It's really a pleasure to welcome to the program today, Douglas Rushkoff, who's immediate theorist
professor at
looney Queens College and also host of the team human podcast as well as author of the
new book team human from ww Norton.
A really great to have you on Douglas big admirer of your work.
Oh thanks.
It's good to be with you.
So maybe to start with you to get our audience into sort of your framing and sort of point
of view on a lot of this stuff.
You've said that technology and markets often are, are crafted or end up inherently an anti
human agenda, which is interesting sort of language to use.
What is that agenda and how does it develop?
Well, I mean really that agenda developed as, as far as I can tell, really in the late
Middle Ages with the invention of the chartered monopoly, which is kind of the protocol operation
and central currency that both of those were, were invented really to prevent the rise of
the middle class and to observe the Lee's feet.
You know, we had the beginnings of what looked very much like internet culture in the late
Middle Ages when people came back from the Crusades and they opened up these trade routes.
They had little local markets with local currencies that were optimized for transaction.
They were getting wealthy and that was a problem for the aristocracy that hadn't worked in,
you know, 10 centuries.
So they came up with a monopoly currency, which was basically like almost like some
kind of a windows operating system that you use it or you can't transact at all.
And it was this growth based interest based currency that if you borrowed some, in order
to transact you had to pay back more.
You know, in order, in order for the economy to keep going.
And instead of being able to have your own business, you had to work for one of the king's
chartered monopolies as an employee selling your time rather than the value you created.
So boom, the innovations, the as I really anti human and that they disconnected workers
from the value they were creating.
We've got brands to disconnect consumers from the producers from whom they were buying stuff.
And we got mass marketing and mass media to really disconnect consumers from one another
so that we bought things instead of relating to other people.
Now you come to the 21st century in the digital age, we had the possibility and this is what
got so many of us excited in those early Internet days, the possibility to really retrieve all
of those cool peer to peer bottom up values of medieval Islam and the Commons and the
co op.
All of these things were starting to emerge.
But then you know, along comes wired magazine and the these ideas about how the Internet
is going to save the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and and allow us to have this exponential
growth like we've never had before.
And now we have a whole lot of digital companies that are not creating tools or platforms to
help people live their lives.
They're creating tools and platforms that really just help corporations extract value
from people either in terms of their time or their data or even their consciousness,
their choice making.
So when I say that the digital landscape has become anti human, really what I mean is that
it's extending and amplifying kind of the most anti human are biases of corporate growth
based capitalism and putting them on digital steroids and it's really hard for people to
really maintain any sense of coherence or values in such a space.
Yeah.
So I mean there's actual technological utopianism, right?
Like really truly the, the, we will be happier and more free and self actualized.
The more science and technology develop, but then there's more of what I would call like
kind of a passive admiration or maybe an unquestioning adoption of some of these technologies that's
not as like hard and fast about we need to push technology and science as much as possible
because it's inherently good.
But just sort of like, I'm sure that has all of this stuff develops.
It's good to use in a sort of uncritical way, and that's where I see a lot of the less healthy
sort of like adoption of technology and social media use coming from this kind of, the default
position is, I'll use it unless I can very clearly think of why not to rather than what
cal Newport for example, advocates, which is let's evaluate each of these tools and
technologies one by one to see what it actually does for us.
Right.
I mean, I come from the early cyber culture, which was informed by really kind of the Psychedelic,
a west coast counterculture.
And I remember the first time Timothy Leary, that big LSD Guru, the first time he used
the Internet, he said, oh my gosh, this is acid.
You know that it's as powerful as an LSD trip and the way it changes the way someone thinks
about the world and the way everything's connected and the access to information and people that
it gives you.
But if the Internet is as powerful as a psychedelic, then it's really important.
What mindset and what's setting you do that drug in, you know, if, if you have the set
and setting goal of I want to do something that's going to help people connect in meaningful
ways and help, uh, you know, the, the planet and other species and everybody live more
healthily and, uh, uh, make a more egalitarian economy and, and increased social justice,
you're going to get very different effects then if you're really just a 19 year old kid
who invents something on the net and then listens to whatever the venture capitalist
tells him to do, you know, so we end up with technologies that are as powerful as drugs,
but we don't recognize that they're
that powerful.
What sort of, um, advice or guidelines or infrastructure do you suggest people at the
individual level sort of employ for having a sort of healthy diet of technology in their
lives?
Well, I don't know that they need
any technology in their diet.
You know what I mean?
On a certain level, it's what's a healthy diet of work?
What's a healthy diet of media?
I went a healthy diet of, uh, online interaction, but, uh, almost anything, almost anything
that you do through digital technology is a substitute for something that you could
be doing in real life.
And I think that what many of us are learning is that we're trying to live our lives at
scale.
You know, at the same scale as a corporation or a or a, uh, uh, you know, uh, Kardashians
or something who's not a person, a cardiac shit.
Maybe there's a person in there somewhere, but it's a lifestyle that's a mediated existence.
And we getting engaged with people in real life.
We ended up losing the ability to make eye contact and establish rapport and breathed
with other people.
So I don't, I don't really think that there's any, you know, particularly healthy or unhealthy
amount or quota or quotient of technology as long as you have the sort of the real life
experience and, and sustenance, um, for you to be able to engage in those online experiences
in a healthy way.
You know, for the most part, the people who are making the platforms that we engage with
each other online, they don't have our best interests at heart.
We all know now they go to classes at Stanford and captology, which is, you know, how to
hypnotize people using digital technology.
You know, that we take the, the addiction algorithms from Las Vegas slot machines and
they're in our social media feeds to get us to keep checking them.
So, you know, in some sense, I feel like almost any use of digital technology is a compromise
and you have to be aware that, okay, I'm now going to compromise the integrity of this
interaction.
Like the one I'm having with you.
We're going to compromise that interaction in order to reach more people.
But if we're very aware of the ways in which it's compromised that I'm not making real
eye contact with you, that we can't establish rapport with one another, then we're going
to have to be extra compassionate and extra conscious that this, that none of the painstakingly
evolve social mechanisms that we have for establishing rapport with one another, are
able to, uh, to, uh, to activate when we're using this medium.
Yeah.
In other words, you and I would arguably have a better conversation in person, but for the
purposes of filming this segment for my program and we're in different locations, we've sort
of made the compromise that we're going to do it over Skype, over this video conferencing
technology that has, there are, that's a compromise that we're making for what I guess we've both
calculated if we thought about it this deeply is, is a sort of greater good, which is we're
going to get this interview out to people.
Right.
And as power users, you know, I realized what a power user is, is not someone who understands
necessarily how to reprogram Skype, you know, or how to know how is our image happening.
A power user is someone who understands those kind of dehumanizing compromises and knows
how to compensate for it, can accept it.
You know?
And that's, you know, and I'm sure for you when you pick guests or when I picked podcasts
to be on, I tried to get a sense of is this someone who understands that or is this someone
who's a, uh, uh, I'm going to go down some pretty dark places with because they don't,
uh, they're not going to be forgiving enough of, of this medium and how it works.
So along those lines, I mean, not to be overly Dystopian, but also not, not to sugarcoat
it.
What do you see as the extrapolated out five years, 10 years, whatever.
What do you see as the, the real practical dangers to our world becoming more technology
centric trick?
Um, I mean the main problem with any of these technologies is that, you know, the kid who
invents the tech invents it for one reason.
But then once they take the money from the venture capitalists, I mean, and these are
kids, these are college freshmen who drop out of school, you know, with their new APP
or platform.
And then they listen to these venture capitalists.
Then they have two objectives.
One is to do the APP or whatever it was that they, they thought they were going to make.
And now the second one is to figure out a way for that APP to also make many billions
of dollars.
That's really hard.
You know, Twitter was considered a failure when it was making $2 billion a year, which
I think that's about as much money as you could expect from 140 character messaging
app.
But you're not allowed to stop at 2 billion.
You have to keep growing your company.
So now Twitter has to pivot from a messaging company into an advertising company, to a
streaming media company, into something else.
You know, getting more and more, becoming more and more extractive all along the way.
So when I look at that trajectory, what I see are a whole lot of CEOs and, and billionaires
looking to figure out how can I earn enough money to insulate myself from the world that
I'm creating by building these kinds
of platforms.
You know, even Adam Smith talked about there being three main factors of production, land,
labor and capital, right?
The land that we use, the place where we were running our company, the Labor, the people
that are working to make this happen, like all those little Uber drivers and then the
capital and all three have sort of an equal place in production.
But right now in the digital realm, capital's the only one that has a voice.
Capital's the only one that scales infinitely.
You and me, people in land don't scale infinitely.
And when capital's the only one that has a voice, well your labor gets disenfranchised
and your land gets destroyed.
So we're dealing with climate change and we're dealing with economic inequality.
So, unless we were really to shift, I see those things, gifts, you know, not necessarily
permanently worse, but worse to a point that people say, oh, wait a minute.
This is not a problem of digital technology.
This is a problem of economics.
This is a problem of growth based corporate capitalism that just happens to be amplified
and accelerated by digital technology.
So, you know, the beauty of it, you know, my optimistic take is that digital tech, by
kind of putting capitalism on steroids is it created something that's almost like the
movie Koyaanisqatsi.
You know, where everything happens in fast time and it, because it's happening so quickly
this time, we can sort of see it.
I feel like most people are more aware of the extractive nature of, of the operating
system, of this economic operating system and looking for alternatives.
So I think we're going to start to see the emergence of cooperatives.
Uh, you know, a worker owned businesses.
We're going to see people treating resources like Commons the same way we did, you know,
back in the Middle Ages when we understood this is a precious resource.
And rather than creating a market for it, we're going to guard it as a Commons and,
and, and enforce its use and share it.
So I'm actually optimistic that things are happening clearly enough and quickly enough
that people are going to react, um, from a much more human centered, uh, sustainable,
uh, outlook.
I hope you're right and I do agree that the speed with which it's happening does seem
to paint a clearer picture of the fact that, uh, that, that it is indeed happening.
W make sure to check out
the book team human.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Douglas Rushkoff.
Douglas, really a pleasure having you on today.
It's good to be honest with you.
Thanks for what you do.