Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 14

Team Human: Stacco Troncoso “The Commons is the Glue”

Playing for Team Human today is Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation. Stacco brings with him deep knowledge and enthusiasm for the power of the commons. Stacco and the Commons Transition team put their faith in people, believing in the potential of diverse, empowered communities to address complex problems. Far from a utopian fantasy, P2P offers a wealth of resources including models from groups who have already successfully transitioned to a commons approach in governance, finance, and culture. Stacco and crew have just launched a new Commons Transition Primer, loaded with case studies and beautifully designed research on ways to make the commons transition a reality in your community.

Opening today’s episode, Rushkoff looks at the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. In his “by any means necessary” moment, why does Trump even bother to deny collusion with Russians? And is media’s obsession with the Russia story distracting us from Trump’s dangerous policies and appointments?

If you enjoyed this episode, dig deeper:

How can I take part in the Commons Transition
Commons in the Time Of Monsters: How P2P politics can change the world, one city at a time.
​​Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
​​Long: In-depth, longer articles
​​Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
​​More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links
http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/

Team Human shows are made possible by listeners like you. You can help support the show by subscribing via Patreon. Thank you!

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Team Human: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge “Weaponized Pleasure”

 

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has been one of my dearest and most human friends for the past few decades. Gen’s a musician, icon, cut-and-paste artist, occultist, and pandrogyne with whom I’ve worked and played in many ways over the years.

Gen founded The Coum Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV, with whom I played keyboards in the early 2000’s. Gen also embarked on a very personal cut-and-paste experiment with partner Jackie, where they both sought to unite through psychic and physical remixing.

Gen is currently challenged with a case of leukemia and has to stay close to the oxygen machine. But it seemed like a good excuse to bring out the portable recorder (generously funded by our Patreon subscribers!) and have a conversation.

(Visit the GoFundMe Campaign for Genesis Breyer P-Orridge https://www.gofundme.com/genesis-breyer-porridge)

Stephen decided to leave this mostly unedited, to give y’all a taste for what it’s like to sit in Gen’s apartment and just have a real conversation. Don’t worry, though – a conversation with Gen is a conversation about the fate of our species and reality itself.

Please accept it as our holiday gift.

-Douglas

-Douglas

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Team Human: Occult America

On this week’s episode of Team Human, occult scholar and author Mitch Horowitz. Mitch, the author of Occult America (Bantam); One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown); and Mind As Builder: The Positive-Mind Metaphysics of Edgar Cayce(A.R.E. Press) joins Douglas for a conversation about the shared histories of magic, capitalism, and American political thought. It’s a conversation that asks questions about the nature of the mind and the power of enthusiasm. What about optimism? What about celebration? What about anomalous behavior? Horowitz and Rushkoff make an argument for the progressive power of wild possibility – including the possibility that humans are not reducible to mere fleshy robots.

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Team Human: In Our Backyards

Joining Douglas on his Team Human podcast today is Erin Barnes co-founder of ioby. Ioby (in our backyards) is a “crowd-resourcing” platform for citizen-led, neighborhood-focused projects. Rather than just raise money, ioby mobilizes civic engagement by putting resources in the hands of local leaders who want to steward positive change in their neighborhoods.

Erin shares with Douglas how ioby harnesses the power of solidarity and real world connection. In doing so, ioby not only ignites civic participation, but also flips the script on the NIMBY mentality (not in my backyard). Ioby demonstrates the positive potential of local communities playing an active role in shaping public spaces and creating public good.

Opening today’s show, Rushkoff looks at the reversal of subject and object, figure and ground. Have we lost perspective on the two? Listen here:

or subscribe to Team Human on your favorite podcast app via teamhuman.fm

 

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How Being in the Crosshairs of the GOP Tax Plan Forces Progressive to Take Stock of Our Own Privilege

As most of us who have reviewed the proposed tax plan have now realized, the changes are pointedly directed at the upper middle class – specifically, those who didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

The elimination of the State Tax deduction, for just one example, hurts only those people who live in high-tax states, such as New York and California, the heart of blue America.

The corporate tax cuts even more pointedly disadvantage the upper middle class intellectual class. C corporations – like the big ones on the stock market – all get tremendous tax breaks.

S corporations, on the other hand – the small businesses and sole proprietorships owned by regular people – get much, much smaller deductions. Not only that, but S corporations run by white collar college graduate professionals, such as consultants, doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants, engineers, web developers are specifically excluded from the cuts. No, the S corporation tax cuts apply only to real, hands-on small businesses like plumbers, landscapers, carpenters, and other more blue collar enterprises.

The owners and employees of startups – the vast majority of which are located in New York and the Bay Area – are also directly and specifically punished by the new plan, which requires they pay taxes on stock options whether or not they are ever exercised. So the employee of a startup has to pay taxes on options that may never actually be worth anything.

In short, super rich people get a tax break on their passive stock gains. Big corporations get permanent tax cuts. And particular members of the working class get at least some nominal attention. Businesses that earn less than $37,000 a year do better; businesses that earn more than $260,000 a year do better. But all those businesses in-between – the kind run by upper middle class – they get screwed.

In a final, overt swipe at those who tend to vote against Trump, the plan eliminates the exemption for interest paid on college loans. After all, if education is inversely proportional to Trump support, why not disincentivized it?

On a certain level, though, the whole plan is genius. It’s basically saying, you white upper middle class bleeding heart liberals care so much about equality? You teachers and lawyers and intellectuals want think of yourselves as aligned with the working class? You identify with them? Well, go live like them!

What makes you think your job as a doctor or lawyer deserves so much more compensation than that of a bricklayer or ditch digger? You identify with those workers? You want to march in the street for those workers? Well, now you can get paid like those workers. Let’s level that playing field, okay?

Business millionaires and billionaires? We don’t count. (Private jet expenses are exempt under the new plan. Medical expense deductions are repealed.) Sure, if you want to be one of us, you can go into business and get rich. Even ultra-rich. That’s the American way. But if you want to go do some job, then you don’t get to be so comfortable. You can’t get wealthy as a professional. You can’t get rich as an employee – only as an entrepreneur. Not supporting institutions and government, but by tearing them down. Creative destruction. If you’re not willing to go to war and take those risks, then accept your fate: you don’t deserve to be rich.

It’s a self-interested, cynical, and politically vengeful stance. And the tax plan won’t even accomplish what it claims it’s doing. But it does force those of us well-meaning liberal members of the upper middle class to examine our own privilege.

We want to do social justice careers, but we also want to get paid $100,000 a year or more to do them. We want to call ourselves members of the middle class, but we want to earn more money than most of them. At least the Republicans are being direct about the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog landscape they’re endorsing.

Compared to them, we progressives verge on hypocrisy. We hide our wealth and privilege the way the hippies did at Woodstock. No, we’re not members of the 1% that currently owns half the world’s wealth. And taking our money away may not make any real difference to wealth disparity compared with taxing corporations or the ultra-wealthy just a teeny bit more.

But those of us who are arguing for a more equally distributed economy had better think about exactly how we want to object to being the first ones on the chopping block.

(This piece was adapted from my latest monologue on the TeamHuman show.)

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Team Human: More Than Mere Dirt

What can we learn from a mere handful of dirt? For Nikki Silvestri, soil is both a metaphor and the literal “fertile” ground through which complexity and diversity thrive. Having worked on issues of food systems, sustainability, and public health, Silvestri describes soil as the link through which to engage in the work of building community, resilience, and social equity. Today, in her conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, Silvestri offers a unique approach to systems thinking, grounded in a deep sense of humility in the face the immensely complex natural systems that thrive just below our feet.

Listen to the show here:

Nikki Silvestri is the founder of Soil and Shadow and the the former executive director of Green for All and the People’s Grocery.

Visit http://www.nikkisilvestri.com and https://www.soilandshadow.com/ to learn more about Nikki and her work.

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Team Human: “The Thrill of Democracy”

Playing for Team Human today are Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen from the Small Planet Institute. Lappé and Eichen are out on the road with a mission to reinvigorate “civic courage” and inclusive participation in democracy. Their latest book Daring Democracy Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want offers a diagnosis of what has come to ail our democracy and recommends the necessary cures, offering concrete examples of ballot initiatives, reforms, and collective organizing happening across the country. Counter to a despairing narrative on the current state of democracy in the U.S., Lappé and Eichen argue that people are indeed rising to take the reigns. Inspired by examples of deep organizing and the convergence of movements in places such as Democracy Spring, Democracy Awakening, and Occupy Wall Street, Lappé and Eichen see power shifting back into the people’s hands. Their analysis of how we got to where we are, coupled with their passion and optimism for change, is both contagious and empowering. In this Team Human conversation, Lappé and Eichen join Douglas to make a case for hope, courage, and optimism in this moment of turmoil and division.

Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue on the theme of democracy inspired by this conversation. Though it may have been easy to have lost faith in democracy after the 2016 election, perhaps election day is the wrong place to look if we really see democracy in action. It’s a monologue that asks: where does democracy begin for team human?… and lucky for us, today’s guests Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen are ready with the answer.

 

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Team Human: An Outsider’s Approach

Today on Team Human, we share a conversation with author, musician, humorist, and culture hacker Hugh Gallagher. Gallagher began his professional writing career thanks in part to a college entrance essay that went viral in the 90s, earning the distinction of being an early, if not the first, internet comedy meme. With lines like, “I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice… I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes…” Gallagher broke the mold, winning a national writing award, a beer with John Kennedy Jr., and a gig writing for Rolling Stone.

Douglas and Gallagher look back on Gen X culture hacking, discuss the professional career landscape for creatives, and talk about the inspiration behind Hugh’s latest novel Lifted, a work of digital fiction available via Radish Fiction. It’s a freewheeling Team Human conversation that embraces stepping out of binaries and defaults, and embracing the fringes.

All the music you hear on today’s show is thanks to Hugh’s alter ego, the 80s Belgian pop star VON VON VON.

Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue on penetrating consciousness though art, theater, and creative cultural expression.

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Team Human: Solving for Inequality?

Net impresario Tim O’Reilly now recognizes how the short-term focus of digital business is draining the real economy. Its algorithms have been programmed to extract value from us all. For O’Reilly, however, the solution is not to eliminate algorithms, but to write better ones.

If there’s an argument to made for technosolutionism, O’Reilly makes as good a case as there is. Rather than confronting O’Reilly on their differences, Rushkoff engages him, pushes gently, finds common ground, and looks to develop a shared approach to our economic woes.

Also, Rushkoff opens the show with a question: while the advance of technologies and our eagerness for the new may be inevitable, where in the process of on-boarding might we fold in human values?

 

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Team Human: Shareable Cities

Today on Team Human, Neal Gorenflo from Shareable.net joins Douglas on the podcast to spread the word about Shareable’s latest resource, Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons. Sharing Cities is an inspiring collection of 137 case studies and policies across a wide spectrum of issues that show how empowered communities are building citizen-run, democratic solutions using commons thinking.

Whether it be the grassroots artist organization Club Cultural Matienzo (CCM) that formed in Buenos Aires to build a cultural commons for the local arts scene in wake of a tragic nightclub fire, or land stewardship activists in Brooklyn reclaiming public space for urban farming and community gardening, Sharing Cities is filled with projects and policies ready to replicated and implemented in your community.

You can Contribute to Shareable for a hard copy or E-Book copy, or download a free pdf of Sharing Cities from Shareable.net:

https://www.shareable.net/contribute 

(the free PDF is bottom right on this page)

Listen to the show here:

Support Team Human on Patreon

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