Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 6

Team Human ep. 194: xiaowei r. wang – Live from Unfinished Live

Author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and creative director at Logic Magazine xiaowei r. wang helps us contend with the fact that social trust simply may not be something that can scale.

In his monologue, Rushkoff asks why we should create solutions “at scale” if operating at scale, itself, is the problem.

You can read a written version of Rushkoff’s monologue, Exponential Tech Doesn’t Serve Social Good, on Medium.

Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang is now available at your favorite indie bookstore.

Click here to stream Team Human.

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What Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse means to our humanity

Maybe this is what Silicon Valley’s demigods have been dreaming about since the beginning. A profound reversal of the relationship between human beings and technology, a flipping of the real and virtual.

I’m speaking of the project Mark Zuckerberg launched on Thursday. It was the metaverse, he said, and also announced that his company’s name had changed, to Meta, from Facebook.When I clicked on the link to Zuckerberg’s video announcement, I thought it was a joke at first, maybe a “deep fake.” Someone seemed to have modeled Zuckerberg’s face and gestures pretty well, but the guy in the video was so robotic, surely he must have been an avatar.

But no, this was the real Facebook founder, joining his most trusted employees in pitching the metaverse, Facebook’s proprietary new virtual world of worlds where we are supposed to do our working, playing and socializing forever more.This isn’t intended to be some casual digital simulation we enter and leave at will. Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to ultimately encompass the rest of our reality — connecting bits of real space here to real space there, while totally subsuming what we think of as the real world.

Click here to read more of What Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse means to our humanity on CNN.

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Team Human ep. 193: Ryan Broderick

Garbage Day journalist and host of the Content Mines Podcast Ryan Broderick brings us up to date on the current state of meme play.

You can view Broderick’s talk, The Internet is Magic, from The Meme in the Moment Festival, on YouTube.

In his monologue, Rushkoff explores how the World Wide Web flattened a meta-community of digital nomads.

You can read a written version of Rushkoff’s monologue, Did the Homepage Kill the Internet?, on Medium.

Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human ep. 192: Ellen Pearlman

New media artist, curator, writer, and creator of, Noor: A Brain Opera, the world’s first immersive interactive brain opera, Ellen Pearlman brings us where no machine can go: Into the last soft, squishy recesses of human experience still inaccessible to our robot overlords.

In his monologue, Rushkoff reminds us about the importance of reducing our exposure to the global information onslaught.

You can read the written version of Rushkoff’s monologue, “Turning off the “News“” on Medium.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human ep. 191: Richard Heinberg

Author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival and senior fellow-in-residence Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg shares the simple truth that power has a lot less to do with what you’re granted or what you have than what you do.

In his monologue, Rushkoff explores the opportunity we have to confront the realities of climate change now that its effects are here. “But now that the effects of our own activity are upon us, we have no more power to mitigate them than the toddler does of preventing chest of drawers from toppling over.

You can read the written version of Rushkoff’s monologue, “It’s Good to Feel Small” on Medium.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human ep. 190: Irwin Kula

President of the National Jewish Center for Leading and Leadership, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, and seventh-generation rabbi Irwin Kula brings us through a spiritual journey in the desert — and may just show us the strength to stay there in the in-between.

In his monologue, Rushkoff explains his hope that blockchains and cryptocurrencies can become something other than another asset class for a generation of traders. “Our marketplaces should never be in service to its financial utilities or the people monopolizing them. Nor should the metrics of economic health be based on the requirement of capital to grow.”

You can read Can’t We Use Crypto for Something Other Than Capitalism, a written version of Rushkoff’s monologue on Medium.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human Special Report: Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum Pranks Newsmax

On this Team Human special report, The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum explains how he duped Newsmax into letting an imposter former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz discuss his regret for the Afghanistan War for 11 minutes!

You can listen to the Team Human Special Report here.

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Team Human ep. 189: Sarah Pessin

Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Denver Sarah Pessin helps us learn to treasure the great human in-between. The living, delightfully incomplete, and always never-quite-thereness of our collective human journey.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human ep. 188: Naomi Klein

Author and activist Naomi Klein engages with Rushkoff about life in the technopoly, and how the inequality of the digital age must be met with a structural critique of capitalism.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human ep. 187: Jeremy Lent

Author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, Jeremy Lent helps us see through to the meaning that informs our science so that it can be used to embrace the paradox of our existence, rather than reducing it down to a form suitable only for exploitation.

In his monologue, Rushkoff explores how well-natured attempts to improve language will almost always fall short because of the underlying structure of the language we use. “We must also accept that language is just another medium that will almost always fail to say what we truly mean.”

You can read Rushkoff’s “What if All Language is Oppressive?” on Medium.

The Web of Meaningis available now. It’s an important refutation of the orthodox materialism that is plaguing science and culture. It’s a helpful reminder that those of us experiencing the world as a meaningful place are not the crazy ones.

Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon.

Jeremy Lent will be joining Team Human’s official Discord channel on Friday, August 6, at 1:00 PM ET for a special Team Human Salon. You can become a contributing supporter of Team Human today.

Begin supporting today for as little as $2 per month to gain access to our Discord community, the Team Human Team Feed featuring bonus episodes, archived conversations with Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, t-shirts, and various other digital rewards.

You can listen to Team Human here.

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