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an 10 22

It turns out that many of today’s billionaires are selfish, lonely men fantasizing about how they will survive the end times they have played a part in creating.

In mid-September, for just a few days, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani entered the ranks of the top three richest people on earth as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It was the first time an Indian, or, for that matter, an Asian, had enjoyed such a distinction. South Asians in my circle of family and friends felt excited at the prospect that a man who looked like us had entered such rarefied ranks.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Adani was deemed the second richest person, even richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos! A Times of India profile fawningly quoted him relaying his thought process in the early days of his rags-to-riches story. “‘Dreams were infinite but finances finite,’ he says with engaging frankness,” according to the profile. There was no mention of the serious accusations he faces of corruption and diverting money into offshore tax havens, or of the entire website, AdaniWatch, devoted to investigating his dirty deeds.

Adani made his money, in part, by investing in digital services, leading one economist to say, “Wherever there is a futuristic business in India, I think… [Adani] has a stronghold.”

The moment of pride that Indians felt in such an achievement by one of their own was short-lived. Quickly Adani slipped from second richest to third richest, and, as of this writing, is in the number four slot on a list dominated by people who have made money from the digital technology revolution.

In fact, ranking multibillionaires is a meaningless exercise that obscures the absurdity of their wealth. This year alone, a number of tech billionaires on Bloomberg’s list lost hundreds of billions of dollars as the gains they made during the early years of the pandemic were wiped out because of a volatile stock market. But, as Whizy Kim of Vox points out, whether or not they’re losing money or giving it away—as Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doing—their wealth remains insanely high, and most are worth more today than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

What are they doing with all this wealth?

It turns out that many are quietly plotting their own survival against our demise. Douglas Rushkoff, podcaster, founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and fellow at the Institute for the Future, has written a book about this bizarre phenomenon, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

In an interview, Rushkoff explains that billionaires worry about the end of humanity just like the rest of us. They fear catastrophic climate change or the next pandemic. And, they know their money will likely be of little value when civilizations decline. “How do I maintain control over my Navy Seal security guards once my money is worthless?” is a question that Rushkoff says many of the world’s wealthiest people want to know the answer to.

He knows they ask such questions because he was invited to give private lectures by those who think his expertise in digital technology gives him unique insight into the future. But Rushkoff was quietly studying them instead and has few flattering things to say about these wielders of economic power.

“How is it that the wealthiest and most powerful people I’d ever been in the same room with see themselves as utterly powerless to affect the future?” he asks. It seems as though “the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable calamity and then just, you know, hang on for dear life.”

Rushkoff explores this tech billionaire “mindset” that he says has resulted in a generation of people who are “almost comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind.” Adani is a perfect example of this, having invested in the very fossil fuels that are destroying our planet. He has large holdings in Australia’s coal mining industry and has sparked a massive grassroots movement intent on stopping him.

The admiration that some Indians feel for Adani’s ascension on Bloomberg’s list of billionaires is based on an assumption of cleverness. Surely, he must be one of the smartest people in the world in order to be one of the richest? Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man by far (with twice as much wealth as Bezos), has enjoyed such a reputation for years.

Those who are invested in the idea of merit-based capitalism can justify the unimaginable wealth of the world’s richest people only by assuming they are intelligent enough to deserve it.

This is a façade. Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on the planet appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us.

After being around tech billionaires in private, Rushkoff concludes that they are invested in “this notion that they really can, like puppeteers, kind of control society from one level above,” and that this approach is “different than the era of Alexander the Great, or Caesar.” If the question that vexes them most of all is how, in a disastrous future, will they control the guards they hire to protect their hoardings, then our economic system is a farce.

“Even if we call them genius technologists, most of them were plucked from college when they were freshmen,” says Rushkoff. “They came up with some idea in their dorm room before they’d taken history, or economics, or ethics, or philosophy” classes, and so they lack the wisdom needed to oversee their own perverse amounts of wealth.

Having spent time with many tech billionaires, Rushkoff worries that “their education about the future comes from zombie movies and science fiction shows.”

Billionaires are not simply drawing their wealth from a vacuum. According to data from the World Economic Forum, “the world’s richest have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth over recent decades.” This means that, if you were rich to begin with a decade or two ago, you are likely to have seen your wealth multiply by a greater amount than middle-class or lower-income people.

Not only are tech billionaires undeserving of their wealth, but they also are fleecing the rest of us—and fantasizing about hoarding that wealth in the worst-case scenarios while the rest of humanity struggles to survive.

The danger is that if society valorizes such (mostly) men, we are in danger of internalizing their childish, selfish mindset and giving up on solving the climate crisis or building resiliency on a mass scale.

Instead of relating to them, we ought to feel sorry for a group of people so cut off from humanity that their vision of the future is a very lonely one.

“Let’s look at these tech-bro billionaire lunatics. Let’s laugh at what they’re doing… so they look small rather than big,” says Rushkoff. He thinks it is critical to adopt the perspective that “the disaster they’re so afraid of looks entirely manageable by more reasonable people who are willing just to help each other out.”

sonali

The Uncanny Valley Is Our Best Defense

Our bodies recognize the dangers of simulation, and we should too

Douglas Rushkoff

Dec 16 ·

While humans are drawn to and empowered by paradox, our market-driven technologies and entertainment appear to be fixed on creating perfectly seamless simulations.

We can pinpoint the year movies or video games were released based on the quality of their graphics: the year they figured out steam, the year they learned to reflect light, or the year they made fur ripple in the wind. Robot progress is similarly measured by the milestones of speech, grasping objects, gazing into our eyes, or wearing artificial flesh. Each improvement reaches toward the ultimate simulation: a movie, virtual reality experience, or robot with such high fidelity that it will be indistinguishable from real life.

It’s a quest that will, thankfully, never be achieved. The better digital simulations get, the better we humans get at distinguishing between them and the real world. We are in a race against the tech companies to develop our perceptual apparatus faster than they can develop their simulations.

The hardest thing for animators and roboticists to simulate is a living human being. When an artificial figure gets too close to reality — not so close as to fool us completely, yet close enough that we can’t tell quite what’s wrong — that’s when we fall into a state of unease known as the “uncanny valley.” Roboticists noticed the effect in the early 1970s, but moviemakers didn’t encounter the issue until the late 1980s, when a short film of a computer-animated human baby induced discomfort and rage in test audiences. That’s why filmmakers choose to make so many digitally animated movies about toys, robots, and cars. These objects are easier to render convincingly because they don’t trigger the same mental qualms.

We experience vertigo in the uncanny valley because we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of years fine-tuning our nervous systems to read and respond to the subtlest cues in real faces. We perceive when someone’s eyes squint into a smile, or how their face flushes from the cheeks to the forehead, and we also — at least subconsciously — perceive the absence of these organic barometers. Simulations make us feel like we’re engaged with the nonliving, and that’s creepy.

We confront this same sense of inauthenticity out in the real world, too. It’s the feeling we get when driving past fake pastoral estates in the suburbs, complete with colonial pillars and horse tie rings on the gates. Or the strange verisimilitude of Las Vegas’ skylines and Disney World’s Main Street. It’s also the feeling of trying to connect with a salesperson who sticks too close to their script.

In our consumer culture, we are encouraged to assume roles that aren’t truly authentic to who we are. In a way, this culture is its own kind of simulation, one that requires us to make more and more purchases to maintain the integrity of the illusion.

We’re not doing this for fun, like trying on a costume, but for keeps, as supposedly self-realized lifestyle choices. Instead of communicating to one another through our bodies, expressions, or words, we do it through our purchases, the facades on our homes, or the numbers in our bank accounts. These products and social markers amount to pre-virtual avatars, better suited to game worlds than real life.

Most of all, the uncanny valley is the sense of alienation we can get from ourselves. What character have we decided to play in our lives? That experience of having been cast in the wrong role, or in the wrong play entirely, is our highly evolved BS detector trying to warn us that something isn’t right — that there’s a gap between reality and the illusion we are supporting. This is a setup, our deeper sensibilities are telling us. Don’t believe. It may be a trap. And although we’re not Neanderthals being falsely welcomed into the enemy camp before getting clobbered, we are nonetheless the objects of an elaborate ruse — one that evolution couldn’t anticipate.

Our uneasiness with simulations — whether they’re virtual reality, shopping malls, or social roles — is not something to be ignored, repressed, or medicated, but rather felt and expressed. These situations feel unreal and uncomfortable for good reasons. The importance of distinguishing between human values and false idols is at the heart of most religions, and is the starting place for social justice.

The uncanny valley is our friend.

This was section 63 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here.

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https://medium.com/team-human/the-digital-economy-is-capitalism-at-its-worst-230b2eeb38d4

Instead of bringing widespread prosperity, the digital economy has amplified the most extractive aspects of traditional capitalism. Connectivity may be the key to participation, but it also gives corporations more license and capacity to extract what little value people have left. Instead of retrieving the peer-to-peer marketplace, the digital economy exacerbates the division of wealth and paralyzes the social instincts for mutual aid that usually mitigate its effects.

Digital platforms amplify the power law dynamics that determine winners and losers. While digital music platforms make space for many more performers to sell their music, their architecture and recommendation engines end up promoting many fewer artists than a diverse ecosystem of record stores or FM radio did. One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing.

It’s the same across the board. While the net creates more access for artists and businesses of all kinds, it allows fewer than ever to make any money. The same phenomenon takes place on the stock market, where ultra-fast trading algorithms spur unprecedented momentum in certain shares, creating massive surpluses of capital in the biggest digital companies and sudden, disastrous collapses of their would-be competitors. Meanwhile, automation and extractive platforms combine to disadvantage anyone who still works for a living, turning what used to be lifelong careers into the temp jobs of a gig economy.

These frictionless, self-reinforcing loops create a “winner takes all” landscape that punishes the middle class, the small business, and the sustainable players. The only ones who can survive are artificially inflated companies, who use their ballooning share prices to purchase the also-rans. Scale is everything. This sensibility trickles down to all of us, making us feel like our careers and lives matter only if we’ve become famous, earned a million views, or done something, even something destructive, “at scale.”

While digital business plans destroy a human-scaled economy, the digital businesses themselves compromise the human sensibilities required to dig ourselves out of this mess. The human beings running those enterprises are no less the psychic victims of their companies’ practices than the rest of us, which is why it’s so hard for them to envision a way out.

Well-meaning developers, who have come to recognize the disastrous impacts of their companies, seek to solve technology’s problems with technological solutions. They see that social media algorithms are exacerbating wealth division and mental confusion, and resolve to tweak them not to do that — at least not so badly. The technosolutionists never consider the possibility that some technologies themselves have intrinsic antihuman affordances. (Guns may not kill people, but they are more biased toward killing than, say, pillows, even though both can be used for that purpose.) Furthermore, they propose technosolutions that are radical in every way except in their refusal to challenge the underlying rule set of venture capitalism or the extreme wealth of those who are making the investments. Every technosolution must still be a profitable investment opportunity — otherwise, it is not considered a solution at all.

Even promising wealth redistribution ideas, such as universal basic income, are recontextualized by the technosolutionists as a way of keeping their companies going. In principle, the idea of a negative income tax for the poor, or a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, makes economic sense. But when we hear these ideas espoused by Silicon Valley’s CEOs, it’s usually in the context of keeping the extraction going. People have been sucked dry, so now the government should just print more money for them to spend. The argument merely reinforces the human obligation to keep consuming, or to keep working for an unlivable wage.

More countercultural solutions, such as bitcoin and the blockchain, are no less technosolutionist in spirit. The blockchain replaces the need for central authorities such as banks by letting everyone on a network authenticate their transactions with computer encryption. It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism. It simply substitutes for trust in a different way: using the energy costs of blockchain mining as a security measure against counterfeiting or other false claims. (The computer power needed to create one bitcoin consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years.) Is this the fundamental fix we really need? A better ledger?

The problem the blockchain solves is the utilitarian one of better, faster accounting, and maybe an easier way to verify someone’s identity online. That’s why the banking industry has ultimately embraced it: the quicker to find us and drain our assets. Progressives, meanwhile, hope that the blockchain will be able to record and reward the unseen value people are creating as they go about their lives — as if all human activity were transactional and capable of being calculated by computer.

We must learn that technology’s problems can’t always be solved with more technology.

This was section 48

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Team Human today, filmmaker, writer, educator, and systems thinker, Nora Bateson.

Bateson

and Rushkoff interrogate our moment of global crisis to challenge the

very systems that drive human behavior and thought. How do changemaker’s

end up falling trap to the solutions they seek to create? Further, they

explore why quantifying humans as part of a system reduces people to

abstract figures rather than the complex beings they truly are. “There’s

something about this possibility of recognizing living complexity in

ourselves and each other that becomes this untold possibility,” Bateson

says.

In

his opening monologue, Rushkoff discusses why Team Human’s greatest

strength is not in a specific physical space, but in the form of deeply

honest, human engagement.

Bateson’s book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, is now available:

https://www.triarchypress.net/small-arcs.html

This

conversation was recorded live on May 22, 2020, as part of a (RE)Humans

live Zoom call. You can learn more about (RE)Humans here:

https://www.rehumans.us/

==

https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, thetranshumanist vision too easilyreduces all of reality to data, concluding that “ humans are nothing butinformation-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we 

want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies berun as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers....[no lnx]

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality.If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of the upcoming book Team Human (W.W. Norton, January 2019) and host of the TeamHuman.fm podcast

***

audio: https://medium.com/team-human/the-undercurrent-of-extremism-with-brian-hughes-599ac1e56063

text:

https://medium.com/team-human/we-are-not-the-virus-we-are-the-kamikazes-dadae917e5a2

53:26

‘The Undercurrent of Extremism’ With Brian Hughes

On the underlying drive fueling so much of today’s violent extremism

Douglas Rushkoff

Apr 22

Playing for Team Human today, Graduate Assistant 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. How can we reconcile issues of identity that are tied to structural conditions of racism and sexism? How do we achieve solidarity?

In his opening monologue, Rushkoff discusses how Covid-19 is a kamikaze attack of human biology against systems that threaten our very survival.

Read the written version of Rushkoff’s monologue on Medium:

https://medium.com/team-human/we-are-not-the-virus-we-are-the-kamikazes-dadae917e5a2

https://medium.com/team-human/we-were-naive-to-think-digital-media-would-be-democratic-d989b8daf4c7

Team Human

We Were Naive to Think Digital Media Would Be Democratic

Elites always snatch the power from the people

Douglas Rushkoff

Apr 15

We were naive to think that digital technology would be intrinsically and inevitably more empowering than any medium that came before it. Yes, digital networks are more directionless and decentralized than their broadcast predecessors. They allow messages to flow from the bottom up, or the outside in. But, like all media, if they’re not consciously seized by the people seeking empowerment, they’ll be seized by someone or something else.

Whoever controls media controls society.

Each new media revolution appears to offer people a new opportunity to wrest that control from an elite few and reestablish the social bonds that media has compromised. But, so far anyway, the people — the masses — have always remained one entire media revolution behind those who would dominate them.

For instance, ancient Egypt was organized under the presumption that the pharaoh could directly hear the words of the gods, as if he were a god himself. The masses, on the other hand, could not hear the gods at all; they could only believe.

With the invention of text, we might have gotten a literate culture. But text was used merely to keep track of possessions and slaves. When writing was finally put in service of religion, only the priests could read the texts and understand the Hebrew or Greek in which they were composed. The masses could hear the Scriptures being read aloud, thus gaining the capability of the prior era — to hear the words of God. But the priests won the elite capability of literacy.

When the printing press emerged in the Renaissance, the people gained the ability to read, but only the king and his chosen allies had the power to produce texts. Likewise, radio and television were controlled by corporations or repressive states. People could only listen or watch.

With computers came the potential to program. Thanks to online networks, the masses gained the ability to write and publish their own blogs and videos — but this capability, writing, was the one enjoyed by the elites in the prior revolution. Now the elites had moved up another level, and were controlling the software through which all this happened.

Today, people are finally being encouraged to learn code, but programming is no longer the skill required to rule the media landscape. Developers can produce any app they want, but its operation and distribution are entirely dependent on access to the walled gardens, cloud servers, and closed devices under the absolute control of just three or four corporations. The apps themselves are merely camouflage for the real activity occurring on these networks: the hoarding of data about all of us by the companies that own the platforms.

Just as with writing and printing, we believe we have been liberated by the new medium into a boundless frontier, even though our newfound abilities are entirely circumscribed by the same old controlling powers. At best, we are settling the wilderness for those who will later monopolize our new world.

This is section 31 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.

From “Team Human” by Douglas Rushkoff. #31

32: 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…

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https://medium.com/team-human/everything-works-better-locally-with-helena-norberg-hodge-ba8e9a8fc715

Team Human today, author, filmmaker, and founder & director of Local Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Norberg-Hodge joins Team Human to discuss how globalisation doesn’t make things more efficient, and how localism can work to serve real people and real places.

==

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https://medium.com/team-human/their-ridicule-means-we-are-winning-e2cd5f27bf12

no lnx

Weekly Column

Their Ridicule Means We Are Winning

There’s something happening here

Douglas Rushkoff

Feb 20, 2019 · 5 min read

It’s easy to underestimate the significance of what’s been happening this year. That’s just the way mainstream media pundits and politicians want it.

Thousands of children in Europe and Great Britain walked out of school to protest climate change inaction. In rallies and interviews with contentious and cynical reporters, they articulated the science, economics, and political ineptitude responsible for the climate catastrophe in progress. They made a clear, urgent demand that the adults currently responsible for business and government policies accept short-term inconveniences so that today’s young people will be permitted to live out the rest of their natural life spans. British Prime Minister Theresa May and other members of government in Europe implied that the kids were simply playing hooky and that their time would better be spent in school.

The very same day, Amazon succumbed to local activists from Queens, New York, and canceled its plans for a headquarters in Long Island City. Although the company had secured the blessings of New York’s Democratic mayor and governor, it was unable to convince a vocal minority of people on the ground who feared Amazon would be as extractive and gentrifying to Queens as it has been to Seattle. (Just last year, Amazon successfully shot down a proposed tax for affordable housing in areas where it has forced out local residents.) Yet this startlingly unlikely victory is derided by establishment Democrats and business experts as the naive, self-defeating foolishness of inexperienced, fringe activists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s easy to be dismayed by such naysaying, particularly when it comes from people and institutions who are purportedly friendly to progressive causes. We mustn’t. On the contrary, I’ve come to believe that real change — dare we call it revolution? — will inevitably be ignored, denigrated, and ridiculed right up to the moment it happens. And maybe, just maybe, it is happening.

I no longer accept the story that climate change is happening too gradually for our society to notice and respond. I don’t even believe that metaphor about a frog passively sitting in slowly heating water until it boils to death. As real scientists inform us, when the water gets too hot, the frog jumps out. Frogs are not stupid, and neither are we. A civilization that grows aware of its own destructiveness can wake up and take the actions necessary to avert apocalypse.

The widespread dismissal of humanity’s rapidly accelerating victories against the forces of ignorance, racism, sexism, runaway capitalism, and species hubris may be frustrating, but we should take them as signs of success. These conversations are not occurring on the ground, here in the real world, anyway. They’re taking place in corporate boardrooms, TV studios, social media platforms, or even the paralyzed halls of government, utterly disconnected from flesh-and-blood reality. Even if these spokespeople weren’t utterly cynical and dishonest, they still wouldn’t have a clue about the relative significance of what is happening in the real world, about which they offer their judgment and expertise.

In fact, the very content of their ridicule is valuable for what it reveals about their false assumptions and faulty constructions. Instead of feeling insulted or dismayed by their attacks, we should listen to what they’re saying. They are involuntarily exposing their vulnerabilities.

Theresa May, for example, derided Britain’s school-age climate activists by claiming they were cutting school — the equivalent of truancy. Let’s break that down for a minute. She’s not just implying that fighting for one’s life is a form of play, but that school is a form of work. Since when? As Britain in particular should remember, government-funded school was not meant as a form of work but as compensation for a life of work. A person who worked in the coal mines all day deserved the basic dignity of being able to come home at night and appreciate a great novel or participate intelligently in representative democracy. But like most people today, the prime minister thinks of school as some form of job preparation — an extension of work. Indeed, corporations now externalize the cost of job training to the public sector. So much so that kids walking out on school is understood as a labor protest. Well, good for them!

Likewise, the New York Times was desperate to understand how a small pack of loud, ill-informed New Yorkers could have rejected Amazon when it made so much economic sense for us to have welcomed them. The paper turned to Bradley Tusk, Mayor Bloomberg’s former campaign manager, now working as the leading “fixer” for Silicon Valley firms looking to win government concessions. Tusk explained that, unlike Uber and Airbnb, which leveraged their apps to deliver their lobbying messages to consumers, Amazon “didn’t do their homework.” The supposed lesson here is that Amazon should have paid folks like Tusk more money and then manipulated people through their smartphones. Or maybe purchased full-page ads in the New York Times?

The underlying assumption is that more corporate propaganda would have worked to dissuade local activists from heeding the warnings of their peers in San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, Austin, Seattle, or any of the other cities that have been made unaffordable by the combined impact of economic disenfranchisement and residential inflation. Even the premise that New York City “lost jobs” by rejecting Amazon is specious. As if scattering those 25,000 jobs through the rest of the nation is bad thing? There’s nothing management likes more than turning workers of one place against those of another — as if the workers of Cleveland or Memphis were somehow the enemy. Maybe activists in Queens are waking up to Marx’s idea of the international proletariat.

This is not silliness. This is what it looks like when we speak truth to power. We are undermining the contention that things just can’t get better. Don’t expect their affirmation or congratulations. And when they’re defeated, try to treat them with more compassion and respect than they’re treating us.

Team Human

Team Human is a manifesto?—?a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature.

Thanks to Aaron Gell.

Written by

Douglas Rushkoff

Author of Team Human, Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, and host of the Team Human podcast http://medium.com/team-human

==

https://medium.com/team-human/the-anti-human-religion-of-silicon-valley-ac37d5528683

The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley

How an esoteric Russian religion still fuels the digital apocalypse

There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.

It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.

I tell the story in my new book,:{Team Human:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?

They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.

The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space.The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling Americantranshumanists:They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.

The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.

No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.

As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.

The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.

We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.

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https://medium.com/team-human/how-addictive-tech-exploits-our-evolutionary-needs-c3c1e18cfcc8

Team Human

How Addictive Tech Exploits Our Evolutionary Needs

We evolved the need to be aware of anything important going on in our social circle

Douglas Rushkoff

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.

That’s why persuasive technologies are not designed to influence us through logic or even emotional appeals. This isn’t advertising or sales, in the traditional sense, but more like war-time psy-ops, or the sort of psychological manipulation exercised in prisons, casinos, and shopping malls. Just as the architects of those environments use particular colors, soundtracks, or lighting cycles to stimulate desired behavior, the designers of web platforms and phone apps use carefully tested animations and sounds to provoke optimal emotional responses from users. Every component of a digital environment is tested for its ability to generate a particular reaction, be it more views, more purchases, or just more addiction. New mail is a happy sound; no mail is a sad one. The physical gesture of swiping to update a social media feed anchors and reinforces the compulsive urge to check in — just in case.

Most persuasive technology tactics depend on users trusting that a platform accurately represents the world it claims to depict. The more we accept the screen as a window on reality, the more likely we are to accept the choices it offers. But what of the choices that it doesn’t offer? Do they really not exist?

A simple search for “a pizzeria near me” may list all the restaurants that have paid to be found, but not those that haven’t. Persuasive designs offer users options at every juncture, in order to simulate the experience of choice without the risk of the user exercising true autonomy and wandering off the reservation. It’s the same way game designers lead all players through the same game story, even though we feel like we’re making independent choices from beginning to end. None of these choices are real, because every one leads inevitably to the outcome that the designers have predetermined for us. Because the interfaces look neutral, we accept the options they offer at face value. The choices are not choices at all, but a new way of getting us to accept limitations. Whoever controls the menu controls the choices.

Designers seeking to trigger addictive loops utilize what behavioral economists call “variable rewards.” Marketing psychologists in the 1950s discovered that human beings are desperate to figure out the pattern behind getting rewarded. It makes sense from a survival perspective: Sudden wind gusts mean rain is coming, and predicting the motions of a fish in the water makes it easier to spear.

In the hands of slot machine designers, this survival trait becomes an exploit. By doling out rewards at random intervals, the slot machine confounds the human being attempting to figure out the pattern. Consciously, we know the machine is randomized or perhaps even programmed unfairly to take our money. But subconsciously, those random intervals of quarters clinking into the metal tray induce a compulsive need to keep going. Are the quarters coming down every 10 tries? Every five tries? Or is it five, seven, 10, and then back to five? Let me try again and see…

Compulsions are futile efforts at gaining control of random systems. Once triggered, they are really hard to shake. That’s why academic studies of slot machine patterning became required reading in the euphemistically named “user experience” departments of technology companies. It’s how we’ve become addicted to checking our email — looking to see if there’s just one rewarding email for every 10 useless ones. Or is it every 11?

Persuasive design also exploits our social conditioning. We evolved the need to be aware of anything important going on in our social circle. Not having the knowledge that a fellow group member is sick or angry could prove disastrous. In the compliance professional’s hands, this “fear of missing out” provides direct access to our behavioral triggers. All we need are a few indications that people are talking about something to stimulate our curiosity and send us online and away from whatever we were really doing. So designers put a red dot with a number in it over an app’s icon to make sure we know that something’s happening, comments are accumulating, or a topic is trending. If you refuse to heed the call, you may be the last person to find out.

User experiences are also designed to trigger our social need to gain approval and meet obligations — ancient adaptations for group cohesion now turned against us. We seek high numbers of “likes” and “follows” on social platforms because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social acceptance. There’s no difference in intensity between them. We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we got liked by many. Similarly, when someone likes something of ours or asks to be our “friend” on a social network, we feel socially obligated to return the favor.

Some platforms leverage our urge to compete, even playfully, with our peers. Websites employ leaderboards to honor those who have made the most posts, trades, or whatever metric a company wants to promote. Users also compete for “streaks” of daily participation, badges of accomplishment, and other ways of demonstrating their achievements and status — even if just to themselves. Gamification is used to motivate employees, students, consumers, and even online stock traders. But in the process, the play is often surrendered to some pretty unplayful outcomes, and people’s judgment is clouded by the unrelated urge to win.

Many familiar interfaces go even deeper, building addictive behaviors by leveraging our feeding instincts. Designers have discovered that “bottomless feeds” tend to keep users swiping down for additional articles, posts, or messages, consuming more than they intend to because of that unsatiated feeling of never reaching the end.

On the other hand, designers want to keep us in a state of constant disorientation — always scrolling and paying attention to something, but never so much attention that we become engrossed and regain our bearings. So they use interruption to keep us constantly moving from one feed to another, checking email and then social media, videos, the news and then a dating app. Each moment of transition is another opportunity to offer up another advertisement, steer the user toward something yet more manipulative, or extract more data that can be used to profile and persuade more completely.

This is section 33 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.

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https://medium.com/team-human/no-evolution-did-not-make-us-into-selfish-capitalists-95cb9f1402d6?

Evolution Is Not the Cause of Selfish Capitalism

Cooperation is imprinted in our genes just as unmistakably as competition

Douglas Rushkoff

Jan 14, 2019

Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together.

We’ve been conditioned to believe in the myth that evolution is about competition: the survival of the fittest. In this view, each creature struggles against all the others for scarce resources. Only the strongest ones survive to pass on their superior genes, while the weak deserve to lose and die out.

But evolution is every bit as much about cooperation as competition. Our very cells are the result of an alliance billions of years ago between mitochondria and their hosts. Individuals and species flourish by evolving ways of supporting mutual survival. A bird develops a beak which lets it feed on some part of a plant that other birds can’t reach. This introduces diversity into the population’s diet, reducing the strain on a particular food supply, and leading to more for all. What of the poor plant, you ask? The birds, much like bees, are helping the plant by spreading its seeds after eating its fruit.

Survival of the fittest is a convenient way to justify the cut-throat ethos of a competitive marketplace, political landscape, and culture. But this perspective misconstrues the theories of Darwin as well as his successors. By viewing evolution through a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.

The most direct benefit of more neurons and connections in our brains is an increase in the size of the social networks we can form.

The most successful of biology’s creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems. It’s hard for us to recognize such widespread cooperation. We tend to look at life forms as isolated from one another: a tree is a tree and a cow is a cow. But a tree is not a singular tree at all; it is the tip of a forest. Pull back far enough to see the whole, and one tree’s struggle for survival merges with the more relevant story of its role in sustaining the larger system.

We also tend to miss nature’s interconnections because they happen subtly, beneath the surface. We can’t readily see or hear the way trees communicate. For instance, there’s an invisible landscape of mushrooms and other fungi connecting the root systems of trees in a healthy forest. The underground network allows the trees to interact with one another and even exchange resources. In the summer, shorter evergreens are shaded by the canopies of taller trees. Incapable of reaching the light and photosynthesizing, they call through the fungus for the sun-drenched nutrients they need. The taller trees have plenty to spare, and send it to their shaded peers. The taller trees lose their leaves in the winter and themselves become incapable of photosynthesizing. At that point, the evergreens, now exposed to the sun, send their extra nutrients to their leafless community members. For their part, the underground fungi charge a small service fee, taking the nutrients they need in return for facilitating the exchange.

So the story we are taught in school about how trees of the forest compete to reach the sunlight isn’t really true. They collaborate to reach the sunlight, by varying their strategies and sharing the fruits of their labor.

Trees protect one another as well. When the leaves of acacia trees come in contact with the saliva of a giraffe, they release a warning chemical into the air, triggering nearby acacias to release repellents specific to giraffes. Evolution has raised them to behave as if they were part of the same, self-preserving being.

Animals cooperate as well. Their mutually beneficial behaviors are not an exception to natural selection, but the rule.

Darwin observed how wild cattle could tolerate only a brief separation from their herd, and slavishly followed their leaders. “Individualists” who challenged the leader’s authority or wandered away from the group were picked off by hungry lions. Darwin generalized that social bonding was a “product of selection.” In other words, teamwork was a better strategy for everyone’s survival than competition.

Darwin saw what he believed were the origins of human moral capabilities in the cooperative behavior of animals. He marveled at how species from pelicans to wolves have learned to hunt in groups and share the bounty, and how baboons expose insect nests by cooperating to lift heavy rocks.

Even when they are competing, many animals employ social strategies to avoid life-threatening conflicts over food or territory. Like breakdancers challenging one another in a ritualized battle, the combatants assume threatening poses or inflate their chests. They calculate their relative probability of winning an all-out conflict and then choose a winner without actually fighting.

The virtual combat benefits not just the one who would be killed, but also the victor, who could still be injured. The loser is free to go look for something else to eat, rather than wasting time or losing limbs in a futile fight.

Evolution may have less to do with rising above one’s peers than learning to get along with more of them.

We used to believe that human beings developed larger brains than chimpanzees in order to do better spatial mapping of our environment or to make more advanced tools and weapons. From a simplistic survival-of-the-fittest perspective, this makes sense. Primates with better tools and mental maps would hunt and fight better, too. But it turns out there are only slight genetic variations between hominids and chimpanzees, and they relate almost exclusively to the number of neurons that our brains are allowed to make. It’s not a qualitative difference but a quantitative one. The most direct benefit of more neurons and connections in our brains is an increase in the size of the social networks we can form. Complicated brains make for more complex societies.

Threats to our relationships are processed by the same part of the brain that processes physical pain.

Think of it this way: a quarterback, point guard, or midfielder, no matter their skills, is only as valuable as their ability to coordinate with the other players; a great athlete is one who can predict the movements of the most players at the same time. Similarly, developing primates were held back less by their size or skills than by their social intelligence. Bigger groups of primates survived better, but required an increase in their ability to remember everyone, manage relationships, and coordinate activities. Developing bigger brains allowed human beings to maintain a whopping 150 stable relationships at a time.

The more advanced the primate, the bigger its social groups. That’s the easiest and most accurate way to understand evolution’s trajectory, and the relationship of humans to it. Even if we don’t agree that social organization is evolution’s master plan, we must accept that it is — at the very least — a large part of what makes humans human.

Human social cohesion is supported by subtle biological processes and feedback mechanisms. Like trees that communicate through their root systems, human beings have developed elaborate mechanisms to connect and share with one another.

Our nervous systems learned to treat our social connections as existentially important — life or death. Threats to our relationships are processed by the same part of the brain that processes physical pain. Social losses, such as the death of a loved one, divorce, or expulsion from a social group, are experienced as acutely as a broken leg.

Managing social relationships also required humans to develop what anthropologists call a “theory of mind” — the ability to understand and identify with the thinking and motivations of other people. From an evolutionary perspective, the concept of self came after our ability to evaluate and remember the intentions and tactics of others. Unlike the relatively recent cultural changes that encouraged ideas of personal identity or achievement, our social adaptations occurred over hundreds of thousands of years of biological evolution. Enduring social bonds increase a group’s ability to work together, as well as its chances for procreation. Our eyes, brains, skin, and breathing are all optimized to enhance our connection to other people.

Prosocial behaviors such as simple imitation — what’s known as mimesis — make people feel more accepted and included, which sustains a group’s cohesion over time. In one experiment, people who were subtly imitated by a group produced less stress hormone than those who were not imitated. Our bodies are adapted to seek and enjoy being mimicked. When human beings are engaged in mimesis, they learn from one another and advance their community’s skill set.

The physical cues we use to establish rapport are preverbal. We used them to bond before we ever learned to speak — both as babies and as early humans many millennia ago. We flash our eyebrows when we want someone to pay attention to us. We pace someone else’s breathing when we want them to know we empathize. The pupils of our eyes dilate when we feel open to what another person is offering. In turn, when we see someone breathing with us, their eyes opening to accept us, their head subtly nodding, we feel we are being understood and accepted. Our mirror neurons activate, releasing oxytocin — the bonding hormone — into our bloodstream.

Human beings connect so easily, it’s as if we share the same brains. Limbic consonance, as it’s called, is our ability to attune to one another’s emotional states. The brain states of mothers and their babies mirror each other; you can see this in an MRI scan. Limbic consonance is the little-known process through which the mood of a room changes when a happy or nervous person walks in, or the way a person listening to a story acquires the same brain state as the storyteller. Multiple nervous systems sync and respond together, as if they were one thing. We long for such consonance, as well as the happy hormones and neural regulation that come with it. It’s why our kids want to sleep with us — their nervous systems learn how to sleep and wake by mirroring ours. It’s why television comedies have laugh tracks — so that we are coaxed to imitate the laughter of an audience of peers watching along. We naturally try to resonate with the brain state of the crowd.

These painstakingly evolved, real-world physical and chemical processes are what enable and reinforce our social connection and coherence, and form the foundations for the societies that we eventually built.

Thanks to organic social mechanisms, humans became capable of pair bonding, food sharing, and even collective childcare. Our survivability increased as we learned how to orchestrate simple divisions of labor, and trusted one another enough to carry them out.

The more spectacular achievement was not the division of labor but the development of group sharing. This distinguished true humans from other hominids: we waited to eat until we got the bounty back home. Humans are defined not by our superior hunting ability so much as by our capacity to communicate, trust, and share.

Biologists and economists alike have long rejected social or moral justifications for this sort of behavior. They chalk it up instead to what they call “reciprocal altruism.” One person does a nice thing for another person in the hope of getting something back in the future. You take a risk to rescue someone else’s child from a dangerous predator because you trust the other parent to do the same for your kid. In this view, people aren’t so nice at all; they’re just acting on their own behalf in a more complicated way.

But contemporary research strongly supports more generous motives in altruism, which have nothing to do with self-interest. Early humans had a strong disposition to cooperate with one another, at great personal cost, even when there could be no expectation of payback in the future. Members of a group who violated the norms of cooperation were punished. Solidarity and community were prized in their own right.

Evolution’s crowning achievement, in this respect, was the emergence of spoken language. It was a dangerous adaptation that involved crossing the airway with the foodway, making us vulnerable to choking. But it also gave us the ability to modify the sounds that came from our vocal folds and make the variety of mouth noises required for language.

While language may have been driven by the need for larger, more complicated social structures, think of the immense collaborative act that developing a language required from its speakers. That multigenerational exercise alone would change the fabric of society and its faith in a cooperative enterprise.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is1YUQVYkvY

how to be "Team Human" in the digital future | Douglas Rushkoff

83,143 views•Jan 14, 2019

Humans are no longer valued for our creativity, says media theorist Douglas Rushkoff -- in a world dominated by digital technology, we're now just valued for our data. In a passionate talk, Rushkoff urges us to stop using technology to optimize people for the market and start using it to build a future centered on our pre-digital values of connection, creativity and respect. "Join 'Team Human.' Find the others," he says. "Together let's make the future that we always wanted."

Check out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com

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‘The Big Tent’ With Naomi Klein

On humanizing the universal project of saving our planet

Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff

Mar 15, 2019 ·

Photography: @EDLphotography

Playing for Team Human today: award-winning journalist, activist, and author of No Is Not Enough, This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and most recently, The Battle For Paradise, Naomi Klein.

Klein and Rushkoff share a conversation about moving beyond the ideology of individualism. It’s a discussion about what it means, in concrete terms, to forge solidarity with others. Klein finds hope in people’s ability to overcome divides by working together, in common labor, on a common project. One example Klein celebrates is the Green New Deal with its multifaceted and intersectional approach to solving the triple threat of climate crisis, economic inequality, and the surge of racist nationalism. Speaking live on stage at WNYC’s the Greene Space, Klein and Rushkoff make a case for humanizing the universal project of saving our planet. After all, the survival of life on earth is a “big tent” under which we all can and must organize.

This special episode of Team Human was recorded live in front of a studio audience in collaboration with WNYC’s Podcast Mixtape at the Greene Space. Join us live next week, Monday March 4th, for another live Team Human taping at the Greene Space with original Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, Roger McNamee. McNamee’s new book Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe takes a critical look at Facebook and the deep rooted problems of the Silicon Valley ethos.

Check out Douglas’s regular column here on Medium, featuring expanded versions of each week’s show monologues.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time. Our outro features Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Team Human

Team Human is a manifesto?—?a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature.

Individualism

Community

Green New Deal

Environment

Podcast

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this cd be our future, also booktv

bento box: me now, me later, us now, us later

gop trump smash and grab is me now (and a bit us, as defined as party, which is just an extension of my pvt selfish ambition, means to an end.

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https://medium.com/s/teamhuman/the-power-of-panic-with-david-wallace-wells-d86abe222f1e

TEAM HUMAN

‘The Power of Panic’ With David Wallace-Wells

On why the climate crisis is both inevitable and avoidable

Douglas Rushkoff

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TEAM HUMAN book

https://books.google.com/books?id=4Y5gDwAAQBAJ

https://medium.com/s/douglas-rushkoff/no-evolution-did-not-make-us-into-selfish-capitalists-95cb9f1402d6

Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together.

...

https://medium.com/s/teamhuman/a-demonology-of-algorithms-with-mark-pesce-bf5ffb6c6b50

TEAM HUMAN

“A Demonology of Algorithms” with Mark Pesce

Team Human Live at Civic Hall Pt. 2

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https://rushkoff.com/books/life-inc/

...In

Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from a convenient legal fiction to the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

This fascinating journey reveals the roots of our debacle, from the late Middle Ages to today. From the founding of the chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace; the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401k plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.

Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this 600-year-old trend, and to begin to create, invest and transact directly rather than outsourcing all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes.

Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living – the operating system on which we are now running our social software – was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world, and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

In Life Inc., Douglas Rushkoff presents the unnerving, unbelievable, but ultimately undeniable proof that our world has been overtaken by an absolutely artificial economy.

He shows how our most fundamental assumptions about money and commerce are actually false ones – artifacts of a 400-year-old plan by a waning aristocracy to maintain control of Western Europe. Although the architects of this corporatism have long since passed on, we still live in a landscape defined by their plans and have internalized their values as our own.

Taking on some of the biggest assumptions of our age, this is a book filled with dangerous ideas and rather unspeakable heresies:

Most importantly, Rushkoff shows how this moment of financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reinstate commerce and communities based in creating value for one another, rather than continuing to extract it for the benefit of institutions that no longer exist.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

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