Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 47

YesMen Fix the World – on MediaSquat Radio

PLAY INTERVIEW

I had a great discussion last night with the most brilliant media viralists walking the earth – the YesMen – on my radio show The MediaSquat last night. You can play it above, or go see their movie trailer at The YesMen Fix the World website.

Monday's show also featured an interview with the founder of Appropedia.org, a wiki Appropedia for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development.

If you haven't ever listened to The MediaSquat, you c

post removed

This post has been removed.

I wrote a piece I believed to be in support of a web site that has gotten a lot of undeserved heat lately. But many members of that community saw in the piece a betrayal of their ambitions. They successfully took down this site, posted personal details elsewhere on the web, and crashed my email. I don't have the means or energy to keep this site up or my online life functioning with the piece in place.

So, for the sake of everything and everyone else I'm hoping to supp

4Chan, Child Porn, and what's left of the Wild Net

Just posted this piece to Daily Beast about having spent the last three weeks "embedded" as journalist on the infamous /b channel on 4chan.

…all along, as I took my notes, and considered asking some pointed questions, I actually started to wonder what might happen to the security of my own email account and Web site if I said the wrong thing, insulted the wrong /b/rother, or inflamed the wrong posse. And in that sense it felt like the old Internet again—the unpredictable, interactive, and highly

The end of mass everything. DIY Days, Philly

KEYNOTE – DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

The End of the Story: How capitalism killed narrative, and how to grow new ones
The myth of infinite market expansion was supported, at least in part, by a story structure dependent on crisis, climax, and relief. Just as we are now demanding bankers give up their absolute control of our monetary system, must we as storytellers give up control of our narratives? And how can we make a living telling stories in a world where everyone now has a story to tell, and a means o

Rushkoff vs Andersen

Change Observer just posted the first part of a conversation between me and Kurt Andersen, on the economy and just how big an opportunity this crisis might be affording us.

Andersen is smart – really smart – though a bit more sanguine about all that's going on around us than I am. I think that might be, in part, because he has done so very well at everything he has tried. Maybe that's a law of the universe, and one I should just follow (rather than letting my misgivings about "success" impede m

Best of Times, Worst of Times: Two Economies, by design

Today's generally accepted business headline, from the NYTimes: "Signs of Economic Growth Push Markets Up"

Just parsing that phrase pretty much says it all. Signs of economic growth can and will push markets up. This means, literally, that if the metrics we use to measure economic growth indicate a positive trend, more speculators will invest capital into the shares originally used to lend money to corporations.

Of course, the signs of economic growth – these metrics – are really just derivatives

Rushkoff on Disinfo Podcast

Disinfo yet lives. They just launched a podcast interview with me about Life Inc, as well as other matters counter-cultural.

Bank Bonuses = Carpet Bag

NYTimes today: "Big Banks Paid Billions in Bonuses Amid Wall St. Crisis"

Translation: Bankers pay themselves more when their banks are about to fail.

Regulators, such as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, are shocked and dismayed that financial firms receiving the largest share of federal bailout money last year paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.

In fact, for reasons regulators can't seem to figure out, bank executive's bonuses were

"Lucrative Fees May Deter Efforts to Alter Troubled Loans"

That's the headline, NYTimes and elsewhere.

What it means is that mortgage companies can often make more money when the homeowner goes into foreclosure than if the homeowner pays his bills. The longer a homeowner is delinquent, the more late fees and other penalties are accrued. Plus, there's other fees the mortgage servicer gets if the homeowner goes belly up, once the bank sells the house.

So if a homeowner is beginning to miss payments, it is not to the mortgage lender's benefit to help him re

Front Page Translations

Lately, the business headlines have been shocking and deceptive. Each day, I'm going to pick a few off the cover of the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, and try to explain, briefly, what's really going on.

The Goldman Sachs ultra-fast computer-transaction scandal: Big fast computers connected to the trading floor allow "connected" financial firms like Goldman Sachs to see our stock trades before they are actually executed. They can then take action based on our actions, by going back in