Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff

The animal can find water anywhere in its roaming range, or even migrate to find a new source. While the plant binds energy, the animal binds space.

What makes humans special is that we can also bind time. We don’t need to experience everything for ourselves over the course of a single lifetime. Instead, we benefit from the experiences of our predecessors, who can tell us what they’ve learned.

Through language and instruction, humans create a knowledge base that compresses or binds many centuries of accumulated wisdom into the learning span of a single generation. We do not need to reinvent all knowledge anew, every time.

Even our emotions are not our own, but a side effect of how our social group is organized.

Disconnection from one’s social group leads to higher rates of depression, illness, and mortality.

Lonely students have low levels of immune cells. Prison inmates prefer violence to solitary confinement. In the US, social isolation is a greater public health problem than obesity.

Unfettered communications, a functioning democracy, the right to free expression and assembly, community values, and economic inclusion all enable such activities.

Without a relatively open social landscape in which to participate, we can only express ourselves through self-absorption or withdrawal.

Without socially positive opportunities to exercise our autonomy, we tend toward self-promotion over self-sacrifice and fixate on personal gain over collective prosperity.

Mental health has been defined as “the capacity both for autonomous expansion and for homonomous integration with others.”

To have autonomy without interdependency leads to isolation or narcissism. To have interdependency with no autonomy stunts our psychological growth. Healthy people live in social groups that have learned to balance or, better, marry these two imperatives.

It doesn’t take much to tilt a healthy social landscape toward an individualist or repressive one.

one desocializing strategy is to emphasize individualism.

Those competing individuals never find true autonomy, however, because they lack the social fabric in which to exercise it.

Conformity is not truly social, however, because people are looking up for direction rather than to one another.

We either succumb to the pressure with the inner knowledge that something is off, or we recognize the ploy, reject the plea, and arm ourselves against such tactics in the future. In either case, the social landscape is eroded. What held us together now breaks us apart.

But then those very media become the means through which we are separated. Books reach only the literate wealthy; radio encourages mob violence; money is hoarded by monopoly

Language bonded tribes, offered new ways to settle conflicts, allowed people to express emotions, and—maybe more important—enabled elders to pass on their knowledge.

For all the benefits of the written word, it is also responsible for replacing an embodied, experiential culture with an abstract, administrative one.

Adolf Hitler used the new, seemingly magical medium of radio to make himself appear to be anywhere and everywhere at once. No single voice had so permeated German society before, and the sense of personal connection it engendered allowed Hitler to create a new sort of rapport with millions of people.

Television culture further fostered loneliness by substituting brand imagery for human contact.

The net seemed to offer personal autonomy at the same time as it connected people in new ways. Popular mythology holds that computer networks began as a sort of informational bomb shelter for the US Defense Department.

where dumb terminals were connected to big but primitive mainframes. Processing cycles were scarce, and networking allowed many people to share the common resource.

Messaging and other conferencing tools and bulletin boards soon became more popular than computing itself.

So the government funded the implementation of a big “network of networks” that finally became the internet.

For their part, the hackers and hippies inspired by the internet saw it as an extension of the human nervous system. Each human brain was understood to be a node in a giant network. Aspirations were high. The internet would transform humanity into the planet’s brain; Gaia, the planet’s spirit, was to become fully conscious.

Traditional media companies and advertisers, who had decidedly less interest in planetary consciousness than they did in quarterly profits, became gravely concerned when they learned in 1992 that the average internet-connected family was watching nine hours less commercial television per week than families without the internet.

steering the internet toward less interactive and more advertiser-friendly uses.

The World Wide Web was originally intended as an easier way to find and hyperlink research documents.

Internet utopians declared victory: the net had survived an attack from the forces of commercialization and could now resume its mission to connect us all. We announced that the net was and would always be a “social medium.”

With social media, the net could eschew commercial content and return to its amateur roots, serving more as a way for people to find one another, forge new alliances, and share unconventional ideas.

The copious information that users were posting about themselves became the basis for detailed consumer profiles that, in turn, determined what ads reached which users.

Advertisers communicated individually to users through news feeds that were automatically and later algorithmically personalized.

The platforms themselves were no longer in the business of delivering people to one another; they were in the business of delivering people to marketers. Humans were no longer the customers of social media. We were the product.

Others sought out particularly influential users and made them brand advocates who got paid in free product.

the members of various affinity groups and even political affiliations competed against one another for likes, followers, and influencer status.

The social agenda driving what felt like a new medium’s natural evolution was once again subsumed by competitive individualism.

Gone are the collaborative urges that characterize embodied social interaction. In their place comes another bastardized Darwinian ideal: a battle for survival of the fittest meme.

The term “media virus” was meant to convey the way ideas could spread in a world with more interactive communications. A real, biological virus has a novel, never-before-seen protein shell that lets it travel through a person’s bloodstream unrecognized. (If the body identifies the virus, it sends antibodies to attack it.) The virus then latches onto a cell in the host organism and injects its genetic code within. The code works its way to the nucleus of the cell and seeks to interpolate itself into the cell’s DNA. The next time the cell reproduces, it replicates the virus’s code along with its own.

Then the person carrying the virus begins spreading it to others. The virus continues to replicate and spread until, at last, the body learns to reject its code. From then on, the protein shell will be recognized and atta...

woman “live streams” her husband dying of gunshot wounds.

A president threatens a nuclear attack in a public, 140-character message typed with his thumbs.

medium than the message.

That moment of confusion creates the time and space for infection.

Surveillance video of a police van running over a black suspect recalls America’s shamefully unacknowledged history of slavery and ongoing racism.

The amazing thing is that it doesn’t matter what side of an issue people are on for them to be infected by the meme and provoked to replicate it. “Look what this person said!” is reason enough to spread it.

well-meaning and pro-social counterculture groups have attempted to spread their messages through the equivalents of viral media. They subvert the original meanings of corporate logos,

Logic and truth have nothing to do with it. Memes work by provoking fight-or-flight reactions.

The danger with viruses is that they are constructed to bypass the neocortex—the thinking, feeling part of our brain—and go straight to the more primal brain stem beneath.

Memetic campaigns do not speak to the part of the brain that understands the benefits of tolerance, social connection, or appreciation of difference. They’re speaking to the reptile brain that understands only predator or prey, fight or flight, kill or be killed.