Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 15
October 17, 2017
Team Human: Big Hunger
A high school basketball team organizes a canned food drive. A church volunteer group restocks the local pantry with donations from Walmart. Each example are seemingly positive pictures of American civic engagement… So what’s wrong with this picture?
On Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast today is Andy Fisher, author of Big Hunger: the Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups. In the book, Fisher tackles the big question of why chronic hunger and food insecurity persist despite the efforts of food banks, pantries, and charity. Fisher’s suggests that our effort to solve hunger with charity is missing a crucial component that would transform stop-gap measures into long-term solutions. Join Douglas and Andy as they take a critical look at the what Fisher calls the “non-profit industrial complex,” while looking toward a future where social equity figures into the equation of ending hunger in America.
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October 10, 2017
Team Human: Calming Technology
What is a robot? Are robots our friends? Does the term “friend” even apply? So begins this week’s episode of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case. Amber and Douglas look at how algorithmically programmed systems of automation and control might just be turning us into the robots. Case’s recent book, Calm Technology Design For the Next Generation of Devices proposes another way. How might we flip the script on systems that compress and atomize our every move? How might we use our technology to slow down rather than speed up – to resolve to sharper human detail rather than a pixelated blur. And finally, how might we use technology, including this podcast, to advance a slow-motion, empathetic, and deep state of calm?
Rushkoff begins with a monologue on the Jewish high holidays. Is prayer a distraction to the real world work of justice that must be done, or is there something deeper and more communal to retrieve?
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October 4, 2017
Team Human: “There’s No App For That”
Joining Douglas Rushkoff today over on the Team Human podcast is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That. On the show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change. Richard’s work calls on us to look at the fundamental ethical problems underlying climate issues such as overshoot, unsustainable growth, and inequality. Heinberg then challenges us to step out from hiding behind our technologies and acknowledge the deliberate moral intervention that is urgently needed if we are to foster a more resilient and more just community and ecosystem.
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September 27, 2017
Team Human: You Shall Be As Gods…
Team Human, Ep. 56 Professor Steve Fuller: “You Shall Be As Gods: Transhumanism, Posthumanism, and everything human in between.”
On today’s episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Professor Steve Fuller. Fuller teaches Sociology at the University of Warwick. In his recent book, Humanity 2.0, Fuller embraces a future vision in which technological and medical advancement will enable humans to evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations. Steve will use this concept to teach us what distinguishes transhumanist from posthumanist projects, and why such thinking should be taken seriously. While Rushkoff and Fuller may come from very different perspectives, they share common ground in questioning whether living as gods – longer, faster, stronger, smarter – will serve humanity or merely further existing inequality, injustice, and environmental catastrophe.
To open this show, Rushkoff looks at the ways being human is a team sport. It’s a future vision that recognizes collaboration, not competition, as the cornerstone of evolution. We’ll explore how this squares with the transhumanist project and more.
If you enjoy this conversation, Rushkoff shared the stage with Steve Fuller in 2015 at a conference held at IBM Watson, featured in Team Human Episode 53. An extended video version is available exclusively to Patreon subscribers.
Special thanks to Luke Robert Mason of Virtual Futures Podcast for coordinating this interview and recording Professor Fuller’s side of the conversation from the UK.
A huge thank you to our Patreon supporters. Minutes ago we reached our first funding goal! Your subscriptions keep this weekly podcast alive, so thank you! Please take a minute to review Team Human on iTunes. Your reviews help others discover this show.
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September 20, 2017
Team Human: Folding the Fringes
For this week’s Team Human, Douglas is out on the road in Austin, Texas where he caught up with longtime friend and cyberculture pioneer, Jon Lebkowsky. Jon and Douglas first look back on the promise of the early cyber revolution, and then look forward to the ways in which those quirky fringe elements might be folded back into the work of promoting justice, solidarity, and even a bit of ambiguity… Whether manifested in platform cooperatives, consensus building tools like Loomio, or in the spirit of Occupy, Lebkowsky and Rushkoff retrieve the thread of radical potential as it has evolved from those early days of the internet.
Douglas begins today’s show discussing his recent meeting with a group of billionaires whose fears of future social unrest have left them scrambling for apocalypse strategies to protect their wealth and lifestyle. Find out what the “insulation equation” is as Douglas challenges these executives to forgo the Walking Dead scenarios and join team human!
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September 12, 2017
Team Human: Blissfully Bored
When was the last time you found yourself truly bored? Have you lost those nooks and crannies in the day when you used to let your mind wander aimlessly in a daydream?
On today’s episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Manoush Zomorodi, host of the popular WNYC Studios podcast, Note to Self. On Note to Self, Manoush initiated a series of listener experiments aimed at breaking the influence of our digital devices and networks on our lives. Those social experiments led her to uncover the creative power of boredom, detailed in her brand new book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self .
On today’s show, Douglas and Manoush wander together as they interrogate the always-on media environment. In an era of constant entertainment, constant emergency, and constant distraction, must we fight for the mental space to just be bored? We’ll learn why boredom matters and more…
This episode begins with a monologue on the news media’s recent reporting on natural disaster and catastrophe. Has our appetite for spectacle confused our perception of disaster? As we watch a calamity like Hurricane Harvey or Irma across our screens, what lessons about might we learn from the darker side of our initial response?
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September 6, 2017
Team Human: Panel Discussion at IBM Watson
This week on the Team Human podcast we’re hosting a special episode and exclusive video. Episode 53 features an excerpt of a panel discussion recorded on location at IBM Watson in New York from August 2015, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff and produced by our friends at Virtual Futures in London. Douglas was joined by philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller, tech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, IBM Watson researcher Michael Karasick, and philosopher of technology, Dan O’Hara.
Patreon subscribers have exclusive access to the full, unedited video with an engaging question and answer session ( Patrons will find this in the previous Patreon Blog post ) at https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman. Start your monthly subscription today to support the show and get access to the Team Human Slack Channel as well as other subscriber rewards. July and August rewards are shipping this week!
Enjoy this discussion and please review Team Human on iTunes or your preferred podcast platform and help spread the word about the show!
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August 30, 2017
Team Human: Recalibrating For Trust
Consider a text message in which you are deciding where to meet for dinner with a friend. As you go back and forth in that stream of abbreviated communication, you suggest, “Let’s eat Italian,” to which your friend responds “Fine.” The one-word text sends you into a state of alarm. Did they mean “fine” as in “great,” or “fine” as in “Fine, you win, we can eat where you’d like”? Somewhere in this chain of communication, trust has been lost.
Featured on Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast today are William Softky and Criscilia Benford, a husband and wife team who are looking deep into the biophysical and mathematical underpinnings of establishing trust in communications. They’ve just published a paper titled “Sensory Metrics of Neuromechanical Trust” in the journal, Neural Computation. In this conversation, Softky and Benford join Rushkoff to dive deep into experiences of digital disorientation and screen addiction. What’s really going on in our brains as we consume more and more digital stimuli? Have our nervous systems been recalibrated by these flattened, two-dimensional interactions?
Opening today’s show, Rushkoff looks at the recent Mayweather vs. McGregor boxing match. Did this spectacle represent a surrogate Trump vs. Obama battle? And while that fight is over, the victor declared, what does it mean when governance itself becomes a prolonged spectacle?
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August 23, 2017
Team Human: Make It So: Civic Hall Labs
Elizabeth Stewart, founding executive director of Civic Hall Labs, empowers technologists who put people first, amplifying the “civic” of civic tech. On today’s Team Human podcast, Stewart joins Douglas Rushkoff for a conversation about technology innovations whose value is measured in their contribution to the public good. It’s a type of thinking that asserts the means of tech innovation to be just as important as the ends. We’ll learn about Elizabeth’s work and how Civic Hall Labs is fostering participatory, human-centered collaborations to solve difficult societal challenges.
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August 16, 2017
Team Human: The Tiny Magic of CyberFeminism
On this week’s Team Human podcast, Rushkoff talks with author, professor, filmmaker, and feminist activist Alexandra Juhasz. Douglas and Alexandra explore the dangers of a media landscape that amplifies the grotesque and sensational. They also look at how human agency and autonomy are threatened on our hypercommercialized media platforms. Drawing on her commitment to feminist values, Alex encourages an embrace of the “situatedness of our humanity” and the vitality of difference. Listen below or visit teamhuman.fm for more.
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