Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 16

Team Human: Surrendering to the vast, the novel, the ambiguous

On this week’s episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Pixar animator Michael Frederickson for a conversation about the power of awe. What role does awe play in human evolution? And what distinguishes awe from spectacle–or terror even? Frederickson shares his insights as an artist and storyteller on the deeply human experience of “having our minds blown”. Plus, today’s episode begins with a monologue about the mysterious and awe-inspiring world of David Lynch and his return to Twin Peaks. It’s an episode looking at the way artists challenge us to surrender to the vast, the novel, and even the ambiguous.

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Team Human: More Than Just Money?

Can currency be understood as something more than just money? Can we retrieve multiple dimensions of value in our exchanges? Social hacker and currency designer Art Brock thinks so and is hard at work designing currencies to amplify connection, sharing, and social good. Check out this week’s episode of Team Human as we explore this and more.

Plus, today’s Team Human begins with a monologue on the new “see no evil, hear no evil” algorithms of Instagram. What are the true motives driving this move?

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Team Human: It’s Capitalism, Mate

When I first met Labor Party activist and technology/economics historian Richard Barbrook, he chided me for the “damage” my books had inflicted on his students, and how much energy he had to spend rehabilitating them. From Barbrook, I eventually realized, this is a compliment. Please enjoy this wonderful installment of Team Human, where Richard schools me on everything from the fundamentals of class formation to the KGB’s deepest desire: to join the West, and how Lenin was the first fascist.

Also, an opening monologue from me in which I challenge my own enthusiasm for Universal Basic Income – especially now that I’m hearing my own words spouted back at me by Silicon Valley investors and developers whose attraction to the idea seem entirely more self-interested: let’s have the government pay poor people so they can keep buying our stuff! It does nothing for the underlying inequality and, in many cases, will just exacerbate it. It’s asset inequality we have to address. Access to the means of production is worth a whole lot more than welfare.

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Team Human: Best Friends, Part 2

This week on Team Human, the soul-searching conclusion of my journey into the heart of darkness with author and friend Walter Kirn. We explore how disingenuously promoted concepts such as “creative destruction” are used to replace human civilization with a business plan.

What would it mean to maximize human virtues of compassion or intelligence instead of machine virtues like speed and extraction? Is there a higher power, and do we need one in order to value one another? Walter has been a profound influence on the conception of Team Human, and I invite you to enjoy the dangerous path he takes through this material.

Thanks to our new supporters on Patreon. Check out patreon.com/teamhuman to join the team. There you’ll find show exclusives, bonus material, and membership rewards for patrons of the show.

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Part One of the conversation with Walter Kirn :

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Team Human: Best Friends

We’re posting a very special Team Human this week – a conversation with my best friend from college, fellow writer and social critic Walter Kirn. Walter is most famous for his books Up in the Air (which became a George Clooney movie) and Blood Will Out (about a guy that fooled everyone into thinking he was a Rockefeller). But I know him as a fellow traveler.

Walter and I connect only once every few years, but when we do it becomes quite a marathon. So in this exchange, we cover everything from the replacement of humans by machines to the mechanization of human consciousness by algorithms. But the information we cover is really secondary to the style of engagement we’re striving to model: total honesty, a “yes and” approach to collaborative seeking, and mutual love and respect throughout.

We’ve broken up the conversation into two parts. We’ll post the second half next week.

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Today’s show inaugurates our launch on Patreon. Click the icon above or visit patreon.com/teamhuman to support the show. Your subscription not only earns premium gifts, but also grants you access to the TeamHuman Slack channel, where we discuss the issues raised on the show, hold production meetings, and entertain ideas for new guests and features. Joining Team Human means participating as fully and directly as you would like to in the creation of this show, and having a direct channel for feedback and discussion of what we’re doing. Whether you’re a long-time listener or just discovering the show for the first time, being a patron is a direct way to keep the Team Human conversation alive!

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Team Human: Leaving the World Better Than You Found It

Social Permaculture designer Adam Brock asks us to consider whether human beings may not really be the global environment’s greatest enemy. No, he’s not a climate denier so much as a cultural engineer whose step-by-step approach to everything from agriculture to economics suggests that we really can make the planet better instead of just extracting and destroying everything in our path.

Of course, that means adopting some of the techniques of our ancestors and aboriginal brethren, as well as directing our science and technology toward these constructive, circulatory ends.

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Fast Company: Amazon Eats the World

With its mega-acquisition of Whole Foods, the retail behemoth moves to suck the value out of yet another market.

“Amazon just bought Whole Foods,” my friend texted me seconds after the announcement of the proposed acquisition. “It’s over. The world.”

This unease is widespread, and has raised new calls for breaking up Jeff Bezos’s impending monopoly by force. Surely the company, which now generates 30% of all online and offline retail sales growth in the United States, and already controls 40% of internet cloud services, has reached too far. The 3% hike in Amazon’s share price since the announcement—which would alone more than pay for the acquisition—may attest less to the deal’s appropriateness than to investors’ growing fear that missing out on Amazon means missing out on the future of the economy.

Whatever you may think of Jeff Bezos, and whether or not antitrust regulations can justifiably be applied to a company whose expansion doesn’t raise but actually lowers costs for end consumers, may be beside the point. Many of us get that something is amiss, but are ourselves so deeply enmeshed in the logic of last century’s version of free-market industrial capitalism that we can’t quite bring ourselves to call this out for the threat it poses to our markets, our economy, and even our planet.

The reason why monopolies were broken up in an industrial economy was that they tended to gain control over the platforms through which their products were distributed. The biggest oil company ends up controlling shipping and refineries, the biggest airline controls too many gates, and the biggest phone company controls the wires.

But in a digital economy, the platform is the business. Netflix content sells its platform. Apple’s devices sell its supposed “ecosystem.” Amazon’s book business, like Uber’s cab business, was just an easy foothold—the low-hanging fruit of an existing but inefficient marketplace—through which to establish a platform monopoly. From that beachhead, the company then pivots to other verticals.

The problem is, when an existing market is merely a means to another end, the company doesn’t consider the long-term effects of its actions. Amazon treated the book industry the same way companies like Walmart once treated the territories into which they expanded: Use a war chest of capital to undercut prices, put competitors out of business, become the sole employer in the community, turn employees into part-time shift workers, lobby for deregulation, and effectively extract all the value from a given region before closing up shop and moving to the next one.

This model of doing business—one that even a proto-fascist like Henry Ford would have considered obscene—has not served corporations well. As the data now reveals, corporate profits have been steadily decreasing relative to corporate size over the past 75 years. That’s right: Corporations are great at extracting all the value from a marketplace, but really bad at deploying the money they accumulate in the process. They take all the poker chips off the table, leaving nothing for the other players to exchange between themselves. And by sucking their customers and suppliers dry, such companies end up destroying the marketplaces on which they depend for revenue. It’s a form of financial obesity, where the only thing left for the company to do is acquire a new marketplace, extract all its value, and move on.

In the real world, such extraction took years, even decades to run through its cycle. In a digital economy, “network effects”—which is when a product or service’s value increases the more people who use it or work to create it —accelerate the cycle so that an entire taxi industry can be turned into an “internet of things” in a matter of months.

It’s not that internet founders are somehow more evil or rapacious than their forebears. It’s simply that when companies are platforms, survivability and scalability amount to the same thing. Just as winner-takes-all network effects lead to just one Taylor Swift and millions of penniless artists, these same dynamics promote the establishment of platform monopolies like Amazon.

The problem is less that these single platforms emerge than the fact that their business plans are taken from the obsolete play books of the industrial age, where extraction was the only game in town. While internet servers and financial capital can scale up almost infinitely, the real world cannot. Humans only have so much time and attention in a given day, and the topsoil only has so many nutrients in a given acre. As the merchants of abstracted digital products, like ebooks and streaming media, apply their same business models to the markets and environment on which real people depend for sustenance, power-law dynamics become a lot more dangerous.

Not that Whole Foods was ever a sustainable business in itself. Healthy food and sustainable agriculture are simply incompatible with year-round organic summer produce in all 50 states. However catchy the slogan, capitalism really has no room to be conscious. Of the three factors of production—land, labor, and capital—the “consciousness” part of the equation has always been provided by the places and the people.

Which means that if we’re actually going to confront the devastating potential of an Amazon monopoly, we have to come to grips with more than the way one company has seized control of multiple verticals. We must look instead at how we’ve employed our digital platforms solely in the service of an extractive industrial-age model of growth, and decide whether we’re capable of upgrading to a genuinely digital and distributed form of capitalism. This would mean adopting circular, even revenue-based models that sustain our marketplaces—instead of simply colonizing them.

First published in Fast Company

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Team Human: Whose Global Village?

In the good old days, the big ethical conversation online centered on the “digital divide.”If only every African child had a laptop, the thinking went, then we’d get the universal equality promised by the Enlightenment. But that logic has also been consistently challenged by those of us who see more than a little bit of cultural and economic imperialism embedded on these devices and networks.

This week on Team Human, I speak with Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor and author of Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World. He’s thought longer and deeper than I have about the impact of the net on aboriginal societies, as well as how indigenous peoples can use technology for their own benefit, rather than that of Facebook and Google.

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Team Human: There is no Enemy Team

Just as some Americans fear anyone in a hijab, some progressives now shudder when they go by a house with an American flag over the door. Worse, our knee-jerk reactions to our president’s twitter posts and misdirections makes us so predictable as to be ineffectual: we become utterly incapable of reconciling with the poor confused souls who have surrendered to the fear and hate being fed to them by the irresponsible but well-funded propaganda arms of the Russo-American oligarchy.

Team Human can’t treat the other team as the enemy. It denies us some of the satisfaction of getting to hate the f’ing idiots who – left to their own devices – will surely kill us all. But it’s one we have to learn. Luckily, we’ve got some visionaries like Loomio.org co-founder Richard Bartlett to help us learn to occupy a reality in which forging consensus works and even feels better than a winner-takes-all victory.

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Team Human: Reveling in the Unspoken

Computers are great at resolving things; human beings, on the other hand, can contend with sustained paradox. Filmmaker and Alternate Reality Game designer Kevin McLeod reconnects us with what once made movies so special: they didn’t make sense, forcing us into a state of awe and ambiguity that is uniquely human.

Meanwhile, I use my monologue to announce that I have started on a new book, Team Human: A Manifesto, to be published by WWNorton next year.

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