Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 34
October 20, 2015
Why Uber’s Bid For Platform Monopoly is Dangerous
This is a response to Susan Crawford’s recent piece “Getting Over Uber.”
My problem with Uber all along has been that it’s optimized for a really specific utility, but at the expense of others. It’s a bit like online universities, which offer courses isolated from the fabric of education or a learning community. That’s the nature of any digital business: you get what you program for, but lose everything else — and sometimes it doesn’t come back.
Remember what Clearchannel did to the FM dial? They bought it all up, and replaced local stations and deep music knowledge with long-distance, computer-generated play lists. It was all excused as free market capitalism; thanks to VC they had more money, so they were entitled to purchase the landscape. Eventually, the non-local Clearchannel FM stations proved they weren’t profitable enough to sustain the company’s valuation, so Clearchannel began selling them. But the institutional knowledge enjoyed by those original FM stations was gone.
Uber may be of great utility in the limited frame of providing low-cost rides for people with iPhones. But it does not serve any of the other functions that a local taxi service does. Meanwhile, its programmed not just to provide rides, but to take out competition. It is a platform monopoly in the making. This is because it cannot support it’s multi-billion-dollar valuation by being a ride broker.
Uber needs to create a platform monopoly so that it can leverage into other verticals, from logistics to self-driving cars. If anything, Uber’s drivers are the R&D for Uber’s driverless future. They are spending their labor and capital investments (cars) on their own future unemployment. And even that would be okay, if they were shareholders in Uber capable of participating in those future profits — but it’s not a worker-owned cooperative at all.
As every economist since Adam Smith and before has known, the factors of production are land, labor, and capital — and sometimes entrepreneurial effort. But the current digital economy rewards only capital, and acts as if acknowledging the contributions of land and labor were a communist, regulatory plot.
The people providing the labor and the communities providing the territory for Uber’s operations deserve an equal say in the way the company works, and revenues the company earns.
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No, You Can’t Have it All
(CNN) — Technology has always been about choice: Fire allowed us to choose to live in colder climates. Electric lighting offered us the choice to read at night. Drugs give us the freedom to choose stressful, self-destructive lifestyles.
And digital technology gives us the ability to do more than one thing at the same time — or at least it feels that way.
In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s provocatively commonsensical new book, “Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family,” she’s not concerned with the digital at all, but the problem she’s pointing to is a form of its multitasking ethos writ large: the way women and men, but women in particular, must prioritize (that is, juggle) career and family.
In stark opposition to the can-do feminism embraced by some of today’s C-suite female superstars, Slaughter makes the simple but undeniably realistic case for lowering our expectations. The idea of parents perfectly balancing family duties so they can prioritize their careers equally just doesn’t work in practice, says Slaughter. “The problem is that ‘fifty-fifty’ is just too pat. Life rarely works out that way. And it’s much harder to be honest about what it really takes.”
As a result, we must abandon the notion that anyone — man or woman — can fully dedicate themselves to both family and career at the same time. “We often cannot control the fate of our career and family; insisting that we can obscures the deeper structures and forces that shape our lives and deflects attention from the larger changes that must be made.”
Sadly, perhaps, one parent will end up doing more parenting and miss out on career opportunities, while the other will miss out on some family joys, but end up higher on the corporate ladder. This is more the problem of competitive corporate culture than it is the failure of individuals to find balance or to work hard enough.
But our technologies, and the culture they spawn, would beg to differ. They want us to believe we can do it all. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandburg became something of a pop business hero for advocating that women “lean in” and do whatever it takes to strive for leadership roles in the workplace — even if it means hiring people to nanny, tutor, and coach one’s kids. Outsource, borrow, push, and strive. It’s a pedal-to-the-metal approach to life and work that really only makes sense if you’re thinking of your family like a startup you can “flip” once you’ve finished building it by any means necessary.
The inclination for multitasking engendered by our digital platforms and their advocates has created the false impression that we can actually do everything we want, all at once. We think we can answer email as well while driving a car as we can at our desks, send sensible tweets while watching a concert, or do homework well while conversing on Snapchat.
Yet every study so far has shown us to be less effective when attempting to multitask. Even when our subjective impression is of having accomplished more in less time, in reality we get less done, we do it with less accuracy and depth, and we remember less about it later. Doing more at once robs all our activities of the attention they deserve — and the experience we deserve.
Slaughter daringly suggests we stop compensating for the unreasonable and dehumanizing demands of corporate culture by running our home lives as if they were the offshore manufacturing arms of a conglomerate. And that we stop blaming ourselves for not being able to measure up to these false ideals.
As she says: “When law firms and corporations hemorrhage talented women who reject lockstep career paths and question promotion systems that elevate quantity of hours worked over the quality of the work itself, the problem is not with the women.”
The post No, You Can’t Have it All appeared first on Rushkoff.
October 3, 2015
Throwing Rocks: The first interview
I will be launching my next book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, at South-by-Southwest next March. Here’s the first interview I’ve done about it, with Hugh Forrest of the Interactive festival.
SXSW: Tell us more about what your new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.
Rushkoff: [The book is] about how mindless growth became the enemy of true prosperity. We are programming the digital economy for the extractive, expansionist values of corporatism, rather than the more distributed possibilities of a digital age. People are frustrated, but don’t know how to express the problem – thus, the title. It’s a reference to the San Francisco residents who are being priced out of their homes by commuting Googlers.
SXSW: What are your goals for the book? How do you believe readers will respond to its contents?
Rushkoff: I want to change the way people build companies – especially digital ones. I’m hoping to convince people [that] it’s more fun to build a company you want to keep, rather than one [you want] to flip. I’m hoping people adopt some of the ideas I’ve shared for how to create value by letting others create value, too – to circulate money instead of hoarding it. To reprogram the economy for human goals instead of just putting 13th Century, anti-p2p values on digital steroids.
See the rest here.
And pre-order the book here(Amazon) or here(BN) or here(International).
The post Throwing Rocks: The first interview appeared first on Rushkoff.
January 31, 2013
Present Shock - reviewed!
Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock: The End Of Time Is Not The End Of The World
by Anthony Wing Kosner
If you read one book next year to help you make sense of the present moment, let it be Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff. Subtitled, “When Everything Happens Now,” the book is a contemporary rejoinder to Alvin Toffler’s seminal scripture of futurology, Future Shock, published in 1970.
What has happened in those 40 years has undermined our notions of the future. Indeed, one of Toffler’s tenets is that “change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.” Rushkoff takes this notion a step further an describes a present in which “there is no temporal backdrop against which to measure our progress, no narrative through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward which we may strive, and seemingly no time to figure any of this out.”
Rushkoff toes the line between apocalypse and ascension. He diagnoses the cultural problems engendered by our disorientation from traditional concepts of time and attempts to propose concrete steps we can take to recover some sense of control and purpose.
Program or be Programmed, Rushkoff’s last book, followed a similar arc, by explaining ten commands we can use to take control of our digital lives. The book inspired the founders of Codeacademy, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, a free, online platform for teaching programming. Rushkoff is now Codevangelist in Residence at Codeacademy, where I interviewed him recently.
Present Shock is a big concept with profound implications for culture, politics and business. A simple visualization (borrowed from Adrian Bejan’s theories of flow systems) is to think of time as a river flowing at a certain pace. Below a certain threshold, the movements of things on the river are fairly linear and predictable. You launch a barge in the river here and three days later you have drifted to there. This is historical progress as we have come to know it over the millennia But when the speed of the flow increases beyond that threshold, the river becomes turbulent, non-linear, unpredictable. Such is the state of time in 2012.
What does this mean? Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.
Narrative Collapse: Rushkoff identifies both the sensationalism of reality TV and the meta-stories of The Simpsons and Family Guy as examples of how we no longer have the time or patience for linear stories. From entertainment to financial investment, the payoff has to be virtually instantaneous in order to justify our attention. Politically, he shows how these impulses play out both in the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. A news cycle divested of linear time, pushes politicians into present tense reactions with unsustainable results. Rushkoff’s sympathies are clearly more with Occupy who confounded conservatives and the mainstream press by having a large impact without an easily identifiable goal. In remix culture and contemporary activism, he sees the potential for us to seize the narrative frame and use them in new ways to invent innovative story forms and flexible agendas.
Digiphrenia: Because technology enables us to be aware of and have control over multiple conceptual spaces simultaneously, our attention is increasingly divided. Whether we are “multi-tasking” at work or piloting drone strikes in Afghanistan from a suburban office park in Las Vegas, we are not in the present moment (in a zen sense) but actually in fragments between moments that happen to be occurring at the same time. The key to avoiding these dislocation, Rushkoff suggests, is to understand the difference between time as data flow (like a Twitter feed) and time as data storage (like a book.) Knowing when to be in “the now,” and when to insulate yourself from it can help you reclaim control of your time and attention.
Overwinding: The “shock” part of future shock really comes from how much time we have “springloaded” into the present. From financial derivatives to the piracy of intellectual property, Rushkoff shows how we use leverage “to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones,” attempting to capture the value of (others’) labor in the click of a mouse. This is why Black Friday gets earlier and earlier each year or why shaving a couple of milliseconds off the time to execute a computerized trade confers significant advantage. But we can also use this fact in more constructive ways to “springload” time into things, like the example Rushkoff cites of the fully functional “pop-up” hospital that Israel sent to Japan after the Tsunami.
Fractalnoia: One of the biggest risks in the barrage of big data spawned by our digital lives is that our abilities of pattern recognition are imprecise. When we succeed at making sense of the world in one scale or time frame we easily apply that “fractal” pattern elsewhere, often inappropriately. As the pace of change increases, our feedback loops get shorter and shorter until all we have is feedback screech. Computers, operating out of human time, can in fact discern patterns in that noise, but it is up to us humans to put those patterns in the correct context. When we fudge the hierarchy we end up with conspiracy theories and unsupportable science.
Apocalypto: The time pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal. Rushkoff links together not only “Preppers” in their bunkers and cryogenic “Singularity-ists,” but also the current cultural fascination with zombies as examples of our wish to “level up” (in game parlance) out of our present situation. These grand finales are fantasies, like the doomsday predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar, but they speak to a powerful yearning. Rushkoff suggest we resist these temptations and instead, “let up on the pedal just a bit… [and] envision slow paths to sustainability that don’t require zombies or the demise of the majority of the world’s population.
For all of these impacted symptoms of time distress, Rushkoff proposes actionable solutions. I noted in the acknowledgements section the thanks he gave to Courtney Young for “encouraging me to keep considering the positive implications of present shock.” It is tempting, of course, to merely be critical. Rushkoff has something of the old-testament prophet about him, full of honest indignation—but he balances that with an awareness of what people, businesses and governments need in the present moment to solve their immediate problems.
To the problem of narrative collapse, Rushkoff suggests that young people have reacted to the loss of storytellers by realizing they have to become the storyteller. The gamer can write his own next level. We can be fragmented by allowing ourselves to operate on the (non-temporal) time scale of computers or we can program our computers to keep us in sync with our own goals and our own lives. Technology is, in fact, neutral. It doesn’t “want” things to be a certain way. But all technologies are ste up by people with certain biases, but those biases are often unclear until they play out in the real world. So civilians do have an opportunity to intervene in technologies that they dont’t fully understand because they do have the capacity to understand the impact of those technologies on their lives.
Rushkoff sees that technology and financial opportunism have strengthened each other in ways that are ultimately not in the greater good. But he doesn’t see this overwinding of certain values as opposed to others as inevitable or apocalyptic. Now that we see how these things work Rushkoff argues, we can begin to “unwind” them into more sustainable, egalitarian shapes. But as with a computer program, it is important to understand where you are in the code at any given point. Each part of a hierarchically nested system has a certain scope, and assuming global functions or variables can lead to errors.
Most importantly, the end of time as we have known it is not the end of the world. It is a new world that we can assert control over in new ways. So get over your doomsday hangover and get to work!Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Present Shock - reviewed!
Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock: The End Of Time Is Not The End Of The World
by Anthony Wing Kosner
If you read one book next year to help you make sense of the present moment, let it be Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff. Subtitled, “When Everything Happens Now,” the book is a contemporary rejoinder to Alvin Toffler’s seminal scripture of futurology, Future Shock, published in 1970.
What has happened in those 40 years has undermined our notions of the future. Indeed, one of Toffler’s tenets is that “change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.” Rushkoff takes this notion a step further an describes a present in which “there is no temporal backdrop against which to measure our progress, no narrative through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward which we may strive, and seemingly no time to figure any of this out.”
Rushkoff toes the line between apocalypse and ascension. He diagnoses the cultural problems engendered by our disorientation from traditional concepts of time and attempts to propose concrete steps we can take to recover some sense of control and purpose.
Program or be Programmed, Rushkoff’s last book, followed a similar arc, by explaining ten commands we can use to take control of our digital lives. The book inspired the founders of Codeacademy, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, a free, online platform for teaching programming. Rushkoff is now Codevangelist in Residence at Codeacademy, where I interviewed him recently.
Present Shock is a big concept with profound implications for culture, politics and business. A simple visualization (borrowed from Adrian Bejan’s theories of flow systems) is to think of time as a river flowing at a certain pace. Below a certain threshold, the movements of things on the river are fairly linear and predictable. You launch a barge in the river here and three days later you have drifted to there. This is historical progress as we have come to know it over the millennia But when the speed of the flow increases beyond that threshold, the river becomes turbulent, non-linear, unpredictable. Such is the state of time in 2012.
What does this mean? Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.
Narrative Collapse: Rushkoff identifies both the sensationalism of reality TV and the meta-stories of The Simpsons and Family Guy as examples of how we no longer have the time or patience for linear stories. From entertainment to financial investment, the payoff has to be virtually instantaneous in order to justify our attention. Politically, he shows how these impulses play out both in the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. A news cycle divested of linear time, pushes politicians into present tense reactions with unsustainable results. Rushkoff’s sympathies are clearly more with Occupy who confounded conservatives and the mainstream press by having a large impact without an easily identifiable goal. In remix culture and contemporary activism, he sees the potential for us to seize the narrative frame and use them in new ways to invent innovative story forms and flexible agendas.
Digiphrenia: Because technology enables us to be aware of and have control over multiple conceptual spaces simultaneously, our attention is increasingly divided. Whether we are “multi-tasking” at work or piloting drone strikes in Afghanistan from a suburban office park in Las Vegas, we are not in the present moment (in a zen sense) but actually in fragments between moments that happen to be occurring at the same time. The key to avoiding these dislocation, Rushkoff suggests, is to understand the difference between time as data flow (like a Twitter feed) and time as data storage (like a book.) Knowing when to be in “the now,” and when to insulate yourself from it can help you reclaim control of your time and attention.
Overwinding: The “shock” part of future shock really comes from how much time we have “springloaded” into the present. From financial derivatives to the piracy of intellectual property, Rushkoff shows how we use leverage “to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones,” attempting to capture the value of (others’) labor in the click of a mouse. This is why Black Friday gets earlier and earlier each year or why shaving a couple of milliseconds off the time to execute a computerized trade confers significant advantage. But we can also use this fact in more constructive ways to “springload” time into things, like the example Rushkoff cites of the fully functional “pop-up” hospital that Israel sent to Japan after the Tsunami.
Fractalnoia: One of the biggest risks in the barrage of big data spawned by our digital lives is that our abilities of pattern recognition are imprecise. When we succeed at making sense of the world in one scale or time frame we easily apply that “fractal” pattern elsewhere, often inappropriately. As the pace of change increases, our feedback loops get shorter and shorter until all we have is feedback screech. Computers, operating out of human time, can in fact discern patterns in that noise, but it is up to us humans to put those patterns in the correct context. When we fudge the hierarchy we end up with conspiracy theories and unsupportable science.
Apocalypto: The time pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal. Rushkoff links together not only “Preppers” in their bunkers and cryogenic “Singularity-ists,” but also the current cultural fascination with zombies as examples of our wish to “level up” (in game parlance) out of our present situation. These grand finales are fantasies, like the doomsday predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar, but they speak to a powerful yearning. Rushkoff suggest we resist these temptations and instead, “let up on the pedal just a bit… [and] envision slow paths to sustainability that don’t require zombies or the demise of the majority of the world’s population.
For all of these impacted symptoms of time distress, Rushkoff proposes actionable solutions. I noted in the acknowledgements section the thanks he gave to Courtney Young for “encouraging me to keep considering the positive implications of present shock.” It is tempting, of course, to merely be critical. Rushkoff has something of the old-testament prophet about him, full of honest indignation—but he balances that with an awareness of what people, businesses and governments need in the present moment to solve their immediate problems.
To the problem of narrative collapse, Rushkoff suggests that young people have reacted to the loss of storytellers by realizing they have to become the storyteller. The gamer can write his own next level. We can be fragmented by allowing ourselves to operate on the (non-temporal) time scale of computers or we can program our computers to keep us in sync with our own goals and our own lives. Technology is, in fact, neutral. It doesn’t “want” things to be a certain way. But all technologies are ste up by people with certain biases, but those biases are often unclear until they play out in the real world. So civilians do have an opportunity to intervene in technologies that they dont’t fully understand because they do have the capacity to understand the impact of those technologies on their lives.
Rushkoff sees that technology and financial opportunism have strengthened each other in ways that are ultimately not in the greater good. But he doesn’t see this overwinding of certain values as opposed to others as inevitable or apocalyptic. Now that we see how these things work Rushkoff argues, we can begin to “unwind” them into more sustainable, egalitarian shapes. But as with a computer program, it is important to understand where you are in the code at any given point. Each part of a hierarchically nested system has a certain scope, and assuming global functions or variables can lead to errors.
Most importantly, the end of time as we have known it is not the end of the world. It is a new world that we can assert control over in new ways. So get over your doomsday hangover and get to work!
May 13, 2011
LSD Magazine Interview
Giant interview with me about alt.topics, just published in a (for now) web-only magazine called LSD.
Here's the link.
May 7, 2011
Two New Videos
Here are two fun new ones. The first is a clip of an evening interview last month for "Rushkoff on Broadway" with Newsweek's Jeremy McCarter. They should be showing the whole thing on cableTV eventually.
Center for Communication
And here's an odd one – my "canonization" with Reverend Billy at the Church of Life After Shopping. I don't generally do rants, but it was situationally appropriate.
Saint Douglas Rushkoff
April 25, 2011
Big Interview at Figure/Ground
They just posted a big text interview with me at FigureGround – a website based in Canada looking at a lot of media theorists and thinkers.
Here's a piece:
What are you currently working on and when is your next book coming out?
I'm currently working on a summit called Contact that I hope will restore some of the lost optimism and potential of the early net. My next published thing that's coming out is a graphic novel I wrote for Vertigo three years ago, that's finally coming out in 2012. It's about kids raised from birth to be video game testers. I'm hoping someone decides to make it as a movie, too, so that it can ultimately end up a series of video games. That'd be fun. I'm spending most of my time working on a new book that I hope will help people see what's going on right now from a more able perspective. I think people have gotten caught up with catching up. Time is compressing for us, and we think we're narrowing in on the present when we're actually doing the opposite. The notion of "now" is a really funny thing, and almost always concerns some form of delusion, distraction, or manipulation. I'm working on a book that may help rip that one open. I want us to have the benefit of traditional narrative, even in a non-linear, post-narrative world. Just because stories aren't true doesn't mean they aren't useful. And I totally get why people feel there's no time for them, anymore. But if what I'm trying to do works, we'll end up with all the time in the world.
April 4, 2011
Rushkoff on Broadway Recap
Nice summary of last week's event via PBS.org's Need to Know blog.
"So I browsed the Net for three hours. Did I make anyone happier? Did it earn me money? Am I a better person? So why did I do it?"
On Wednesday evening, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff engaged a standing-room-only crowd in a converted movie theater in midtown Manhattan. His quick wit, fearless dystopian warnings, and heartening calls to action have made him a favorite among those questioning the future of our digitally mediated culture; there were a lot of big ideas slung our way.
One visualization of a social graph. Friends' names appear around the edge, and lines depict those friends' relationships to each other. Photo: flickr/inju
For one, the commodification of human relationships ("the social graph"), which is the unfortunate business plan of Facebook and many elements of the monetized web, is not in our best interest. At all. Vigilance on this count – and awareness that "we are the product being sold" – will help protect us. While the social web can be an invaluable tool, we must control it, speak its language and learn its tricks, Rushkoff said."Your [social] graph is better preserved than if it was chiseled into the Parthenon, owned by a company managed by a**holes!"
He cited the use of social media in the recent Middle East uprisings as an occasion when people exhibited real agency — gathering ever-growing groups around not a TV show or other cool brand, but toward a shared goal. He added that the most interesting moment in the Egyptian uprising was actually after that government's January 27 decision to "turn off the Internet"; at that point:
• Protesters maintained, and increased, their momentum by connecting with each other in person.
• The world realized the vulnerability and centralized structure of the Internet and started asking some essential questions."The way to win this age is to just do something. Grow some vegetables and learn how the code works."
It's interesting that these passionate ideals would be shared with technology and media students situated in the whirling wealth of Columbus Circle, home to Time Warner, Armani Exchange and a slate of luxury restaurants. One wise woman commented, on leaving the theater, "When did he become such a leftist?"
But he had just answered that question. "I'm not a communist, just a media theorist." The 20th century was the age of great "isms," which only reinforce themselves by insisting that we oversimplify. To this point: the third chapter from his latest book "Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" is titled "You May Always Choose None of the Above."
While Rushkoff considers himself neither a communist nor an activist, he readily engaged the question, "What is to be done?" Within an economy where the inflationary tendency of money prevents us from hoarding, and which perches on a global banking system many consider insupportable, we were exhorted to "invest locally."
"Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old."
"Invest in community supported agriculture."
"Learn to program."
A few links, if you'd like to act on that:
Community supported agriculture
Webmonkey coding tutorials
Contact Summit 2011: The Evolution Will Be Social
March 24, 2011
Party Like It's 1992
I was about to deliver the closing talk for a social media conference called Pivot last year, when I all-at-once realized that almost nobody there had any idea what social media was really about. While interactive technologies had spread wider and deeper than any of us in the early days had ever imagined, they seemed to have shed something along the way.
Social media offer us an opportunity more spectacular than purchasing video greetings from American Idol contestants for our Facebook friends. They offer us the ability to play an active, conscious role in the development of our networked human future: from distributed communications networks impervious to the censorship of corporate or government regimes to new modes of value creation and exchange, or new open source democratic participation to collective consciousness and expression.
So, in a world now overflowing with networking events, I decided to launch a new conference – Contact – a counter-conference, if you will, dedicated to folding the edges of net culture back to the middle where they belong.
The Internet was prefigured not by Wired but by BoingBoing and Mondo2000. The net revolution is happening on the streets of Cairo, not the Facebook page of PepsiCorp. And social networking is less a tool for kids to agree upon a brand of sport shoe than the unemployed workers of Cleveland to support their collective renaissance.
I'm tired of bemoaning the commercialization of the net, and would rather simply take it back or build another one capable of realizing the tremendous evolutionary potential that these media appeared to hold in store for us as they emerged twenty years ago.
And so I'm gathering the best and brightest hearts and minds I know to reify these possibilities. Scott Heiferman, Dennis Crowley, Mark Pesce, Dave Winer, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Michel Bauwens, Eli Pariser, Marc Canter, Caroline Woolard, Laura Flanders, to name just a few, have already signed up to participate. But this is not a sit-in-the-audience-and-listen-to-speeches-that-you-could-have-watched-on-Vimeo sort of affair.
We might open with some short "provocations" from people in the field sharing their greatest challenges, but the object of the game is to spawn, share, and develop our hopes and dreams. What will come out of this process is anyone's guess. At at the very least, we'll convene meetings about the ideas we care about, and vote on the ideas we want to pursue and push forward. We'll have a giant Bazaar where everyone can demo their works in progress for one another and seek help, customers, or collaborators. We'll have the chance to get the advice of leading technologists, entrepreneurs, and theorists on our work, and to educate ourselves about what everyone else is doing.
More than that, we will have planted a flag in the sand that social media is evolutionary in spirit, and capable of addressing the greatest challenges facing humanity at the brink of economic, ecological, and cultural crisis. And to celebrate this fact.
I'm also hoping Contact can launch a competition – even in its first year – awarding the four "best voted" ideas put forth by attendees with some real cash to go build them out. If you are an NGO or corporation looking to put your name on such a contest while also potentiating new ideas in this space, please get in touch.
So come if you can, October 20, 2011 at the Angel Orensanz Center in NYC. We've only got room for 400 this first year, but you can make Contact anywhere you like through MeetupEverywhere.
