We spend our days obsessively checking email, texts, and social media on our tablets and smart devices. According to Douglas Rushkoff, this is no way to live. The media theorist has coined the term “present shock” to describe how the digital universe has taken us out of ourselves and changed the way the world works.

Those strange people's culture is to blame, we're told, when wife-battering or other interpersonal violence occurs in the households of immigrants from certain parts of the world. But does culture determine violent or misogynist behavior? And are non-Western cultures in fact regressive, as they're so often represented to be? Leti Volpp talks about double standards and the perilous politics of culture.

It's only been a decade and a half since the height of the AIDS epidemic. Yet there's profound amnesia about what happened during those years, in which hundreds of thousands of people died in this country, ignored by a government that only helped those with the disease after being forced through direct action. Writer Sarah Schulman argues that AIDS paved the way for massive gentrification in cities like New York and San Francisco. She describes the erasure of a liberatory queer culture and its replacement with a conservative one.

Why has the Bay Area been such a cauldron for the melding of art and politics?  And what did a period of heightened gentrification do to San Francisco's radical culture? Komotion International, the legendary artist collective and performance, music, and art space -- which nurtured musicians like Michael Franti, Consolidated, and Primus -- epitomized the spirt of rebellion and creativity, leaving a deep mark. Collective co-founders Robin Balliger and Mat Callahan discuss Komotion's glory years and eventual demise during the "code wars."

What does revolution mean to movement elders Grace Lee Boggs and Angela Davis? What should it encompass, and whom should it involve? Boggs and Davis spoke recently in Berkeley. And Daniel Rasmussen tells the story of the largest slave revolt in US history, which took place in 1811 in and around New Orleans.

If we find another society's cultural practices repulsive or inhumane, can we condemn those practices as morally wrong? Or is it presumptuous and ethnocentric to do so? In a new book, Steven Lukes explores the terrain of moral relativism and highlights efforts to identify moral norms and values that transcend nation and culture. (Encore presentation.)