing faculty from Bay Area colleges,, universities and literary groups. Topics include haiku writing, writing across genres, historical fiction, creative nonfiction and how to tap into your creative unconscious. Space is filling up fast; register in advance here.
Native literature has long been a festival mainstay, this year shining an even brighter spotlight on Indigenous voices with a new Native California stage in partnership with Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Native American-focused programming includes award-winning author Greg Sarris and novelist Tommy Orange in conversation, cookbook author Sara Calvosa Olson on decolonizing your diet, Indigenous horror with Rebecca Roanhorse and Dani Trujillo and the inspiring young essayists of the annual Graton Writing Project.
Anchored by four outdoor stages, the festival’s free Outdoor Fair & Literary Marketplace (Sunday only) features more than 100 exhibitors, including an eclectic array of authors, independent booksellers, local publishers, writing groups and programs, literary clubs and organizations, book artists, libraries, reading resources and more. Hosted by Oakland publishing house The Collective Book Studio, the Outdoor Fair’s interactive Family Zone will feature author talks, readings, storytelling sessions, cooking demos, and Drag Story Hour! Other booths will feature book-related arts and crafts, a book scavenger hunt, Literacy Bingo, the popular Half Price Books Free Book Giveaway — and more!
The Bay Area Book Festival is BARTable, easy to get to, free, and fun for all. Bring family and friends and make a weekend of it June 1-2 in downtown Berkeley!
Check out the full line-up at www.baybookfest.org
10th Anniversary Bay Area Book Festival Brings Top Authors, Critical Conversations,
and Family Fun
The Bay Area Book Festival is throwing a 10th anniversary party, where festivalgoers will be treated to the top-tier speakers the festival is known to showcase as well as new attractions, including a full day of workshops for emerging writers, three evening headliner events, a reimagined Outdoor Fair in the park (Sunday only) and the inaugural Native California stage. The icing on the birthday cake? Almost everything is free.
This year’s ticketed headliners include the incomparable Joan Baez, cultural commentator Naomi Klein and a trio of book-to-screen superstars (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Piper Kerman and Alka Joshi). Free programming features nearly 100 speakers, including Jonathan Lethem, Amy Tan, Steve Phillips, Forrest Gander, and Berkeley poet laureate Aya de León, as well as rising stars like Tommy Orange, R.O. Kwon, gina Breedlove and poet Brontez Purnell. Dozens of panels will encompass pressing issues such as Democracy, Equity, Immigration, Climate, Artificial Intelligence, and more. There will also be talks that elevate BIPOC voices, climate fiction and poetry as tools for climate justice, LGBTQIA voices, and more.
The festival’s first-ever Writers’ Day offers 10 free writing workshops for emerging and published writers � including youth andd teens � led by creative writing faculty from Bay Area colleges,, universities and literary groups. Topics include haiku writing, writing across genres, historical fiction, creative nonfiction and how to tap into your creative unconscious. Space is filling up fast; register in advance here.
Native literature has long been a festival mainstay, this year shining an even brighter spotlight on Indigenous voices with a new Native California stage in partnership with Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Native American-focused programming includes award-winning author Greg Sarris and novelist Tommy Orange in conversation, cookbook author Sara Calvosa Olson on decolonizing your diet, Indigenous horror with Rebecca Roanhorse and Dani Trujillo and the inspiring young essayists of the annual Graton Writing Project.
Anchored by four outdoor stages, the festival’s free Outdoor Fair & Literary Marketplace (Sunday only) features more than 100 exhibitors, including an eclectic array of authors, independent booksellers, local publishers, writing groups and programs, literary clubs and organizations, book artists, libraries, reading resources and more. Hosted by Oakland publishing house The Collective Book Studio, the Outdoor Fair’s interactive Family Zone will feature author talks, readings, storytelling sessions, cooking demos, and Drag Story Hour! Other booths will feature book-related arts and crafts, a book scavenger hunt, Literacy Bingo, the popular Half Price Books Free Book Giveaway — and more!
The Bay Area Book Festival is BARTable, easy to get to, free, and fun for all. Bring family and friends and make a weekend of it June 1-2 in downtown Berkeley!
Check out the full line-up at www.baybookfest.org
Speaker: Özgür Narin
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Machine Learning Algorithms running on Artificial Neural Networks and particularly reinforcement learning were real breakthroughs of 2010s, Generative AI and transformers are of 2020s, all of them developed and spread to various branches.
And nowadays they even talk about an “existential risk” created by AI as if capitalism itself was not the real existential risk for centuries. So we should talk about capitalist production process of AI and the class structure of it.
Hence, I will first try to analyse the path from machine to machine-learning via Marx’s analysis of machine while considering the alienation as the dual and complementary part of it. Datafication of society is a consequence of this process. The data extractivism of capital transforms the datafication into profit seeking capitalist production as well as parameterisation of the society. So the data gathered in and for the sake of the capitalist production is the input of the capitalist cycle and at the same time actively intervening and manipulating both the labour process data and consumer behaviour data. The data was and is not “as given” in a capitalist production. It would be better to discuss this constant manipulation before “bias” and “ethical issues” in data gathering. AI and constantly produced and reproduced data sets transformed this problem into a new sphere. When we consider the machine learning algorithms using large dataset gathered through all cycles of capitalist social reproduction, it would be better to consider the alienation of total social labour and this new level of “manipulation”. I will try to discuss this problem and suggest “parameterization of society” vis a vis “datafication of society” considering the distinction between the social form of data collection that is capitalist data extractivism and the objective content of data gathering which is in fact a possibility to organize the social production in a different classless society. The key factor is the subjective side, that is the intersection of the producers of the AI architecture, algorithms and the data.
The evolution from machinery to AI is actually a social process that is structured by class struggle. So I will try to trace the historical development of producing “learning machines” as a class struggle and point out both sides of the development, i.e. capitalist side of AI research, from cybernetics to AI and the Soviet side of it. And finally, modern class struggle, workers involved in the production of AI versus Tech-giants…
Last but not the least, considering the rather futuristic scenarios of AI, I will discuss the limits of AGI and creating AI with ‘the ability to transfer learning from one domain to other domains’ namely “AI with the capacity to engage and behave intelligently in a wide variety of contexts”.
Our speaaker, Özgür Narin, is currently a union member and Assistant Professor of Economics at Ordu University in Turkey. He graduated from the Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University. He studied the capitalist production of science and technology, particularly innovation and the changing scientific labour process. His current research is on Artificial Intelligence “General Intellect” and the alternative reorganization of social production and society. His writing has appeared in Monthly Review and Science & Society
grassroots democratic organization that was formed as a conscious united front for justice against police brutality. The OGC is involved in the struggle for police accountability and is committed to stopping police brutality.
We fight against spy drones, facial recognition, tracking equipment, police body camera secrecy, anti-transparency laws and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones; we oppose “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” — to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government, and attempts to hide what government officials, employees and agencies are doing.