Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 7

Team Human ep. 185: Duncan Trussell

Comedian, composer, contemporary buddhist, and host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Duncan Trussell and Rushkoff travel far and wide through spirituality and synchronicity to help us discover what it means to be truly human, together. Is the hope that life — and conversations, themselves — continue after death? How can humans grapple with the Buddhist belief of truly learning to let go of “the dream”?

You can listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human Serialization #37 & 38: The Damage We Do to Ourselves When We Try to Function Like Computers

When autonomous technologies appear to be calling all the shots, it’s only logical for humans to conclude that if we can’t beat them, we may as well join them. Whenever people are captivated — be they excited or enslaved — by a new technology, it becomes their new role model, too.

In the Industrial Age, as mechanical clocks dictated human time and factory machines outpaced human workers, we began to think of ourselves in very mechanical terms. We described ourselves as living in a “clockwork universe,” in which the human body was one of the machines. Our language slowly became invested with mechanical metaphors: We needed to grease the wheels, crank up the business, dig deeper, or turn a company into a well-oiled machine. Even everyday phrases, such as “fueling up” for eating lunch or “he has a screw loose” for thinking illogically, conveyed the acceptance of humans as mechanical devices.

Read more from “The Damage We Do to Ourselves When We Try to Function Like Computers”

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Team Human Serialization #36: On the Internet of Things, We People Are the Things

While Team Human may be compromised in the digital environment, team algorithm is empowered.

As our more resonant communication pathways fail us, it becomes harder to check in with one another, operate in a coordinated fashion, and express or even experience empathy. We lose all the self-reinforcing feedback loops of rapport: the mirror neurons and oxytocin that reward us for socializing. Surprisingly, the inability to establish trust in digital environments doesn’t deter us from using them, but spurs more consumption of digital media. We become addicted to digital media precisely because we are so desperate to make sense of the neuromechanical experience we’re having there. We are compelled to figure it out, calibrate our sensory systems, and forge high- touch relationships in a landscape that won’t permit any of these things. We instead become highly individuated, alienated, and suspicious of one another.

Read more from “On the Internet of Things, We People Are the Things”

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Team Human ep. 157: Tyson Yunkaporta “Everything Indigenous is Human”

Playing for Team Human today, senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne and author of “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World,” Tyson Yunkaporta.

Yunkaporta helps us apply an indigenous lens to see our global crises in a more actionable and inclusive way. Where did western culture go wrong? How did the shift from a circular understanding of time to a linear model of time affect human perception of progress? How did indigenous practices of psychedelic drugs lose their meaning without their proper contexts and spiritual guidance?

In his opening monologue, Rushkoff discusses how regenerative thinking and practice can be applied across broad spectrums to help us understand how to integrate all parts of life — from production to externalities — into our actions and mindsets.

Listen to Team Human here.

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Team Human Serialization #35: Digital Media Still Isn’t Very Good at Connecting People

Safer than the real world, where we are judged and our actions have consequences, virtual social spaces were assumed to encourage experimentation, role-playing, and unlikely relationships. Luckily for those depending on our alienation for profits, digital media doesn’t really connect people that well, even when it’s designed to do so. We cannot truly relate to other people online — at least not in a way that the body and brain recognize as real.

As neuroscientists have now established, human beings require input from organic, three-dimensional space in order to establish trusting relationships or maintain peace of mind. We remember things better when we can relate them to their physical locations, such as when we study from a book instead of a digital file.

The human nervous system calibrates itself over time based on the input we receive from the real world. A baby learns how to fall asleep by lying next to its mother and mirroring her nervous system. An anxious person gets calm after a walk in the woods. We come to trust another person by looking into their eyes and establishing rapport. We feel connected to a group when we breathe in unison.

Read more: https://medium.com/team-human/digital...

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Team Human Serialization #33: How Addictive Tech Exploits Our Evolutionary Needs

Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation. Persuasive technology, as it’s now called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral change” and “habit formation,” most often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

Behavioral design theory holds that people don’t change their behaviors because of shifts in their attitudes and opinions. On the contrary, people change their attitudes to match their behaviors. In this model, we are more like machines than thinking, autonomous beings. Or at least we can be made to work that way.

Read more from Team Human on Medium: Click here

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Team Human Serialization #32: The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. Now, Not So Much

The problem with media revolutions is that we too easily lose sight of what it is that’s truly revolutionary. By focusing on the shiny new toys and ignoring the human empowerment potentiated by these new media — the political and social capabilities they are retrieving — we end up surrendering them to the powers that be. Then we and our new inventions become mere instruments for some other agenda.

Social phenomena of all sorts undergo this process of hollowing. When punk rockers reduce their understanding of their movement to the right to wear Mohawks or pierce their faces, it’s easy for them to lose touch with the more significant anti-authoritarian ideology of DIY, direct action, and never selling out. Instead, punk becomes just another fashion trend to be sold at the mall. When ravers understand their movement as the right to take drugs and dance all night, they lose sight of the deeper political potentials unleashed by reclaiming public space or separating recreation from profit. Rave becomes just another genre for industry to sell. The styles of these movements were co-opted, and the essential shifts in power on which they were based were left behind.

Read more from Team Human on Medium: Click here

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Team Human ep. 154 Priscillia Ludosky “Occupying Reality”

Playing for Team Human today, activist and a Founder of the Yellow Vest Movement, Priscillia Ludosky

Ludosky will be showing us how a movement uniting the agendas of the people transcends the sensibilities of both the left and the right.

You can support the Team Human podcast on Patreon and subscribe to the Team Human podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

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Team Human ep. 153 Brian Hughes “The Undercurrent of Extremism”

Playing for Team Human today, Associate Director at the Polarization Extremism and Radical Innovation Lab at American University, Brian Hughes.

Hughes shares with us the underlying drive fueling so much of today’s more violent extremism along with how we can mitigate some of its impact.

You can support the Team Human podcast on Patreon and subscribe to the Team Human podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

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Restoring the Economy Is The Last Thing We Should Want

Everyone wants to know when we’re going to get the economy started up again, and just how many lives we’re willing to surrender before we do. We’ve all been made to understand the dilemma: The sooner we “open up” American and get back to our jobs, the more likely we spread Covid-19, further overwhelming hospitals and killing more people. Yet the longer we wait, the more people will suffer and die in other ways.

I think this is a false choice. Yes, it may be true that every 1% rise in unemployment leads to a corresponding 1% rise in suicides. And it’s true that an extended freeze of the economy could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years. But such metrics say less about the human cost of the downturn than they do about the dangerously absolute dependence of workers on traditional employment for basic sustenance — an artifact of an economy that has been intentionally rigged to favor big banks and passive shareholders over small and local businesses that actually provide goods and services in a sustainable way.

In reality, the sooner and more completely we restore the old economy, the faster we simply recreate the conditions that got us sick in the first place and rendered us incapable of mounting an effective response. The economy we’re committed to restoring is no more the victim of the Covid-19 crisis than it is the cause. We have to stop asking when will things get back to normal. They won’t. There is no going back. And that’s actually good news.

Read more from GEN’s “Restoring the Economy Is The Last Thing We Should Want”: https://gen.medium.com/restoring-the-...

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