Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 29
March 21, 2016
March 20, 2016
March 18, 2016
Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21st Century
Read the complete roundtable discussion at Edge.org
I should only be so articulate and engaged in my own 8th decade. As always, Gardner ties together many disparate threads in his quest for a more humanely driven society. Education could certainly play a significant role.
My fear, confirmed over the past two years since I took a position as a professor at a public university, is that our political economy is becoming the sole determinant of how education works, what students expect, and what they ultimately learn. Even looking at education as something that occurs between learning and “employment” accepts employment as some inevitable stage of life—when we know it is really just an artifact of chartered monopolies and the intentional repression of guilds and small businesses.
When we accept employment as a worthy goal, we have undermined the humane project from the get-go. Employment is a passive response to opportunity, not a critical or active approach to creativity. Recruiters come to campus and even meet with department heads and college presidents in order to “help” them prepare the competent employees of tomorrow. This is the very opposite of what the humanities are for, which is—as Gardner explains—to develop new ways of asking questions.
This same political economy then undermines the funding models of universities as well. Students are not consumers, and tuitions are not fee-for-service. These are research institutions much like teaching hospitals, not MOOCs promising technical skills. Indeed, anything with ready answers is more easily learned by reading the right manuals or doing internships. The classroom, the seminar table are not for the dissemination of fixed knowledge but the modeling of disinterment and interrogation.
It is meant to be unsettling. But students leaving a classroom in a state of confusion, pondering an ambiguity, are now bound to rate the professor and course as ineffective. At least in the short term. As most professors I know now agree, we teach one way before tenure—in order to get good student evaluations—and then another way after tenure. No, it’s not that we’re more lazy after tenure. It’s that we’re willing to give them lessons that they’ll only realize are valuable a few years from now.
Such long-term thinking—this notion that a college education may be something that’s immune to an expiration date—is why our university campuses were built to look the way they do. Their architecture is not an homage to the past, but to the enduring human values they support.
The post Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21st Century appeared first on Rushkoff.
March 17, 2016
Douglas Rushkoff On ‘Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity’
Read this article at TechTimes
In late 2013, activists in San Francisco and nearby Oakland responded to an influx of affluent tech workers to the Bay Area, and the attendant skyrocketing rents, by throwing rocks at the buses Google provided to shuttle itsemployees to and from Silicon Valley.
The event forms the backdrop for Douglas Rushkoff‘s latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity (Portfolio/Penguin, 2016), a historically-minded look at the effects digital technology has had on local economies, big business and the life expectancy of the corporation as we know it.
As a bestselling author of books about the interface between digital technology and culture, ranging from Cyberia, Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace(HarperOne, 1994), a survey of the subcultures evolving around the then-burgeoning World Wide Web, to Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), a critique of our digitally enhanced present, Dougles Rushkoff is a top future tech speaker and sought-after consultant among CEOsunder pressure to sharpen their digital edge.
In his view, the problem with Google and other high-tech corporations is that they are configured to extract value from people and communities to fulfill shareholder expectations of constant growth, and that’s inappropriate in a digitally charged world. Long-term survival in a digital landscape requires corporations to “re-code” for greater value creation, scalability and sustainablility.
“They’re still operating as if they were twentieth-century industrial corporations – only the original corporate code is now being executed by entirely more powerful and rapidly acting business plans,” he writes in a keyed-up technospeak that enlivens erudite historical passages, and Economics for Dummies-styleexplainers, in an engaging discourse on the parameters of a digital economy. “What algorithms do to the trading floor, digital business does to the economy. In the purely rational light of the computer program, a digital corporation is optimized to convert cash into share price – money and value into pure capital.”
The bigger the corporation, the less efficient it becomes at putting its cash to work. “You have giant companies sitting on tons and tons of cash but they don’tknow how to deploy it,” he says. “They don’t have research and development. They don’t even do their own work. They’ve outsourced their competencies.”
Among other things, Rushkoff‘s book is a call for tech companies to recalibrate their growth targets, re-educate their shareholders and redirect profits back to the communities that comprise their markets.
“Big companies need to begin thinking of their employees and the towns in which they operate as economies they need to develop,” says Rushkoff. “You can make platforms that are optimized toward helping people create and transact value. If your users get rich, that’s not a bad thing. That’s not money you’ve lost.It’s money that comes into the ecosystem of your business.”
He’s speaking to Walmart, Uber and every mobile app developer with aspirations of making his or her first billion by 30. He’s speaking from Codecademy, in NewYork’s FlatIron District, a free, online coding school where he serves on the advisory board.
“Their business model is based on helping people create value and transact between each other,” says Rushkoff, holding forth from a co-working space armchair like a bantam edition of an Oxford World Classic – his manner is a Marshall McLuhan-Woody Allen mash-up.” After you’ve learned a little bit of code you get up to a level where other students can pay you to tutor them in their lessons. There’s all these different ways that the platform lets people create value. And that’s really the trick in the modern Internet.”
A longtime observer of the digital landscape, he sees a world where the Internet can no longer make money purely by extracting value. “Look at what’shappening to Uber and its drivers,” he says. “People can’t be squeezed anymore.”
Rushkoff calls for harnessing the hyper-local, hands-on applications digital tools offer to introduce value-building to businessess that currently focus on value extraction. His book advocates for replacing corporate growth imperatives withlong-term sustainability.
“All you have to do is think of your business, the way you start it, the way you run it and even the way you sell it – think of it less as something to grow and flip and rather as something that has a sustainable business model,” he suggests. “Think about your company like a family business where, instead of trying to earn enough money so that you could pay for your child’s future, [you] think about creating a business where your kid would want to work.”
Throwing rocks at Google shuttle buses is, in Rushkoff‘s view, a wrongheaded response to a system that is working as it was programmed to work. Reprogramming the system is the way to effect change.
“People don’t realize how much power they have,” says Rushkoff. “And that’spartly because the real world has been dwarfed by this digital simulacra which seems much more important than our reality, but its not – it needs to be in service of our reality.”
The post Douglas Rushkoff On ‘Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity’ appeared first on Rushkoff.
Douglas Rushkoff Talks Tech, the Digital Economy, and the Growth Trap
Read this piece at the Village Voice
“[W]e have set in place an economic system whose growth works against our own prosperity,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. In the book, Rushkoff, whose previous works include Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed, maps out the failings of our digital economy. Our never-ending hunger for economic growth has become untenable, he argues, and we need to embrace a more distributed approach to growth and social justice, one that reflects the digital technologies that pervade our lives. The Voice caught up with the New York–based writer and professor at Queens College after he gave a talk at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Early on in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus , you write about how early internet users like yourself believed the digital marketplace was going to look something like the Burning Man festival—that is, a sort of equally distributed bazaar. Could you talk a little bit about why this didn’t happen?
It started out that way to some extent because we created things like freeware and shareware. We were making stuff and just letting other people have it. Compensation was usually voluntary. We were building things because we were excited to see other people use them. And what partly happened is the parents of hackers and developers, they would look at us as losers. Like we were just Dungeons & Dragons, video game kids. We were living on pizza, hanging out in garages, and we were failures. But when big companies saw that there could be something in this, they started throwing money at the kids. Taking the money didn’t feel like selling out but rather getting acknowledgement from daddy. What we didn’t realize was that we were surrendering these technologies to people who had very different hopes for them. One result was we ended up with this silly, strange dotcom boom.
You say at one point in the book that “social media originally appeared to be an alternative to the marketplace ethos of the dotcom era.” Particularly, that some social platforms seemed to be offering up a “return to the more peer-to-peer sensibility of the early Internet. But the value systems they created instead — likes, views, reblogs, favorites, and so on — became a new kind of currency.” A currency that changed how we value, or devalue, cultural products.
That’s right. After the dotcom era came crashing down, everybody thought the Internet was over. But I was saying that it had just fought off its first parasitic infection. It crashed and the investors left, but they’d built the infrastructure. So now we could do social media, and I don’t mean Facebook but the early peer-to-peer, connected stuff. The Internet has always been a social medium. It fought off the defense department. It then fought off business. And now it will be ours, we said. But social media companies grew extremely fast, to the point where the money people got interested again. This time they said they weren’t going to make the same mistake. They said, “Look, we are going to come in and we are going to give you a bunch of money, but there are going to be very different terms.” So, of course, you have these companies again that just care about capital and, more than anything else, growth.
This falls in line with what you call the “growth trap.”
Yeah, that’s the growth trap. And it’s what all these giants companies are in, because they’re obligated to grow by what their debt structure demands rather than by the demand of their market. So Walmart, for instance, its stores are going under because the towns where it operated are going bankrupt under the pressure of Walmart. It comes in, under-prices all the local businesses, and underpays its workers. Many of its workers even have to go on welfare. Thus, the town it’s in actually loses money. Then, lo and behold, Walmart finds itself without customers: The customers are broke! You end up killing the goose. And it’s the same thing that digital businesses are doing, but you see it happen much faster.
You characterize the so-called “sharing economy” as a farce. Uber, for instance, gets a lot of negative play in the book. At one point you say the company is the “creative destroyer of the current taxi industry.” Why is that a bad thing?
The problems here are that the sharing economy occurs on corporate-owned platforms that are taking much higher percentages on the transactions than they need to, or that’s appropriate. So Uber takes as much as they can to keep the drivers as poor as possible. They’re doing that in order to pay their shareholders the most money possible. But I would argue that the shareholders are an unnecessary part of the equation. And with Uber, it’s not able to dominate now because their app is great, but because it has a war chest. The ability to regulate the market. The ability to undercut competition.
What about publishing or the news media? Are they stuck in this same trap?
Of course they are. What’s happened is the business landscape became financialized, and now non-growth industries are being asked to behave like growth-based ones. So when you see Viacom or Sony buy a book publishing company, they don’t realize books have been pretty much at capacity for a couple hundred years now. This is it. This is how much people read. This is how many books they can buy. There are enough readers out there to support this many writers, this many editors, and this is how it’s going to go. But they buy these businesses, or buy newspapers, thinking that somehow they are going to grow them. You can’t grow them! And that’s got to be OK, not to grow.
At one point, you bring up in the book how Evan Williams, the guy behind Blogger and a Twitter co-founder, has “disrupted journalism with the blog, and news-gathering with the tweet, but now he was surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry of them all,” that industry being Wall Street. How so?
Yeah, well, I like Evan a lot and Twitter is a great app, a 140-character app that makes like $500 million a quarter. But because they sold it to venture capitalists who then sold it to Wall Street through an IPO, it’s considered a huge failure. So Twitter is going to be forced to pivot from a $500 million a quarter success to some type of ridiculous, winner-takes-all monopoly. And this is being done just to fool another round of investors into paying more for the shares. It has to go from a sustainable, fantastic business to something else. And that’s because Twitter is obligated to grow. Why is there no option for Twitter to grow to full size and then operate at that size? Because that opportunity doesn’t exist for any publicly traded company.
You talk a lot about how companies need to be reprogrammed — just like computers — to believe it’s fine not to grow. But I can’t imagine Wall Street could be reprogrammed in such a fashion.
Wall Street doesn’t have to get onboard with being reprogrammed; it just has to become less central to all the economic activity of our reality. There are always going to be big companies that need public capital. But everything shouldn’t be owned by shareholders. If you look at the data, family-owned businesses do better in terms of revenue and longevity than publicly traded companies. They last longer and they make more money. The only metric where they do worse is during bubbles. But during bubbles you don’t want to grow fast. If it’s a bubble, you want to try and stay the same size so you’re not subjected to the pop when it happens.
Second, digital technology is eating Wall Street. Digital technology is now gaming the system that they thought they had already gamed. The thing that hurt musicians and writers and every other business, it’s now fucking with Wall Street. The CEOs that I talk to are just as concerned with the way that this is being done. They feel trapped because they can’t envision an alternative. They accept the rules of the marketplace as given circumstances of nature. They don’t know that these were devised by human beings at certain moments in history, with very certain agenda.
In the book’s acknowledgements, you thank Occupy Wall Street. Could you talk a little bit about how that movement has inspired you?
Occupy inspired me in all sorts of ways. The biggest was probably that it motivated me to become a university professor. When I went to Occupy in Zuccotti Park, what I saw was not people protesting per se, but people engaging in what are called “learning circles.” They were learning about things like alternative currency, how capitalism works, how lending works. All sorts of cool things. And I thought, this is what kids do when they want to occupy something. They basically set up a graduate school with seventy concurrent seminars. They want to get educated in a way that doesn’t put them in so much debt. So that’s why I got my Ph.D., started teaching at Queens College, and started a master’s program in media and activism.
On the whole, do you think Occupy was a success?
I do agree it wasn’t entirely successful in traditional terms. But I think it was the first prototype of a different approach to activism. It’s what we call horizontalism, both a leaderless and leaderful movement that teaches mutual aid and support. You see others doing this even more successfully.
So what, in the end, are some solutions to all of this?
Help your workers participate in the value equation. Help the towns you’re in. A company like WinCo is crushing Walmart, and the only difference between the two is WinCo is owned by its workers. Walmart is owned by its shareholders. So WinCo can pay its workers more and keep circulating the money. And as it does, it ends up with wealthier employees and towns. And for larger companies, I’m arguing that they seek a steadier state as well, and start rewarding their investors with dividends instead of shares.
Of course Chase, say, isn’t going to change overnight. But as I discuss in the book, when a bank gives a loan to a local restaurant for expansion, what if the bank gave the restaurant half of that loan and made it get the rest from local crowdfunding? I’m advising startups to just take less money. Don’t sell your business. Understand it might take a little bit longer, but if you like what you’re doing, don’t sell your business to people who want to kill it. And that’s what they want to do. They want to destroy the business and make it pivot to do something else.
And local currencies. I’m really into those. More than Bitcoin; like the LETSystem and time-based currency. You don’t necessarily need a bank to put a factory in your town. You can exchange laterally if you have a means of exchange. And that’s what people have to get used to, that the U.S. dollar is not the only way to keep track of who has done what for whom, especially in the Internet age. The difference between the industrial age and the digital age is we don’t have one-size-fits-all solutions anymore.
So prizing companies that offer alternatives to this system.
I’m talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It’s going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That’s a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things. But you can form companies that create value rather than prevent it. So if Google, for instance, sees people making money off videos on YouTube, it should encourage that. And in some ways it does cut people in, but not enough — instead of putting ads on videos and taking all the revenue, they put ads on the videos and give back just a little bit of the money. Companies that do that are going to be more successful in a digital distributed economy. We should treat companies more like a family business, where you’re thinking about the community in which you’re operating, you’re thinking about your vendors, and you don’t want them to all be people that you’re squeezing and ruining.
The post Douglas Rushkoff Talks Tech, the Digital Economy, and the Growth Trap appeared first on Rushkoff.
March 16, 2016
‘Throwing Rocks’ on the Circled A Podcast
Listen to the audio podcast here
The Circled A is an anarchist radio show which broadcasts on Resonance 104.4 FM. This week, Douglas Rushkoff joins Donnacha DeLong to talk about his books and how the world can become a better place. His new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, looks at how the models that dominate modern business practice are ultimately destructive and need to change.
The post ‘Throwing Rocks’ on the Circled A Podcast appeared first on Rushkoff.
March 15, 2016
SXSW Talk Now Online
Complete footage of Saturday’s talk at South by Southwest, Distributed: A New OS for the Digital Economy, is now available at SXSW.com.
From the Program:
“Digital tech was supposed to usher in an age of prosperity, but so far it has put industrial capitalism on steroids. Social networks surrender their missions to data mining, and banks abandon investing for algorithms- all to stoke growth. Startups sell for billions but destroy more jobs and markets than they create.
“In this launch event for his new book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Rushkoff will share a new economic program using the unique distributive power of the internet to break free of the winner-take-all game defining business today. He will offer a series of practical steps to remake the economy from the inside out.”
The post SXSW Talk Now Online appeared first on Rushkoff.
March 13, 2016
‘Throwing Rocks’ on Cool Science Radio
Listen to this podcast at KPCW.org
Guest number two on the program is Douglass Rushcoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn’t between the unemployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Rather, a tornado of technological improvements has spun our economic program out of control, and humanity as a whole—the pro-testers and the Google employees as well as the shareholders and the executives—are all trapped by the consequences.
The post ‘Throwing Rocks’ on Cool Science Radio appeared first on Rushkoff.
‘Digital industrialism’: Why we need to rethink the purpose of our economy
Read this piece at TechRepublic
When protesters in San Francisco lay down in front of the Google bus, which shuttled workers from downtown to the company’s corporate campus, longtime media theorist Douglas Rushkoff “smiled in solidarity.” The locals were rebelling against the massive tech company that had spiked up rent and gentrified their city. But things soon turned dark: weeks later, a group in Oakland threw rocks at the Google bus, smashing a window.
Rushkoff saw something deeper at stake. His new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, out today, explores how we got to the point of “digital industrialism,” why we must rethink the values of our economy, and how to bring humans back into the fabric of the digital age.
“We have lost track of the purpose of our economy,” Rushkoff wrote.
According to Rushkoff, our never-ending appetite for economic “growth” has become unsustainable—and, a misguided end goal. Rushkoff sees us living in a period of “digital industrialism,” marked by a “disproportionate relationship between capital and value.” Web-based companies are creating platforms, but not necessarily value—at least, a value that can keep up with the venture capital backing they’ve received. In the case of Twitter, “they’re making half a billion dollars a quarter,” Rushkoff told TechRepublic. “There is value being created there. But because they took so much venture capital and then had an IPO which made them worth many billions of dollars, even that five hundred million dollars revenue is not enough to satisfy investors who want a hundred or a thousand times on returns.”
As a result, businesses are increasingly trying to monetize “likes” and big data, making people the end product, rather than creating value that consumers can use. The payoff comes not through a sustainable income, but when the platform is sold to a big spender—when Huffington Post was sold to AOL, for instance—creating artificial bubbles.
Rushkoff traces the current values of digital industrialism to an age where monarchs began shutting down bazaars, which had originated as places for townspeople to trade goods and crafts in a peer-to-peer networking fashion. Fearing that the lower classes would gain power, the aristocracy regained control. All along, the working class has been stripped of its power to create, which extended to the industrial age where workers became shuffled into factories, performing low-skill labor.
Blaming tech giants for the exacerbation in wealth disparity is misguided, as well. “Digital technology,” Rushkoff wrote, “is expressing the values of the industrial economy.”
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have been at the forefront of the conversation around technology and labor with their book The Second Machine Age, showing how production continues to increase while income inequality grows. But Rushkoff thinks that their premise of growth-based economy “as a pre-existing condition,” is the wrong way to think about the issue. “This income disparity is not a fact of nature or an accident of capitalism,” he wrote, “but part of its central code,” he wrote.
“There will be no second machine age.”
Calling it a second machine age is reactionary, said Rushkoff. “It’s ‘okay, it’s going to be like that, and the workers will be like this.’ Ultimately, however revolutionary their rhetoric, they’re arguing that this is essentially the same thing.”
But it’s not, said Rushkoff. “The industrial age could be understood with a printing press logic. You could have a printing press economy, and a printing press banking system, and a printing press company. The digital realm is really different. It’s highly individuated. It’s lateral in its construction.”
There are, however, opportunities that the digital world offers to rethink our current economic model, he believes.
To shift into a system that values people over “clicks,” and handmade goods above mass-produced factory products, Rushkoff believes we need to shift our values. Away from the from 40 hour workweek, which, he believes, is simply not what’s needed in society today. Away from “growth” as an end goal. Away from the value system of industrialism, in which “each industrial innovation leads to diminished human presence.”
“Joblessness may be a feature, not bug, of new economy,” he wrote.
Ironically, Rushkoff sees web-based peer-to-peer sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb has eventually eliminating the human element. While today, “freelancers” at these companies have, in a sense, a lot of freedom with their work situation, companies like Uber and Airbnb are taking advantage of people, he believes, treating them as objects rather than as real stakeholders in the company. And now that Uber has self-driving research in the works, “the final indignity” will come when the drivers are replaced by machines. “Peer-to-peer is not a means of including people, but a prelude to getting rid of them,” Rushkoff wrote.
So what can businesses, startups, and corporations do to incorporate these human values? Rushkoff thinks that we need to put power back in the hands of individuals.
In the case of Twitter, “the first rule of thumb would be, take as little money as possible at the lowest valuation possible,” said Rushkoff. “The only reason to take a lot of money up front would be if you’re in Uber and you need the money to try to destroy other players in your space, to create a monopoly.”
For the startup world, what normally happens is “you look to get revenue as late as possible because the minute you’ve shown revenue, then investors see what you’re actually worth,” said Rushkoff. “I would flip that around and try to get your revenue as quickly as possible. Then you anchor users with the idea that this is a fee for service property, and the more money you make, the less leverage your investors have over your company.”
What he would like to see happen? “I think, rather than a simple revolution, we get a renaissance. A genuine rebirth of repressed ideas and mechanisms,” Rushkoff said.
“When you look at everything from Burning Man to eBay, you see there’s a kind of fundamentally different thing going on. Culturally, between community supported agriculture and the environmental movement, and Steampunk and craft beers and the Maker Movement,” he said.
“It’s different than a second machine age. It’s people getting their hands back into things and starting to value the human contribution over the mechanical contributions to things.”
The post ‘Digital industrialism’: Why we need to rethink the purpose of our economy appeared first on Rushkoff.
