Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 21

Reinvent: Bringing People and Places to the Table

Professor and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff, author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, doesn’t blame the billionaires for income inequality—he blames the operating system. “It’s not about redistributing the spoils of capitalism after the fact,” said Rushkoff, “It’s about pre-distributing the means of production before the fact.” Our market, Rushkoff says, prioritizes stockholder profit over corporate sustainability. “The object of the VC is not to build a company. The object of the VC is to flip the company for 100x or 1000x of their original investment,” said Rushkoff. He gave examples of companies that he thinks are getting certain things right, like Kickstarter, a revenue-based business that chose an alternative way to structure its stock options; Meetup, which still profits a few million dollars annually and brings people together face to face; and Chobani, which gave ten percent of their shares to their employees pre-IPO.

In terms of regulating what we are referring to in this series as the sharing economy, Rushkoff believes that first and foremost, people and places need to have a seat at the table. “The city should be a shareholder in a company that’s using its infrastructure to run itself,” said Rushkoff. He believes we need to do a better job of requiring cooperation between parties that are incentivized differently. His advice to individuals? “Invest locally, if you can…Share with other people. Do ring on your neighbor’s doorbell, and say, ‘Do we both need to have snow blowers here? Can I use yours and you use my lawn mower?’ Create ways to actually cooperate. It sounds socialist, I’m sure it sounds really foreign, but the fewer lawn mowers we have, the less pollution we have.”

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Digital Trends – No Secrets, No Shame: How Technology Forces Honesty

Read this piece at Digital Trends

I once saw a human lie detector perform at a conference – one of those guys who can call a dozen people up on stage and match them up with the objects that belong to them, or even “deduce ” their email passwords. He wasn’t doing magic, of course, but simply reading the cues and tells we all give one another all the time. As any gate investigator on Israel’s national airline knows – and its security record attests – our bodies give us away.

If we really do make subtle micro-gestures that betray ourselves to one another, then we must, on some level recognize those signs in others. Sure, some con-men and actors have gotten really good at masking their dishonesty or misdirecting our attention. But many of us have gotten really good at missing the signals we don’t want to see, or lying to ourselves about someone’s truthfulness against our own better judgment.

Subconsciously, anyway, we all pretty much always know when the other is lying. At best, all we do by lying is add noise to the signal, trigger alarm bells in the other person’s unconscious defense mechanisms, and push people away from us in the long run. So why bother to lie at all? Whatever it is we think we’re hiding, everyone already knows, at least deep down.

In an age when well-founded fears of government or corporate invasions of our privacy loom, I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along. The abuses of our private information notwithstanding, could we be looking at a larger shift toward greater honesty?

Nothing to be ashamed of

Don’t get me wrong: It sucks that companies and agencies pore through our data, and sort it algorithmically to predict our future choices before we know them ourselves. Our social-media feeds steer us toward the paths most consistent with our big-data consumer profiles, reducing our spontaneity and manipulating us away from individual agency and unpredictable outcomes.

But the other side of the dynamic is that in order to get us to acquiesce to all this exposure, the sorts of things we are ashamed or afraid to disclose become less aberrant. Hell, marijuana is becoming legal. Gay people are allowed to get married. Transgender kids are getting bathroom rights in high school. How many people who were once afraid of what their email archives or web searches reveal to law enforcement or future employers can now say, “What do I have to hide? Pot’s not a crime, anymore.”

And as we’ve been reminded once again over the past few weeks, digital technology exposes abuses by individual police officers as well as systemic bias. There’s just no hiding anymore.

Internet as Uni-Mind

In the earliest days of the net, I remember young ravers telling me that the internet was itself just the clumsy precursor to the real connection we would one day experience through telepathy and other evolutionary advances. By their logic, the exposures we’re contending with today – whether it’s your girlfriend seeing that email to your ex, or your employer finding out you smoke pot – won’t be matters of technological surveillance. That’ll just be how things are when we’re all truly connected.

No, we’re probably not evolving toward an organically shared, telepathic “uni-mind” anytime soon. In fact, what these optimistic young net enthusiasts were imagining may actually be closer to an honesty we experienced long ago – before our media gave us so many opportunities to obfuscate the truth, hide from one another, and lose the intimacy we shared.

Before the invention of writing, for example, people could communicate only face to face. To lie to someone in person is a whole lot harder, on many levels, than writing a false note. While communication could be extended through time and space, it no longer had the interpersonal reinforcement of one’s spoken promise. It was more a matter of the law, and how to get around it.

Likewise, the printing press changed people’s once unquestioning relationship to the word of God and the actions of government. Ads on radio and television sold mythologies and pitched lifestyles that were unattainable lies. To accomplish this, these media alienate us from one another and ourselves.

The net offers to do the opposite: reveal truths. And while at first these may be crude truths like political scandals or illegal acts, those might actually be easier to deal with than the personal truths we hide from one another. Think honestly for a minute. How devastating would it be for certain people in your life to know all the secrets your online activities could tell them? And at the same time, this very fear is an indication of just how much we are living our lives in shame, secrecy, and isolation? How much might be released – and gained – if we could break through those boundaries?

Escaping digital loneliness

In one of the most intimate moments of the first season of Mr. Robot, a TV show about cyber espionage, the highly alienated, vigilante hero hacker confesses to his therapist. He spills everything he knows about her from hacking her personal emails, web searches, and social media connections. He knows her heartaches, her porn preferences … her very soul. It’s a horrifying moment, but also the most profound human connection we see our hero make over the course of the series. True intimacy.

As he apologizes, in his way, for the invasion of privacy, he adds, “But I’ve helped a lot of people. I want a way out of loneliness, just like you.”

Could part of the reason why this show is resonating so much with people – particularly those of us who spend so much time and energy on things digital – be that we share some measure of his sense of isolation and despair? Perhaps digital technologies don’t isolate us from one another so much than previous media, but they remind us of how much we do and don’t share with one another. Even the chronic oversharing we see on social media may be one small indication of a repressed, almost bulimic urge to release everything, to everyone.

I would never advocate compromising our digital privacy – particularly in an environment where selective enforcement, illegal government spying, and corporate manipulation are rampant. It’s simply not safe out there. But we must also recognize the value of networked “truth serum” for a society as alienated from each other as ours has become.

Besides, everybody already knows.

Sounds more certain than “guess,” and I think this is what these lie detectors would claim to be doing?

The piece rests heavily on the premise that everyone intuitively recognizes a liar, but that’s going to be contentious. Maybe we could flesh it out more. How do you explain “everyone knowing” when we have con men taking people for thousands of dollars, spouses cheating on each other, etc? Clearly, people still get burned by liars. My guess for an explanation: They know but they want to believe otherwise. If that’s the case, let’s plug it in there to explain.

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The New Nationalism Of Brexit And Trump Is A Product Of The Digital Age

Read this piece at Fast Company

Most of us thought digital technology would connect the whole world in new ways. The Internet was supposed to break down those last boundaries between what are essentially synthetic nation states and herald a new, global community of peers.

National governments were considered extinct. Internet evangelist (and Grateful Dead lyricist) John Barlow dismissed them in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace 20 years ago: “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

But the Internet age has actually heralded the opposite result. We are not advancing toward some new global society, but instead retreating back to nationalism. Instead of moving toward a colors of Benetton racial intermingling, we find many yearning for a fictional past when people like to think our races were distinct, and all was well.

Welcome to the digital media environment. It is not a continuation of the television environment that preceded it, but an entirely distinct landscape for human society, which engenders very different attitudes and behaviors.

A media environment is really just the kind of culture engendered by a particular medium. The invention of text encouraged written history, contracts, the Bible, and monotheism. The clock tower in medieval Europe led to hourly wages and the time-is-money ethos of the industrial age. Different media environments encourage us to play different roles and to see, think, or act in particular ways.

The television era was about globalism, international cooperation, and the open society. TV let people see for the first time what was happening in other places, often live, as it happened. We watched the Olympics, together, by satellite. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Even 9-11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event.

Television connected us all and broke down national boundaries. Whether it was the British Beatles playing on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York or the California beach bodies of Baywatch broadcast in Pakistan, television images penetrated national divisions. I interviewed Nelson Mandela in 1994, and he told me that MTV and CNN had more to do with ending the divisions of apartheid than any other force.

But today’s digital media environment is different. At the height of his media era, a telegenic Ronald Reagan could broadcast a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demand that Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Today’s ultimate digi-genic candidate Donald Trump demands that we build a wall to protect us from Mexicans.

This is because the primary bias of the digital media environment is for distinction. Analog media such as radio and television were continuous, like the sound on a vinyl record. Digital media, by contrast, are made up of many discrete samples. Likewise, digital networks break up our messages into tiny packets, and reassemble them on the other end. Computer programs all boil down to a series of 1’s and 0’s, on or off.

This logic trickles up to the platforms and apps we use. Everything is a choice—from font size to the place on a “snap-to” grid. It’s either 12 point or 13 point, positioned here or there. Did you send the email or not? There are no in-betweens.

So it’s no wonder that a society functioning on these platforms would tend toward similarly discrete formulations. Like or unlike? Black or white? Rich or poor? Agree or disagree? In a self-reinforcing feedback loop, each choice we make is noticed and acted upon by the algorithms personalizing our news feeds, further isolating each one of us in our own ideological filter bubble. Not one of the thousands of people who show up in my own Twitter feed support Brexit or Trump. For those supporters, I am sure the reverse is true. The Internet helps us take sides.

This is very different from the television environment, which engendered a “big blue marble” melting pot, hands-across-the-world, International Space Station, cooperative internationalism—well-funded by globalist foundations from Rockefeller and Ford to Soros and Clinton (who are both still espousing the transnational values of a television world).

We are flummoxed by today’s nationalist, regressively anti-global sentiments only because we are interpreting politics through that now-obsolete television screen. The first protests of the digital media landscape, such as those against the World Trade Organization in Seattle made no sense to the network news. They seemed to be an incoherent amalgamation of disparate causes: environmentalists, labor activists, and even anti-Zionists.

What unified them, however—more than their ability to organize collectively on the Internet—was their shared anti-globalism. The WTO represented the peak of global cohesion, at least as orchestrated by the world’s biggest corporations. The protestors had come to believe that the only entities capable of acting on the global level were ones too big for human beings to control.

Those protests were followed by Arab Spring, often misinterpreted as a global movement, when it was really more of a series of nationalist revivals. These were not young people demanding to be part of a world community of revolutionaries. These were local revolutions, with clearly defined boundaries.

The breakdown of European cohesion can be understood the same way. The European Union is a product of the television environment: open trade, one currency, free flow of people across boundaries, and the reduction of national identities to mere soccer teams. (That goes a long way to explaining the rise of hooliganism over the past few decades.) The transition to a digital media environment is making people a whole lot less tolerant of this dissolution of boundaries. Am I Croatian or Serbian? Kurd or Sunni? Greek or European? American or Mexican?

But if that newfound need for discrete identity were the entirety of the dynamic, things shouldn’t have gotten quite as jingoistic or xenophobic. No. There’s something else fueling Trump’s backward-looking “Make America Great Again,” and the Brexiters’ “Take Back Control.” It’s the other main bias of digital media: memory.

Memory is what computers were invented for in the first place. In 1945 when Vannevar Bush imagined the “Memex” on which computers were based, he described it as a digital filing cabinet. And even though they can now accomplish much more than data retrieval, everything computers do—all of their functions—simply involve moving things from one part of their memory to another. RAM and ROM are just kinds of memory.

Meanwhile, as Wikileaks, Google, Ed Snowden, and the NSA continually remind us, everything we do online is stored in memory. Whatever you said or did on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, or Twitter is in an archive, timeline, or server somewhere, waiting to be retrieved by someone.

So when we combine these two biases—boundaries and memories—we get Brexiters justifying isolation as a confirmation of distinctly British values and the return to a nationalist era, when foreigners and other non-whites knew their place. Trump’s followers, likewise, recall a clearly redlined past when being white and American meant enjoying a safe neighborhood, a sense of superiority, and guaranteed place in the middle class. Immigrants were fellow Irish and Italians—not foreigners, refugees, or terrorists leaking illegally across permeable national boundaries.

To be sure, globalism has had some genuinely devastating effects on many of those who are now pushing back. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high, as the mitigating effects of local and national economic activity is dwarfed by that of global trade and transnational banks. But the way people are responding to this pressure, so far anyway, is strictly digital in spirit.

In some sense, those of us who want to preserve the one-world vision of the TV media environment are the ones who must stop looking back. If we’re going to promote connection, tolerance, and progressive internationalism, we’ll have to do it in a way that’s more consonant with the digital media environment in which we are actually living.

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CNN – Tesla crash highlights real problem behind self-driving cars

Read this piece at CNN.com

We think of automobiles as American as baseball, apple pie, and hotdogs – or at least that’s what the car advertisers have gotten us to believe.

But as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s investigation into a fatal self-driving car accident should remind us, the automobile’s centrality to the American way of life was an expensive and political battle with nearly uncountable human casualties.

The latest permutation on this theme occurred in May, when a self-driving Tesla-S failed to register the side of a white tractor-trailer truck against a pale sky. In its statement on the accident, Tesla is quick to remind us that the 40-year-old man killed in the crash was a technology consultant and autonomous vehicle enthusiast — as if a martyr for the greater cause of civic transportation.

If anything, the cause of the crash can be chalked up to the incompatibility between humans and autonomous vehicles. Had the tractor-trailer also been driven by computer, it could have been on the same network as the Tesla. Like an air traffic control system, the network could have orchestrated the safe passage of both vehicles.

The problems emerge when computerized vehicles don’t have such networking at their disposal. Instead, we’re asking the poor Tesla to drive using the same senses mere humans use – which is why the car missed the fact that its entire field of vision was occupied not by sky, but by truck. As autonomous vehicle proponents like to point out, these problems would be solved if robotic cars weren’t required to share the road with humans. We people are the problem.

It’s an argument reminiscent of that made by early car manufacturers, who were being criticized for the high numbers of pedestrian injuries and fatalities on streets. The companies went on a massive public relations effort to shift the blame, and came up with the term “jay walker” to describe the country rube who didn’t know how to cross a street and was deserving of ridicule. Automobile clubs encouraged people to exterminate “the Jay Walker family” – and their little Walker children. Presumably, this was to be done through education, not running them over with cars.

We now assume automobiles have right of way – both on the roads, and as a social value – making it hard for us to imagine transportation solutions that don’t involve them. But it was actually hard to persuade people to purchase automobiles in the first place, and rightly so.

Back before automobiles, factory workers would clock out for the day, buy a newspaper, and sit on a trolley with a beer and a cigar. It took a lot of social engineering to get that worker to give up his relaxed drink and paper and submit, instead, to another hour of operating a heavy and dangerous machine – at his own expense.

It was such a tough sell, that a significant portion of the American way of life had to be retrofitted to the automobile in order for car ownership to make any sort of sense. The suburbs – the result of heavy automobile industry lobbying – can best be understood as the reconfiguration of the American landscape in such a fashion as to necessitate the use of private automobiles. GM famously bought out and closed rail and bus lines in order to force the issue.

Now that we live in an automobile culture, it’s only natural that our leading technologists seek transportation solutions that build on the automobile. After all, they are more expensive (and thus profitable) to manufacture than any sort of mass transit, and their costs are externalized to individual consumers, who see them as high-tech status symbols rather than financial obligations. For all their programming wizardry, they are nonetheless incapable of re-imagining transportation beyond a computer steering the wheel of a traditional motorcar.

If Google, Tesla, and the other tech behemoths looking to remake transportation had even a fraction of the chutzpah and innovative capacity of General Motors, Ford, and their automobile counterparts did in the early 20th century, they would be looking toward reprogramming transportation from the ground up. Imagine solar-powered light rail, public hovercrafts, or buses with pods that detached for the final blocks of traveI. Instead, they seem capable only of adopting the car industry’s PR strategy of casting humans as the enemy of technological progress.

But it is not we humans who are the jaywalkers in this case. It is the technology firms, whose outmoded vision of transportation will keep us trapped in a war with machines that we would do better to leave behind.

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52 Insights – Has Technology Failed Us?

Read this interview at 52 Insights

The natural successor to philosopher of communication theory Marshall Mcluhan, Rushkoff was one of the first adopters of cyber culture but quickly saw how big business overturned the promise of the digital age in favour of making money. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Rushkoff for a pseudo Marxist rather than a media theorist. He uses words like “value extraction” and “scorched earth approach” and there is a lot of truth and heartfelt compassion in what Douglas has to say. His ability to cut through all the jargon of the tech age and say it as it is especially in his latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, is refreshing. A punk and pioneer, Rushkoff comes at this hyper-capitalist sector with venom. He has been left heartbroken having originally thought that this tech explosion would bring us the fruits and spoils of open collaborations and more transparency. Nonetheless his fight goes on, Rushkoff opens up to us passionately about the disfigurement of the digital age and how we can try to fix it.

Douglas, I’ve been following your work for some time and I have to say at times I find it a little confusing. I am trying to figure out which side of the tech divide you are on. Earlier on in your career you were one of the earliest adopters of cyber culture and now it seems like you’ve gone off the other end?

Oh not at all! I love technology! I think digital technology is powerful and could likely solve the majority of humanities problems. I honestly do. From climate change, to distribution of income, to sensor-based agricultural practices, to food, to education. Digital technology is amazing, but when all of the decisions about how we deploy and use digital technology are in the hands of people who solely want to make money by having money, then what we do is implement a very dangerous form of digital capitalism. We’re not in a free market. We’re not in a place where the people have the same access to tools and technology as the masters. When a young person has an idea they automatically go to a money person because they think that’s the only way to get their product developed. But it turns out the beauty of the internet age is that you don’t need money to make a project, you can just do it! That’s what the kids at Slack realised and now they have this giant company that everyone is afraid of because they didn’t take any VC money.

In relation to building a startup, we spoke to Fareed Zakaria and he said millennials are now worshipping people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. They are the new poster children of our age, even though there are probably a lot of people out there that deserve more attention. Is the digital economy just a house of cards, or an emperor’s new clothes? So many young people are out there spending 10 or 15 years of their lives building something that they think is going to contribute but in reality with all this borrowed money and high percentage failure it’s a weak contribution.

I’ve seen it happen so many times. I think that many young developers and entrepreneurs do start with an idea that they genuinely believe in. They believe it will help the world in some way and be empowering not just to them and their investors but to some industry or consumer base. But then they take money from angels or venture capitalists and they’re forced to pivot. They’re forced to accept a different logic. Some are mad about it but some are like, “oh I get it. I got this far with this idea but now I have to deliver a home run. I’m in a different game and the rules are different.” The original product is no longer the main product of the company. Now the main product of the company is the stock. How are we going to sell this stock to the series A people? And then the series B people? And finally to IPO when it no longer matters what this company does. It’s about the win. So business itself becomes gamified. And Bezos is a winner, though he hasn’t won yet. It’s him versus Sergey Brin, versus Mark Zuckerberg.

You make the point that you’d like the public to reject platform monopolies like Uber in favour of worker owned co-ops, orchestrated through authenticated systems like bitcoin and blockchain. I think a lot of people prefer a more open source, gentle democracy, yet everyone is still sitting in café’s drinking their lattes and checking their phones.

Right. That’s why we don’t have it. Everyone would like all these good things but rather than waiting two minutes to hail a cab, they’re all still taking the short term fix and getting an Uber. So yeah, but people don’t right now have the cues to think differently. The ways that they do have to think differently is sort of limited to kneejerk Donald Trumpian responses. It’s tricky because people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have all the convenience of digital industrialism but also somehow have their jobs and wealth and everything that would come with a different social system. As I see it, the reason people are attracted to Trump and Brexit is that the college educated competent government officials and CEOs are not addressing the real problems.

Where Bernie Sanders is right is that, if Hilary Clinton is in the pocket of Goldman Sachs then people are right to question her allegiance. Either she’s cynical, which I don’t think she is, or she believes that their model of economic extraction is somehow going to trickle down into the general public. And it’s not. She’s no worse than Tony Blair. I don’t know how you feel about him but these people would have been considered conservative when I was growing up. Economically speaking anyway.

A lot of your newer work revolves around these technology mega-companies that infringe on our lifestyle. Some people think it’s for the good and some people think it’s for the bad, but don’t you think that they should have more of a responsibility or at least a large discourse about how they can fix a lot of these hellish issues that humanity are facing?

You would think so. I’ve gone to the actual companies and spoken to them, and the odd thing about them is how liberal they are, they also think that things like guaranteed minimum income will just arise to fix the problem. I gave a talk at Uber and they said – we don’t really worry about all the out of work cabbies because they’ll get guaranteed minimum income. It’s almost like they stressed the word minimum. Like, don’t worry, the peasant class will still have enough money to keep Uber going because the government will make up the difference that we’re not paying them in salary. But how is the government supposed to do that if these businesses are completely irregulated and storing all their money offshore and not paying any tax?

So then the question remains to be asked, if we cannot rely on big business to help us, what is their purpose?

Well the way I worded it in Program Or Be Programmed was, who’s your customer? Is Facebook’s customer the little boy who is using it to make friends? No, it’s the company that is buying the little boy’s social graph. And once you understand that then you understand who the platform is for. Who is Uber’s customer? It’s not the driver certainly, which it should be. It’s not the passenger, which it could be. It’s the shareholder, the investor. Uber doesn’t care about creating a decent, sustainable taxi industry, it’s going to move through it the same way that clear channel moved through the FM dial in American radio.

If you were in a room with Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim cook, what would you say to them?

These very same things. That they shouldn’t look at one another as competitors. I guess the main thing I would do is tell them that they have to lobby in Washington to change the way that capital gains and dividends are taxed. If dividends were taxed low and capital gains were taxed high then the capital they gain from their shareholders to grow their businesses would disappear. Then they would be pressured instead to create sustainable revenue and not to grow, because growth would mean higher taxes. It would change the whole thing. This is what we’re facing now. I’ve given talks at companies like IBM and Coke and Pepsi, these are all companies that are required to grow. If you’re one of the top fifty biggest companies in the world and you’re still required to grow, that’s a real problem. I would try to help them understand that the obligation to grow is an artefact of the industrial age and for being programmers they are painfully ignorant of the operating systems on which their companies are running. If they really want to be disruptive, they would figure out how to disrupt more than just some tiny little market.

Walk me through the mood right now in Silicon Valley and also the media landscape. I’ve never seen so much disruption in the media and it seems like such a chaotic time for social media as well?

I think a lot of the mood is like what I described in Present Shock in 2013. People are so busy and constantly trying to keep up with all of these news feeds that are poking at them, so it’s hard for them to apply any narrative to their experience. They don’t know what’s going on. They’re just moving through their day moment to moment, and that’s a disorienting place to be because they’re watching the time if their lives slip away without satisfaction, another day gone to Instagram.

As opposed to being caught up in your own mind, before social media, and just watching your life go by in a different way?

No, I think people had a more physical experience of one another before. It’s very calming and reassuring for the human organism to look into someone else’s eyes, to literally move into sync with a person. Now we have so much communication without any of those subtle cues or reciprocal reinforcement and it ends up with us feeling empty and more exhausted. People are living between their emails and their calendar, making appointments that they don’t even want to have and thinking, “when am I going to fuck my wife? Or spend time with my kid? Or do any of the things that used to make us happy?”

So there’s that on one hand and on the other hand there’s – “can I get in on this thing before it’s completely gone?” People can sense that we’re in a bubble and they’re not sure if there’s a way to cash in on it, or if they should start preparing for a world after this is gone, when there is no more bubble to hitch onto .The mood in the startup community is changing, and I think Mike Judge’s show Silicon Valley has been a great education for a lot of people. If you look at the numbers, IPO’s are going down, valuations are going down. The number of companies seeking Series A and Series B are going down. People are looking for less investment at lower valuations because they finally realised that the more investment and bigger valuation they take, the less control they have over their company, and the less likelihood they have of coming out of it with anything. I’ve spent the last five years doing talks where I basically say, you’re better off having a one in ten chance of becoming a millionaire than a one in a million chance of becoming a billionaire. They realise – “hey, if I just made 10 or 20 million that would still be pretty cool.”

I get on the bus every morning and I am succumb to my technology addiction like everyone else, but sometimes I look up and check out how many people are actually looking out of the window rather than at their phones. It’s usually about 50/50. Do you think this trend will continue in 50 years?

It’s hard to know what will happen. I like the optimism implicit in your question, asking, what will we be like in 50 years rather than whether we will be here in 50 years. The question of how we will have adapted to technology seems to be a much smaller proportion of the impact of technology than all of the externalized impacts of technology that we don’t talk about.

I’m less concerned with how the iPhone is changing my vision than the two refrigerators’ worth of electricity the iPhone is using when it’s operating, or the African kids that are being sent into caves to get rare earth metals to put into my battery, or the electronic waste that’s being buried in South America and China, or the children of Pakistan who are being poisoned by old CRT monitors. These people are going to be impacted way more. In my own crowd and the young people I talk to, I actually don’t see people so enamoured of their technology as older people. It’s the boomer and maybe some Gen-X-ers or Gen-Y who love all of this stuff, their Internet of Things. Younger people either know they can’t afford that stuff or really just don’t care so much. They don’t see it as so central to their experience. Yeah there’s a lot of texting going on but even that. . . I look at my daughter’s class, they’re 10 or 11 years old and they don’t like the stuff. I think we’re going to see people using technology much more appropriately in the future and in a more limited fashion. That could mean a very big disruption for the growth of all these internet service companies that think we will just want to do more and more. Then again maybe they will just fade into the background. Maybe you’ll have smart devices that can get data from what you’re doing but they don’t affect you as much.

What really keeps you up at night? What are you most concerned about in society?

The thing that disturbs me most is when people accept the artefacts that have been left for them as the given circumstances of nature. When people look at corporate capitalism, or Facebook, or the religion they have, as if they were given by god and not invented by people. It’s this automatic acceptance of how things are that leads to a sense of helplessness about changing any of them. I am deeply concerned about the environment and the degree to which temperatures are rising, and how the worst expectations of environmentalists have already been surpassed.

I didn’t used to care so much, but I guess the change for me was when I had a child. In the 90s before I had a kid I thought the worst case scenario was that I might have a front row seat to the end of civilisation, and that would be a shame, but what an interesting time to be alive. But after I had a kid I thought, well she’s going to be in this world, however it is. So it is going to be more incumbent upon me to try to make it better. I think the strategy of being wealthy enough to isolate yourself from the harsh reality of the world. . . that’s going to be harder and harder to do, unless you’re Jeff Bezos. So that became important to me. I’m not worried about a zombie apocalypse, but I’m worried that it’s easier for most people to imagine a zombie apocalypse than to visualise what life will be like 10 or 20 years from now. I’m concerned that we lack the imagination and courage to engage in the way that we really should be and we will resort to these Trump, Brexit, kneejerk reactions.

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Read Write Respond: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Read this review at Read Write Respond

It is easy to be mesmerised by the purported benefits of the digital age. The ability to easily and efficiently communicate, consume, connect and create though often comes at the expense of older more established modes and mediums, such as telephones and newspapers. A vision of supposed freedom and hope has been converted over time into the poster child of digital industrialisation and growth-based economics.

Grounded on the operating system built by the chartered monopolies of the 13th century, companies like Apple, Twitter, Google, Pearson and Amazon are in a race to become ‘the one’ company to rule them all. Sacrificing sustainability, the focus is on cashing in on short term gains via acquisitions and public offerings. This culture of disruption, of sprints, start-ups and pivots, often leads to a scorched earth policy of success at all costs. Whether it be the automation of jobs or the decimation of communities, change and innovation is not always positive or productive for the majority of people.

According to Douglas Rushkoff, it is not all doom and gloom though. For just as we can identify where these ideas of capital at all costs come from in the past, so to can we look back to find alternative solutions to such perils. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus provides a vision for a future built around the exchange of value, rather than the extraction of capital. A future that focuses on a mixture of local and national currencies, as well as focusing on both family cooperatives and international corporations. A return to the ethos of the bazaar, that is spaces designed to maximise the exchange of value and the velocity of money. A digital renaissance if you like.

Similar in vein to David Price’s OPEN, Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus is a story for our time. With eye to tomorrow, Rushkoff provides suggestions and solutions already being explored by some today. The choice though is left to the reader to make the next step to link these seemingly disparate ideas to help form a better tomorrow together.

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On the Block Radio: Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

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Winner of the Media Ecology Association’s first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, technology and media commentator for CNN, digital literacy advocate for Codecademy.com and a lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world.

His new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all. His previous best-selling books on media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, a followup to his Frontline documentary, Digital Nation, and Life Inc, an analysis of the corporate spectacle, which was also made into a short, award-winning film.

His other books include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He wrote the graphic novels Testament and A.D.D., for Vertigo.

He has written and hosted three award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries – The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance, and Digital Nation, about life on the virtual frontier. Most recently, he made Generation Like, an exploration of teens, marketers, and social media.

He has been awarded a Fullbright Scholarship, and Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation, the Center for Global Communications, and the International University of Japan. He served as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Larry King to the Colbert Report and Bill Maher. He developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.

In this episode, we talk about how he sees the purpose of Judaism is to help one transcend Judaism, the psycho-social peril of living in the digital now, and how the new media empires has failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.

I got to talk to one of my heroes, and this show made it possible. Thanks OTBR listeners. You make it all possible. Enjoy!

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Staying Human in the Machine Age: An Interview With Douglas Rushkoff

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At the dawn of the internet Douglas Rushkoff wrote the book Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. A whirlwind tour through the lens of various web subcultures, Cyberia lay the philosophical foundation for the internet as an opportunity for a new kind of liberation. Rushkoff argued that the web could generate a new renaissance by birthing a technological civilization grounded in ancient spiritual truths.

But a different story emerged. Almost overnight, the web was wholeheartedly adopted by mainstream culture and fundamentally changed the world in unexpected ways.

Fast forward 22 years with Rushkoff’s new book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. A critical analysis of all that’s happened since Cyberia, the book documents some of the digital era’s biggest problems while offering solutions to get things back on track.

The title refers to an incident in 2013 when San Francisco protesters threw rocks at a Google commuter bus. Using this critical moment as launching point, Rushkoff articulates who may — or may not — be at fault and why it matters for all of us.

According to Rushkoff, the blame isn’t necessarily on any one group or individual — but is instead the result of a long-term misunderstanding of our relationship with technology. We’ve built priorities into technologies that are accelerating long-term societal problems.

As we further integrate with technology, Rushkoff suggests a crossroads may lie ahead: If we don’t begin reprogramming technologies with a different set of values, we may lose the opportunity to take back control — and maybe even lose our humanness itself.

Cyberia’s renaissance may be closer than ever, but only if we consciously choose it.

Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus explores the central question: What can we do to better align today’s tools with the world we’d like to create? We interviewed Douglas Rushkoff to find out. Read below for an edited version of the conversation.

Since Cyberia it appears your worldview has shifted, moving from a kind of techno-culture optimism about those first emerging platforms to today, with Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, where you give some dire warnings about the current problems and optimistic remedies. What contributed to your shift in thinking?

My perspective never shifted, but the world certainly changed. I went from a world in which my book Cyberia was cancelled by the publisher because they thought the internet would be over by the time it came out. They thought the internet was such a crazy, counter-cultural idea that it would never catch on.

Then over 20 years I not only watched it catch on, but I also watched the slow process through which, rather than disrupting the existing political economy, that new media and digital technology ended up amplifying its power over all of us.

As I look back for what went wrong and why this happened, I think it’s because a lot of us in the counterculture — us weird psychedelic Californian future-loving people — we saw government and regulation as the antagonist to our great evolutionary dreams. Like John Barlow said in his original Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace: governments of the world, go away.

What those of us unversed in Marxist theory at the time didn’t realize was if you get rid of government you create a very fertile soil for the unbridled growth of corporations. Government and corporations tend to balance each other out like fungus and bacteria might in a human body. When you get rid of one, you get overgrowth of the other.

Meanwhile, Wired Magazine recontextualized a counter-cultural revolution as the salvation of the NASDAQ stock exchange. They came along and said, “Don’t worry, the biotech bust of 1987 is over. Now we have a new technology that is going to increase the surface area of the marketplace infinitely, forever.”

And thus we got the “long boom,” a myth of infinite economic expansion which ended up dovetailing just a little bit too neatly with the transhumanist vision of an infinitely evolving computer: The original Ray Kurzweilian singularity vision of technology and biology and everything else growing and expanding forever became dominant, and we left behind the more traditional counterculture and humanist arguments for deploying networking technology.

That’s, I guess, why I look at this from a more critical perspective now. Instead of offering us more time, technologies are always on, drainers of our time and energy in order to serve the market.

Instead of looking at technologies programmed to enable human beings to better navigate the world I see technologies optimized to help corporations better navigate and manipulate human behavior. That’s not technology’s fault but a question of who and what we’re allowing to build our applications and whether or not we’re willing to look at them from the perspective of human need.

What is digital distributism and why is it important?

Digital distributism is really an alternative to digital industrialism. Most digital economic theorists understand the digital economy as an amplification or an acceleration of the same old industrial economy. A new technology comes along; it disrupts the old technology; it gets rid of some jobs, and then people retrain and come back into the workforce. It’s painful, but it’s just the way it is — these successive rounds of the diminution of human participation in the evolution of culture, society and the economy.

I don’t think that’s the way history actually works. What I see instead of these successive technological revolutions are actually renaissances. A renaissance, as opposed to a revolution, is not a turning of the cycle. A renaissance is the rebirth of old repressed forms in a new context.

When you get a genuinely new technology, a genuinely new communications infrastructure — and the genuinely new cultural, scientific, and mathematical innovations that go along with it — you don’t see an amplification of what already is. What you end up seeing, actually, is the rebirth of old forms that have been lost.

When you look at the original Renaissance, the capital-R Renaissance, you got perspective painting and the beginnings of calculus; you circumnavigated the globe; you got the invention of the individual and a society that re-birthed the old forms of ancient Rome and Greece.

I believe we are also passing through a renaissance; but it’s a different one.

Instead of perspective painting, we get the hologram or the fractal. Instead of calculus, we get chaos math and new physics. Instead of circumnavigating the globe, we get orbiting the globe and seeing it as a single biome from above. Instead of the birth of the individual in literature, we get the birth of the collective and an understanding of ourselves as a single organism.

For each of the things that were reborn in the original Renaissance, we can see corollaries in our renaissance, except instead of retrieving the values of Rome, of conquest, we retrieve the values that were repressed in the last renaissance. And those are women and paganism, crafts, peer-to-peer economics and the local marketplace.

We start to see the kinds of things in internet culture, or at least in the internet culture I prefer, which are more craft-based — Etsy, peer-to-peer economics, local currencies and peer-to-peer authentication like Bitcoin. So, that’s not an industrial culture reaffirming itself, but a distributed culture emerging, or re-emerging.

We reap and retrieve the values of distributism and the commons, which is what the popes and the late medieval economists were actually beginning to celebrate before they were forcibly stamped out by early Renaissance monarchs.

Many of the solutions you propose in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus are fundamental changes, different operating systems entirely than our own today. What short-term behaviors can you see contributing to a shift towards a distributed future and what behaviors contribute towards maintaining the extractive model?

I think they all come down to how you can optimize your business or the economy for flow over growth; for the circulation of money rather than the extraction of money.

This is an adjustment that many businesses are willing to make, because most businesses are realizing that by taking all of the money out of the marketplaces, they have no more money left to earn. It’s better to earn the same dollar 10 times than it is to take $10 out of your marketplace because then your business dies. You need money to be moving. A lot of the sorts of innovations I would recommend are for businesses, particularly digital businesses, to make their users wealthy, to make people rich.

YouTube should let the people who put up videos have half the ad revenue that comes from it. Uber should give at least 10% or 20% of its shares to its drivers before it goes public. Chobani, the yogurt company — I’m pretty certain after reading all the stuff I’ve been suggesting — has decided to give 10% of its shares to its workers before the IPO.

This is not bad business; this is not charity. This is using the principle of platform cooperativism to end up with wealthier markets, wealthier employees, wealthier suppliers. The wealthier the people are around you, then the wealthier you get to be.

It’s the strategy employed by family businesses for millennia, and it’s the reason why family businesses do so much better than shareholder-owned businesses in the long run. That’s because they’re thinking about the sustainability of their enterprise and the way it interacts with everybody else.

The sorts of suggestions I’m offering are not giant revolutionary changes.

They can be tiny experiments. A bank can experiment with local crowdfunding so that rather than paying for the entire loan itself with capital, it can offer half the money in a loan and help a local business person get the other half through local crowdfunding that the bank facilitates with an app or technology or authentication.

The bigger the company or government that I’m talking to, the smaller the suggestion I’m making. I’m trying to help them think of it less as pivoting their entire operating system and more as implementing little strategies, little pilot programs of more circulatory economic practices.

We use an extractive model because we’ve accepted the rules of extraction as given circumstances of the economy. We’ve just gotten so used to extractive capitalism, we think it’s the only way.

A new generation of entrepreneurs may be looking to Silicon Valley and technology as a whole as an avenue for success and prosperity. What guiding principles would you recommend as a means for the type of sustainable success proposed in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus?

It’s pretty simple. From the beginning you have to decide: do you want to run a business or do you want to sell a business?

If you are developing a company in order to sell it — if you are playing “flip this house” — then you adopt a scorched earth, monopolistic, extractive approach to your market. You don’t want to have a good business; you just want to dominate a vertical.

But I think the chances of getting to sell your company for 100 or 1,000 times the original investment and becoming a billionaire are smaller than your chances of actually running a successful business by utilizing more distributive and less extractive techniques.

If you decide you want to run a profitable business, then you start looking at things like revenue or the health of your marketplace. You want to grow a market for your product and service, and you want that market to be comprised of people who are healthy and wealthy — and ideally getting wealthier as they use your product, as they use your service.

You want to have workers who are getting smarter and more experienced and more efficient as they continue. That means don’t starve them, don’t pay them as little as possible so that you can get rid of them and bring in other ones. You want to actually have employees who want to work at your company.

It’s like adopting a strategy that even Apple had for a while — where everyone wanted to go work there because it was the coolest place to be. People used to take that test to go work at Google because it seemed like that’s where the smartest engineers would go.

That’s the sort of company you want to have.

That means not just rewarding your employees with 24/7 food, but rewarding your employees with participation and agency over where this company is going. They are part of your expertise, they are not just human resources to be exploited.

Make that decision up front.

Many of the ideas in your book are very optimistic despite a grim outlook on the future of markets and industrialism as a whole. What do you personally do, or what advice would you give to others to remain optimistic in today’s world? Any guiding principles or strategies for remaining resilient?

I don’t know if I’m optimistic. I’m hopeful, hopeful enough at least to lay out some suggestions. I’m not optimistic about our ability to do it. I’m profoundly concerned.

My main strategy for remaining hopeful is staying as human as possible and operating on the human scale as much as possible. When you operate on the scale of the corporations, of the internet, you end up getting caught in these giant standing waves, you end up losing your home field advantage as a living person. When a human being tries to operate on the scale of the internet you get Donald Trump. That’s not a human being, it’s a phenomenon that is utterly divorced from the values, the ebbs, the flows that make us human.

Everyone can’t move to the mountains of Santa Cruz. But you can go outside every day. You can look in people’s eyes as much as possible, form rapport. The more you do at a human scale — and I mean a human scale directly with other people, not just Skyping with other people, but really there in person — the more likely you are to be able to transform the landscape so it no longer favors just corporations and other abstract entities but you and your loved ones and your community.

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What Happens When Anyone Can Code? We’re About to Find Out.

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PSFK 2016 – Throwing Rocks Keynote (video)

Douglas Rushkoff, Author: Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus [PSFK 2016] from PSFK on Vimeo.

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