i just don't want to concede the ability to moderate (or not moderate).
if you go through the list of events, something should jump out: it seems designed to break people down into tiny little subsets. so, you have the meeting for trans people of colour, the meeting for latinas, the meeting for women of colour - and a few meetings that are exclusively geared at white people, too.
when i see that, i interpret it as counter-productive. you get all of these people together in the same space to talk about politics, then you break them into micro-demographics. if i was going to write the book on how to break-up the revolution without a stick, that's pretty much exactly what i'd write. break them down into divisions. make sure they don't talk to each other. make sure they walk out having seen nothing but their own reflections, and maybe with a heightened sense of isolation.
and, i mean, what else do you get out of walking into a conference like this and only talking to other people that are like you, or that can be categorized as statistically similar, anyways? you should expect to walk out of this place feeling isolated - because the conference was designed to isolate you!
where's the meeting on inter-racial class struggle? it's not in the list. there's an introduction to being a dj. there's nothing about bridging divides. it's all about creating and enforcing them.
then, i looked a little closer. this event has some major sponsors, including the ford foundation. now, what do you think the ford foundation wants out of an event like this? do you think the ford foundation wants to fund seminars on class struggle?
rather, i might suggest that what the ford foundation - as well as google, who is funding it through their (functional) mozilla subsidiary - really wants is data. well, if you're an advertising company, that's what you do, right? you break people down into these microscopic categories.
so, what is this going to be like? i'd expect to get asked a lot of questions, and for some people in the back to be taking notes.
the one thing that i pulled out that looked a little bit interesting was this workshop. it kind of seems a little anarchist at first glance. but, on second glance what came out was the likelihood that it's probably a focus group to unveil an advertising strategy. the website says venture capitalist all over it.
you need to be careful with this shit. but, this isn't real. don't be fooled into thinking that it is.
http://amc2016.sched.org/event/77Qf/peer-to-peer-sharing-economy-and-commons-roundtable
what i think that a lot of the reactionary right fails to realize is that a great deal of what they're railing against is really corporate advertising and people that get sucked into it looking for something better.