Best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff tells us how we can restore our humanity
in the sea of digital flotsam. Subscribe to our channel for more Conversations
with Great Minds. We are for this next half hour going to get into one of our
Conversations with Great Minds. So glad to have with us Dr. Douglas Rushkoff.
He's the founder of the laboratory for digital humanism and a professor of
media theory and digital economics at City University New York Queens Research
Fellow Institute for the future. Author of more than 20 books including
his latest just-released "Team Human", our technologies markets and
cultural institutions once forces for human connection and expression now
isolate and repress us it's time to remake society together not as
individual players but as the team. We actually are last time we talked with
Douglas was about your book "Present Shock" wasn't it? Yeah those last time yet
and they did John ago yeah and that was a 2013. I did one between then and now
called "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus". That sort of the
inequality of the digital economy and now "Team Human" So before we get to
Team Human let's just talk, oh and by the way here you're here in Portland. You're live
in the studio with me because tonight you're going to be doing a gig at
Powell's Books, which is just legendary beautiful venues it really is. And then
tomorrow night I'm doing a Team Human Live. It's a podcast I do but I do
them sometimes a live audience is it at bunk bar in Portland yeah - okay great
because you know we're also on the air here in Portland on X ray FM.So to start
with throwing throwing rocks at the bus at the Google bus people were actually
throwing rocks these were the Google I'm sorry I'm in of yours these these were
the buses that Google uses in Silicon Valley to transport their workers around?
Yeah I mean the whole book wasn't about that but it kind of served as the
starting point you know. Here's the company that was two kids from Stanford
we're gonna take down big bad corporate Yahoo by creating a peoples algorithm
that would let us search the net in a new way from the bottom up and you know
they took too much money and ended up being this really awful extractive
behemoth that needs to grow. And people who lived in San Francisco where the
company's operating you know their real-estate prices and their rents
go way way up you know to the point where the city is unlivable for them and
the employees who live there and it was sort of a nice idea that Google thought
instead of having them drive back and forth well create these big
air-conditioned Wi-Fi buses it'll transport them back you know to and from
the mothership. But to people in San Francisco it felt like sort of a symbol
of the alien invasion. Here these people that are using San Francisco as a
backdrop and a bedroom community making it unlivable for real people while all
the capital all the resources is being are being sucked sucked out by this big
company down in Mountain View. And you know it wasn't just that the prices
real-estate prices their rents tripled and quadrupled but if you were in
walking distance of one of the Google bus stops your rent was another thirty
percent higher than it was elsewhere so people started laying down in front of
the buses and saying you know gentrification and and then in Oakland
someone actually threw a rock at one of the Google buses and the sort of very
minor riot happened and people were tweeting at me saying oh Doug aren't you
gonna cheer on what happened like I can't cheer that on because you know and
I got friends on that bus you know who are just trying to make a living and
earn however much they need to earn before they burn out you know so I
wanted to sort of unwind that and show how we're all responsible for this sort
of extractive explosion well and we see this I mean not just in San Francisco
with Google you you we started to see this not not necessarily with the bus
but this this dynamic at work with Amazon in Seattle with Starbucks in
Seattle perhaps with uber in London maybe you know it depends it's
everywhere yeah and it's because of that big disconnection these companies are
not serving real people or places what they're doing is serving shareholders
they they're these were all instructive is there is that it seems like there's
an analogy or an analog between that and for example how Walmart moves into a
community and destroys on average 100 local businesses and and they will
target those businesses absolutely you know and I wrote about that but what
what you know what it takes Walmart say 10 or 15 years to do in a
community where they go in they undercut all the local sellers put everyone out
of business so they become not only the sole retailer but the sole employer in
the community so then they can under pay people or have them on Park
you know part-time wages then all those people who are working at Walmart are
also on food stamps and on welfare you know in order and I'm Medicaid or
whatever to get a basic services so the net effect is a drag but Walmart's
playbook is based on the British East India Company's playbook the early
colonial playbook oh it's tractive capitalists we rebelled against with the
Boston Tea Party right and and folks like Adam Smith who are become the
patron saints of libertarianism were actually the people arguing about the
problem he wrote an entire book that was basically here's the dangers of
capitalism huh and the phrase invisible hand only appears once in wealth of
nations and it appears that in that one place in in the context of protective
tariffs essentially I mean that the sentence begins something like
preferring domestic manufacturer to that a foreign you know blahdy blahdy blahdy
example and water you know which is really that my pivot to this book to
team human who's where I was realizing well these sort of large abstracted rule
sets you know that that used to be enforced by law and British East India
time or Walmart time are now being an enforced with code you know so we're
sort of reified code you mean digital color code that now we're living on
digital landscapes that are just as oppressive as you know the stock market
or industrialism or the economic operating system that we were using you
know that Mark Zuckerberg and and people who are building digital companies are
really building them on top of an operating system that they're not even
acknowledging they didn't go to school they drop out of college at 19 before
they've taken economics but further they take an anthropology so they don't know
that there's another operating system embedded in the platforms they're
building and that operating system is corporate capitalism it's extractive
corporate capitalism how do we use human beings as a profit center for shares
this is digital colonialism it's exactly digital colonialism and it's why and
it's interesting it's why even privileged white males now can
experience what it's like to be an indigenous and indigenous population
because at least we're indigenous to the real world and now we're seeing this
sort of which algorithmic invasion is why you're seeing privileged white males
voting for Donald Trump when he promises them that he's going to at least give
them back the dignity that they had in the 50s 60s 70s when when they had could
get a union job without it without bringing back the union's right right
and what he is speaking to and this is sort of what I'm trying to speak to
awesome that we all have to speak to is that there's a nice there's sound so new
agey but there's an essential dignity to human beings that we are worth more than
our utility value you know in that again it goes back to Marx and I'm sorry but
you know human beings analysis was right on exactly I mean it's that we are more
than the inputs and outputs and the minute that we take on the markets logic
as our own the minute that we only value ourselves in terms of our utility and
what we can produce that's when we've lost yeah so back in back in the 1960s a
guy named Robert Bork came up with an idea back in the 1880s 1881 82 whatever
it was senator Sherman from Ohio first introduced the what came to be the
Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and and and it was vigorously enforced by Teddy
Roosevelt and by Taft you know after him and the whole idea of this was that
bigness giant corporations getting too large
controlling markets either vertically or horizontally was a bad thing because it
was destructive to communities which is what you've just been talking about it
was destructive to what they would refer to as competition what today we would
call entrepreneurism or entrepreneurialism the ability of small
people to start companies to compete with them it was destructive of families
it was not it was not honoring in many cases not even honoring the institutions
of the company that it would they were producing you know vast vast differences
in wealth inequality and wealth that these were all the evils of monopolies
and that was widely understood in the United States in the 60s Borka came
along wrote a paper about this and said no that's all wrong what what what
senator Sherman really was talking about and what we really need to worry about
when we when we enforce antitrust law is the prices consumers pay
and the only metric that we should use to decide whether we're going to break a
company up or forbid a merger is whether or not it's going to lower prices for
consumers and that became a doctrine that was adopted by the US Supreme Court
in a case I'm forgetting the name of Sullivan is in that name in the 1970s it
was 77 and it became the policy of the Reagan administration and we have had no
anti antitrust enforcement since then that doesn't specifically deal with
nothing but is the consumer still getting in cheap price so they don't
view Walmart as a monopoly for example even if it may be the only store within
a thousand-mile rat within 100 miles for a town because you still have cheap
Chinese junk that you can buy low prices and the only metric they're looking at
is the price but not the cost that's right yes so how do we say if we've
accurately diagnosed at least one small piece of the problem how do we wake
Americans up to that and how do we change that well a bunch of ways I mean
the the I guess the simplest team human approach would be how do we help people
see themselves as sort of 360 degree human beings rather than just in their
roles as consumers you know yeah I'm a consumer sometimes but I'm I'm a parent
I'm a producer I'm a worker I'm a I'm all these other things so if I'm
understanding my rights in terms of that customer's always right and that's the
way I express myself well then look then we get an American Idol presidential
election which is what we have right because we've we've bought into that
we've bought into that Sensibility I mean one cure for that is going to be
when people don't have the money to buy stuff anymore so they're gonna have to
start looking at what happened in the late 20s early 30s yeah and you know and
and by the way that's also what happened in 1846 with a Great Depression then the
led to the Civil War it's what happened in 1770 in the great panic of 1772 lit
led to the Tea Party the led to the recreation and it seems that about every
80 years and and you know the fourth turning those guys forgetting their
names right now how it strikes you know wrote about this about how every 80
years we have this you know collapse followed by a war and followed by a
reboot and and typically a major progressive reboot right we've got a
hope and fall yeah but that reboots only gonna work if people engage with one
another than their devices in other words as
things get worse are we going to retreat into video games and Twitter and bad TV
you know are we gonna have enough money to do that
or are we gonna decide that other people are more interesting well isn't this
what Robert Draper was writing about in 2001 or three or whenever he wrote
Bowling Alone right remembering his name yeah Robert Putnam yeah that's right he
was looking at the collapse of civic society's institutions yeah everything
from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to the Elks Club and a salami and some of
the possible answers were cable TV people are working too hard reaganism
has destroyed the middle class and now we've got you know everybody's addicted
to their screens is there another piece to this yeah I mean that's that's a lot
of it it's really you know we are taking a potentially very powerful connecting
industry you know the internet and when you were around for the beginning when
it was gonna oh I ran forums on copy sir yeah yeah exactly and it was you know
and we all I mean a lot of us believed that it was gonna be the realization of
the kind of the guy in mind you know this is the humans in the planet would
connect up each other's nervous systems and get to experience we had
extraordinary community in our copies of communities but you know we're required
to use your real name which is yeah well again there was a rule you weren't
allowed to do commercial activity online either that's right yeah that's right
Douglas rushkoff dr. Douglas rushkoff is where this team human is his new book
we'll be right back it's our conversations with great minds we're
talking with dr. Douglas rushkoff his book team human our technologies markets
and cultural institutions and now isolate and repress us how unique is
this in human history I mean it I called him Draper you said his name was Putnam
but that's right my recollection and I literally you know
it's been 20 years since I rather 17 years since I read his book or whatever
was that he was mostly pointing a finger at number one people were working longer
and harder because of the destruction of unions and number two television cable
television if I'm remembering correctly is there now you're talking about you
know the digital forces that are tearing us apart are there it is this something
that's cyclical is it are there in a way I mean it's older you know I
think that there have been there's some really old and disparaging notions about
human beings and our behavior that we're kind of embedding in our digital
infrastructure and they're not really true so the idea that evolution was a
competition between individuals for the survival of the fittest read Darwin
Spencer says right exactly it's what's mentions are hi Edgar
or someone else you know it's not you know evolution is actually the story of
how species collaborate and cooperate with one another in order to ensure
mutual survival to it to assure homeostasis basically right right I was
taught in school that the big tree you know is getting all the Sun and shades
the little one a little one will perish and the big one will live turns out
that's not true that big tree is sharing nutrients with the little tree through a
network of my Celia in the soil which turns out to be alive and not just dirt
yeah and then you know in the winter when the big tree loses its leaves a
little ones in Evergreen it returns soil through the soil matrix some nutrients
to the big tree and the the mushrooms take a service fee for it yeah you know
it's like oh wait a minute what's that that's not the story I was told and then
we learned that you know if human beings really are the most advanced species
it's really just to the extent that we can collaborate and communicate so we
developed language and text and all these things to allow for higher levels
of coordination but you know really when we take any of these any of these tools
even when we use text you look at the first use of text and it was to count
slaves to keep track of people slaves are seven thousand years ago and so yeah
when they were that's what they used it for you know you look at um the printing
press you know people were not allowed to do their own little pamphlets on the
thing you know the government controlled the printing press and they'd kill you
in fact it was against the law to be literate if you weren't a Catholic
priest I mean exactly quite so they control you
know so we look at these potentially liberating technologies and we say oh oh
look you know the elites end up controlling
them so now we have the Internet and people really have gained the capability
of the printing press era we can write you know we can publish but we can't
program we don't program the environments in which this happens so
you can you know write on Facebook to look house come home and all you're
really doing is enabling algorithms that are looking to
modify and control your behavior yeah this is this is you know remarkable
stuff do you see the essentially the internet right now as it's been reshaped
as a malicious force or as a neutral force or as a positive force it's being
right now it's primarily being used as a manipulative force right there's a multi
trillion dollar industry looking at how to control human behavior through our
devices every time you swipe on your smartphone it gets smarter about you and
you get Dumber about it and if you want to get smarter about it you're gonna
open it up and find all these black box proprietary algorithms that you're not
even allowed to know what they're doing and when you learn what they're doing
you find out Oh Facebook is taking my past behavior in
order to put me in a statistical bucket and predict my future and predict or
modify our commercial station system is doing a live read for hellofresh comm
slash Tom so it's a great organization raised chickpea teen Kotaku yeah and ran
we're pleased to have companies that sponsor our program it keeps us in
business yeah we're talkin we're talking with new
podcasters we're just beggin tart our listeners to give us two bucks a month
yeah wow that's that's a model too we're talking to Douglas rushkoff his new book
his team human and we were just talking during the break about how kind of these
things are not altogether new and and in hyper simplified version you know if you
look at at the at European history for the last millennia right there was this
long long period of basically feudalism and then the Black Death came along the
bubonic plague killed off a third of Europe that created such a labor
shortage that wages went up the middle class emerged essentially as a
consequence as the first unions in the 1300s late 1300s and that produced the
Renaissance right look at music art literature nobody had time for that
before cuz everybody's essentially a slave and then that faded out after
about three generations and the kings took over again and then the printing
press came along some people say that the printing press
is what led us right to the Enlightenment right - you know Rousseau
and John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and on on we honor where we go
these were disruptive events I was gonna say disruptive technologies but the
bubonic plague was not a technology but these were major disruptive events that
had historical consequences that literally are ringing to this day and
I'm wondering putting it in that kind of a context in that kind of very large
context and the development of radio in the United in the world in the 1920s the
development of television in the 1950s the development then of the Internet in
the 1970s and 80s what does this mean for us how do we as a species deal with
these kinds of disruptive cycles and are they always do they always end up just
accruing to the benefit of the East India Company's of the world yeah I mean
if we don't realize what the disruption could do then they end up not being
disruptions they end up you know the the digital revolution is a reactionary
movement by Wall Street against the potential for wider distribution of
wealth that the internet promises well the in the early 90s we used to think of
the Internet as unleashing the new possibilities for the collective human
imagination and by the time Wired magazine came out and said no no the
Internet is the salvation of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange that this is an
investment opportunity so we really pivoted the entire internet from
connecting people to extracting value from people we we used it as an
extension or an amplification of the attention economy absolutely I'm not
amazing I'm sorry we're out of time Douglas dr. Douglas Rushkoff
is the author of the rushkoff.com the website. He'll be at Powell's tonight
here in Portland. The new book is "Team Human". Thank you so much Douglas it's
great having you in the studio.