Transcripts For CSPAN3 In 20240703

You describe yourself in your latest book who writes about Digital Technology but not a futurist. A futurist is someone come to to tell you what is going to happen in the future. I have been right about that so they come in a future but what i am as a presentist. I look at and describe accurately what is happening right now. It is usually an easier way to know what is happening in the future. Moche futurists most futurist say things like propagandist, fighting for what they want to see and positioning them as a consultant in the most needed place to keep people interested in the future by scaring them. If you are a presentist, which is a sociologist looking at what is and you end up free to talk about things in ways other people dont. When i realized i was a present just as when aol was buying time warner back in 1999 and everyone was excited, the first big Digital Company is going to buy time warner, the old Media Company and newmedia was coming and how great it was and New York Times call me to write a piece on it. I wrote a piece saying as i look at it and understand it, looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips. The founder of aol group it and subscriber rate is probably peeking and using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and libraries and all of that. Its probably means we are probably at the peak of the. Com bubble and they said we cant publish this. It means all this stuff is coming and the new age is coming. I am not futurist but i am looking at what is and it looks to me like the end of a videogame where you either level up or cash out and i think he is cashing out. I turned out the right and not because i am a tourist but it is predictive and more predictive by looking at what is rather than trying to guess what is out there. So when impact of the emerging Digital Technology, we do describe yourself as an optimist for pessimist . Douglas an optimist is always optimistic about how this is going to work out. I would say i am frustrated and hopeful but frustrated. I am always hopeful that human beings will find a way out of the mess they are in but i am frustrated we are using technology on people. We are using it on people instead of Technology People with faith in their ability to use it, that we are surrendering this digital rental firm to the needs of the market and when i look at the people running the Biggest Media Companies today, if they think of themselves as the demagogues who should be in charge of everything from covid and farming and society and education and politics. It is like wait a minute, to what end . What are your values and ethics and economics and anthropology classes did you take in college, if any, before you dropped out in richmond year . I kind of look at it that way. Host Douglas Rushkoff is our guest and with us for the next two hours to talk about his book and some 20 books. He takes us back to siberia, what were your expectations at the time of this emerging net, as it was known . Douglas i saw the internet, emerging internet, the emerging Computer Networks as part of a larger cultural phenomena. We had just been we had just had cb radio, the first in the Movement Since ham radio. Fax machines, our Television Screens which have always been passive monitors, we were using joysticks to move things around, playing pong, had faxed machines we could send each other messages. People were Walking Around with phones rather than having to be home to get a call. There was a new understanding of how the world worked. There was electronic music and kids throwing raves with no one on the stage, Just Entertainment in the middle of a field. There are psychedelics it seemed to me that all these things and the internet were part of the new culture, west coast psychedelic, cyber punk, diy, holter kind of culture that might shake things up. And i was an east coast educated theater director and i loved theater. At the time, i was fed up with how elitist and expensive theater it had become and predictable the plays had come. I felt stifled. This internet thing was surprising. It like you i was raised in a world where people who Like Computers were like geek people with pocket protectors in high school and those who turned in the hallways at little right angles. By the late 1980s, i was finding out that my most psychedelic friends from college were going to Silicon Valley to work for apple and sun and intel. It was confusing. Wyatt where the weird people working with computers why were the weird people working with computers . I started covering it as a journalist and i saw a Different Technology story. These people would be working at intel during the day and going to oakland and scraping buds off k oddi peyote cactuses and getting high at night. Something was happening that was different and the first book i wrote, siberia, life in the trenches of hyperspace, was looking at all these different threads of culture as part of the same new cultural assertion that we could redesign reality and all of these Different Things whether it was fantasy roleplaying games. I know people were scared it was satanist. Dungeons and dragons, instead of kids watching a movie would create their own movie together. It was choose your own adventure, hypertext was used to yet. The idea that you could read a story and text on a computer and put on a word and choose where that takes you, opened the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. That was very new. Too many of us, it seemed to be kind of an omen or precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and interesting society, when that was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure in spirituality and politics and government and education and arts in all forms of Tech Committee human activity. Host credit we give net cyberpunk, psychedelic culture to survival of the richest . Caller douglas last couple pages in siberia my book were canceled by bantam Doubleday Bell in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over by 1993 when the book was supposed to come out. We think it is a passing fad and you are too late on it. Host is that letter framed somewhere . Douglas i have it in a drawer with all the other rejections of the book. By the time i was putting it together, it was three or four years in the making and by the time i was putting the famous touches, wired magazine had Just Launched and wired magazine came along and told a very different story about what was happening in the internet. Wired said this was a thing and what it is is good for business. The internet is going to create more surface area on the market and thank to the internet, the Nasdaq Stock Exchange grow forever. They look at Digital Technology as the ultimate derivative. The way finance works is by moving one level above what is actually happening, a transaction between people and you could buy stock in that. Thanks to computers you dont just have to buy the stock, you can buy eight derivative of a derivative. Or you could look at colonialism and only so much territory on the planet but thanks to the internet we will get infinite real estate, and infinite number of websites so market can expand into New Territory, virtual territory. It is interesting what is happening but is it eight financial or business phenomena . Once Business People came in, my fear was there is a window of opportunity for us to seize this cultural phenomena for what it is as a new experiment in the collective human imagination and a new unfolding of human culture. There are folks who want to enclose this as a business phenomenon and turn it into Something Else and make it more about profit and expenditure growth and i am not sure what that will do to the culture. It turns out what it did was kind of killed the culture, because if you can look at the early internet about exploring the Infinite Possibilities of a connected culture and what is the connected human imagination to. What can we do when we are connected that we cant do when we are totally alone and what happens when we share processing cycles in the giant projects . Once you are betting on the internet as a stock, you are not looking for how do you increase possibility, you are looking for how do you increase probability. What do you want. You bet on aol, compuserve, the web. Whatever you bet on you want that as the highest probability. Instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability. You could see it in 1993, 1994, 1995, but we started using on the web is stickiness, to create a website that was sticky and they would get to your website but couldnt leave. They had an ad for one of the companies that major website sticky show people stuck on a flight strip, as if that is the happy user because they are stuck on what you are doing. We use a metric called eyeball hours, and that was how long the human eyeball would spend looking at the monitor. We were in the attention economy, and people who werent paying attention were the enemy. We started to see all the diagnoses of attention Deficit Disorder and all of the prescriptions for getting people to pay better attention to these websites. I started to write about, i wonder if a shortened Attention Span might be a defense mechanism against the world where they are creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal, behavioral finance, slot machine algorithms. There is a division about how to capture human attention and modify human hate your online. That relate for me was the turn, especially for people in the Technology Industry began to think of their users more the way heroin dealer thinks as a user. How do we addict them and control them . Host what is the mindset. Douglas it is a few things. There are a few ways i can describe the mindset, this idea you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from the damage you are creating by earning money. You can develop enough technology to correct for all of the problems you created the technology that you just made. The mindset is a Silicon Valley belief that more tech and more money, they can solve for anything. It is a techno solution must understanding of the world, where human beings are the problem and tecology is the solution. They tend to be libertarian. They understand human relationships as purely a market phenomenon. There they tend to be frayed of women, nature, black and indigenous people. They tend to want to own everything. The object is to see ones own contribution as unique. It is without precedence. It is the urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating it and d animating it. When you hear them talk about progress and increasing choice. It isnt funny, tech pros want to build a new perfect city they are going to live in, renewable and computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and Autonomous Vehicles as the perfect. It is like going to mars or the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. They need to do it as if they need to begin. It is a colonizer urge to get to a New Territory and pretend there is no real life or humans there and then start over completely. When you talk to these guys, whether it is zuckerberg or musk or bezos, they all share these same understandings of human beings as the masses and them as one level above. Mark zuckerberg wants to go to the metaverse, elon musk wants to go to mars. Peter teal talks about one order of magnitude above everybody else. That is the mindset. It really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called effective altruism, where they believe it is ok to be awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. It is a weird utilitarianism on digital psychedelic steroids, or they believe this is how far the mindset goes it is this tech worship, hatred of the human, the body, of everything earthly that they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human Artificial Intelligences spread throughout the galaxy that will launch these things come apart biology, digital, silicon. Their post human entities all over the universe. And because there are so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion larval human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. And that is a very dangerous way to look that the lives of the people today matter less than this future of trillions of little robot consciousnesses. That is part of why i am not a futurist, you can use eugenics and a certain kind of scientific rigor to say thats true, they do matter more so lets invest in bitcoin, save ourselves and let the people die and get the rockets to the next planet. It is ignoring the present. I have much more faith in the reality of the 8 billion people alive today who actually matter. We would make very different decisions if we thought the people alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future. Host for more on survival of the riches the fantasies of billionaires, it is Douglas Rushkoffs latest book. We are looking at them in depth. For mines are open phone lines are open, to go to, mountain or pacific 202 7488903 to send us a text. Go ahead and send your questions and start calling in. You talk about the mindset . What is the concept of team human . Douglas it came up along time ago when i was on a panel, a brilliant guy would the chief scientists at google. He was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. Information like the adam and the molecule and the real organism that human culture. As computers become more complex, capable of handling more complexity than humans and human culture, information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. Once that happens, human beings have to cash it to the pass it to the Artificial Intelligence and accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction. I was upset by that. I think human beings have some qualities that Artificial Intelligence and things raised on binary logics may never have. Human beings can live in the in between space between the yes and no. They can sustain paradox over time without having to solve it. We can at eight problem as something we can sustain rather than solve. A human being can watch a david lynch movie and not understand what it means and still experience that as pleasure. What is that . If human beings are special we deserve a place in the digital future. He said, you are just saying that because you are human, like it was an act of hubris. I said fine, guilty, im on team human. That is when the term came up. Guilty as charged, i admit it, i am a human and i am going to fight for the rights of other of my species to have a place on the planet. The more i thought about it, the idea of team human, i realize it goes against the mindset to call humans team. The mindset is about the sovereign individual, the man in per, the zuckerberg, the single lord over everyone, the idea that team human is arguing and being team human is a team sport. If you actually read darwin, read the book, you will see page after page this guy is marveling at the way species collaborate to ensure mutual survival. They do that within species and within the coordination. Human beings if human beings are the most evolved, it is the most evolved collaborating and cooperating with each other. A lot of them are when you are in real life with a human being you see whether there tuples are adding larger or smaller, are they taking you in, are they making motions with their head . You cant see any of this on zoom or skype or on a text message. We are trying to conduct a very complex and difficult Human Society in a world that is not letting us get the social cues we need for the neurons in our brains to fire. If you are online and someone says they agree with you but you dont the biological feedback, you cant help but be suspicious of them. This body says they say they agree but they didnt get it in my body. So team human is about saying wait a minute, we have to reemploy and retrieve the great mechanism for working and being together. It is putting the social back into socialism. I care about people knowing their neighbors and understanding the human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. Host i wonder how you think this emerging Technology Fits in. Mark zuckerberg in a 2023 event this week previewing upcoming ai and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Here is one he showed off. Arc the industry over the coming decades mark the industry will be how do we unify this in the coming decades. To create it more coherent and better than anything we have today. In the future, you are going to walk into a room and there are going to be as many holograms for you to interact with as our physical objects. Think about all of the things that are physically there that dont need to be physical, think about the paper, media, art, workstation, all the interactive holograms. Take about hanging out with your friends. He soon we will be at the point where it will be physically with some of your friends or some will be there in digitally and will feel just as present. Or you will walk into a meeting and sit down at a table and you will be there and there will be people there physically and digitally as holograms but ultimately the people with you will be ais. Host on back technology. Douglas the word unify, the object of the game for him is to unify the real world with the gentle world so they can continue colonizing world we are in. It is that unification that may be the problem. When he ascribes being hanging out as with friends and some are virtual, that makes me feel sad versus you could be in a meeting and some. That, who cares. For me, the technology is great for increasing our utility value , which i understand, since the industrial age, people have been measured in terms of their utility value, how much money do we have to have for this meeting. I get that. The idea of not adding to meet in real life, even if it as easier on the service surface , it isnt. All the things that dont need to be physical, in order to get to the place where you dont have the physical thing, you need to have a lot more physical things involved. In order to make the ai and the user projecting polygraph whatever machine it is that will create the virtual avatar in the room, you have to send kids in the minds in africa to get the rare metals and put huge factories around water to get cobalt and pollution out and in and you have to have energy and solar panels that they will get energy from the sun but how is the solar panel made and where is it stored . He is describing more physical matter being used to deny human beings of actual physical presence. The avatar is a great substitute. Grandma isnt netherlands and the baby is in cleveland and they can see each other. That is beautiful. Or someone stuck in a hospital bed or as a paraplegic and can have a virtual expense of togetherness at a picnic they wouldnt be able to get to, that is beautiful. People who can actually be together, the complexity of human relationship just imagine the complexity of a mother nursing a baby. We could get a virtual bottle and virtual mother associate can be at work and you are going to be missing something. If the virtual baby is missing something from the mother, than i would argue that i am missing something if you are not at my house watching the game with me but your avatar is on the couch, it is not the same peer we are denying it and turning the game into like work. The other thing that is interesting is the technology he describes, you will never be in the position of being someone on the street and not remembering what their name is. It is uncomfortable. You meet someone on the street, hey, doug, how are you . Oh hey, that is doris. It will tell me all of those things and i can fake rapport with the person i didnt know. It is moving me into desire, almost a dishonest relationship with my world and wondering what matters . What really matters that i remembered that persons name . It was a sales connect or business, then it is good. We used to have these databases, someone calls you and their profile comes up and you say, how is your wife mabel . And you know that because it came up on the computer screen. It is a fake business relationship trying to sell mattresses to macy, ok, fake relationship. In the real world with these the sense of data as part of our interaction and then a world where who pays for the data . Im walking down the street to pick a restaurant and who is going to pay to be in Mark Zuckerbergs mutual virtual augmented world . That might be the best pizzeria on the block. Host 30 minutes into our interview. Looking for calls and questions. This is jim in california. You are on with Douglas Rushkoff. Jim, are you with us . We will try michael in broward county, florida. Jim, hang on the line and we will try to get to you. Michael, go ahead. We will work on the calls. I think we have julie on the line, minneapolis, minnesota. Go ahead. Caller i am here. I am glad to be here. I heard him say a number of things and it fired me up. You are passionate and insightful and have a great many opinions and questions and a lot of ideas which could be discussed by people who agree with you and people who oppose you for achieving progress. You write books, you teach, you appear here, how do you actually get people involved in talking to one another . How do we, because i share some of those characteristics from some of your thoughts how do we begin to i think at one point you said we had an opportunity to take intro of the digital age and instead we seceded it to business much like our universities have how do we retract that and say we want it back, we are capable of doing this . Host thanks for the call. Douglas i am asking precisely that question. The first thing i realized for me was at the construction of how do we get people to. Is a potentially hazardous construction in itself. How do we get people to do this . How do we get people to do that . Once we think about getting people to do something, i am putting myself in a superior place we get into almost Television Style influence. You become an influence peddler. How do we influence society, change people, because i know how people would be better if they are doing this instead of that . I tried to move away from that as the way i think about it and rather about it on how do i have an environment which people feel welcome to. You are welcome to socialize and care for it other and nurture each other rather than care for each other. I broke it down into four ways of changing the environment in which we are operating. The first one i called dean actualize to power. I am trying to help people recognize how many things in our world are a social construction and not conditions of nature, money, these bills. This is not money, it is paper we used to represent money in our society. When i go on cnn or somewhere and they are asking me about ai and the unemployment problem, it is like exactly why is unlimited a problem . When was complainant invented, what was it for and what is the difference between employment and work . When were they forced to start doing wage labor instead of the kind of work they were doing . Challenging these underlying assumptions which leads to the second one which is triggering agency, trying to help people feel that theyve got more agency, authority over what they are doing. For me that was the digital revolution did that for me, when i realized i could save a file not just as a read only file but as a read and write file that others could edit and why it was so much of the world established as readonly, television, money, religion . Why is this up for discussion . The third one was if we are going to do that, once you have agency and want to change things, you need other people. The third was to help people feel less afraid of each other. The great example i like to use is beginning to drill a hole in the wall and you dont have a drill. In america, most people would go to home depot and buy a drill and only use it once and leave it in the garage and then you throw it away. So you have used it once and created all this carbon, you throw it away and it sits on eight toxic waste area where someone looked or and try to find the recycle will parts inside it. What you could have done was gunned down to bob and said can i borrow your grill drill question mark drill . If bob sees it and let you the drill he will be expected to be invited over . Maybe you want bob to come over. The worst case you have a blackwhite arm acute already but that is the nightmare we have to look at why that is. The last thing i was looking at is what is the party and why are we resistant to it into the state of awe . If it is looking at a canyon or enjoying a party with people, it has a response in your body. Your immune system gets better. It is a natural, important part of human health and you dont get it with the vr goggle. You get it in communion with other people or nature of the vastness of reality. I am really looking at how do we help people feel less encumbered, locked in to sort out the status quo institutions and beliefs and more willing to move into that space between the one and zero where life actually happens. Host let me come back to jim in california. He was the first person who called in. Caller thank you for taking my call. I question is totally different than what you have been going on, but i see in your resume that you went to hollywood, you are an apprentice director with Brian Depalma on a nature movie which was a huge flop, and apparently it turned you off on movies and hollywood. I would just like your comments on that if you would and your thoughts on movies today and in the past. The directors and movies that influenced you when you were younger. I am very interested. I am a movie buff. Host thanks for the call. Douglas that is beautiful. The real story, i was a theater director of the time i was 11 or 12 years old. I directed plays in Junior High School and all the plays in high school. I went to princeton and did english and theater. I would to cal arts and did theater. I was driving across country with my best friend and he fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree and was impaled and died. He died to me and all of the sudden i was like theater is so serial, it dies is so ethereal, it dies. It was that existential moment where i wanted to do film because it would stay after i died. Then i took film at cal arts and i was with james mangel who did the wolverine movie and then a great director we worked together a lot. I was making films like theater. I liked werner herzog, lenny, my dinner with i like theater films with anthony gregory. I like theatrical films and then i got the Brian Depalma apprentice gig and i will be his apprentice on this big movie and they were expending at the time it was 50 million on a movie that was just not thought out, just kind of very satire. I did the new york part of it but when they went to l. A. To do the studio part, i actually dropped out and returned to theater at that point and got tired of theater because i was supposed to do a production of threepenny opera and the cheapest seat was going to be 40 bucks. It was a marxist lefty San Francisco thinker, im not going to charge 40 for the cheapest seat for threepenny opera. Then i turned to the internet thinking the internet would be the peoples medium. I wanted to get away from commercial theater and i will go to the internet and go to the antibusiness, prohuman, it was for a moment. It will be that alternative. In terms of the movies, kubrick and lynch do things in movies that is beyond what people realize is quite happening. These movies are all about inviting multiple interpretations. It is as if the movie has a plot but doesnt have the plot. You could almost project anything onto that. Not anything but many Different Things onto that plot. There was much about yourself as the movie. I like what he does and his imitation that he is really playing with illusion and reality. I like david lynchs work. It is about opening questions. I find i am annoyed with guys like nothing against their films, but i get annoyed with jj abrams, Christopher Nolan style movies which do similar things always with an answer. It is always that you figure it out. To me, the beauty of film when it is working, it opens outward. The answer isnt the answer, there are many. It is an object. It works or like that it has a mythic level of experiential value but what it means is you could be different every time you go through it. Thanks host thanks for sharing that story about your friend. You have a podcast in the 20 books. I wonder why you think it is you havent shared that story publicly for. Douglas i dont know, when you share a story about the death of your friend, it feels a little like it is begging for sympathy. It is like oh you are talking about that sad thing and maybe also because i dont know, it takes a lot of years to move through trauma. I remember back from my theater days, you have a scene if you have to cry or be upset or whatever it is in a play, what you do is recall when youve had a similar emotion and think about that in order to activate that emotion in the scene. At least you do it in the rehearsals. I remember our teachers told us a rule that it has to be from at least six years ago, otherwise you havent processed the trauma in ways that it is useful and could end up being nonuseful. Maybe now whatever it is 30 years later, i am kind of distance enough from it that when it came up it didnt have the texture that made it feel inappropriate to bring to bear. And also because of the audience. I know some of the audience whoever is there but i think about book tv and a lot of these people are book people and i dont get to talk to book people that much. Another author, book people, we go through life differently than other people. Book people understand how to engage with an idea or emotion over an extended period of time. Whatever book you are reading, it is a different thing than remote controlled media. I kind of felt it was both safer and more appropriate to bring up the processing of trauma or people who write and people who read. Host you chat with more of the people, plenty waiting. In california, oscar, you are on with Douglas Rushkoff. Caller i will get straight to the question i want to ask. Thank you for your books, by the way, they are great. How can we get this aspect of, do you have a way of expressing the big picture of things going on and it is great because i like to take an aspect of that. For example, capitalism, ok, it has done a lot of great things, but a lot of people use as a self defining term, practically. Rented, it put us on the map, but how can you use i believe that capitalism is great. It did a lot of good things, but people just strongly side with it but they dont see i have often lived at capitalism unchecked starts going bad and starts doing damage, like the big corporation. Host lets pick up on that because that is a theme of several of his books. Douglas for sure. First book i on capitalism was how the world became a corporation and how to take it back. That is the one that got me on the Stephen Colbert show. I was really looking at, where did capitalism come from . Where did the corporation come from, central currency come from . I traced it back to the late ages. There was a growth of a new peertopeer economy. After the crusades there was a marketplace they learned how to do from the desire and they brought from the bazaar and they brought it back and we had a trading class. Into that market until the 1980s. Air stock or seek as the middle class got the feet, so they came up with two great ideas, one was central currency. It said you are not allowed to have a transaction unless you borrow money from the central treasury at interest. So now because there is interest built into the economy, the economy has to grow just to stay the same. It looks fine for colonialism as long as you keep going faster and faster. The chartered monopoly said you have a monopoly charter to make shoes and everyone else was a shoemaker had to be an employee for the shoe company and that has come down to us as corporate capitalism that we dont question nice president like biden talks about we have to have the gdp to grow by 3 to 5 every year. Why do we need it to grow, what does it mean to actually feeding people, nothing. In some ways it is the opposite, it is about balance sheets. It favors increasingly abstract economic strengths. It is why derivatives are valued more than stocks. This end state capitalism where in 2013 the new york Stock Exchange was purchased by its derivatives exchange. The new york Stock Exchange, which is an abstraction of the real market you could argue it is an extraction of the exchange of actual human need, was consumed by its own extraction. This is the way it goes and that is why we end up in this world with tech billionaires looking at what is the next level of abstraction. We could think of the ai craze and digital craze is about looking for, how do i go meta and extract on reality itself and be one of the robots, one of the derivatives, one of those things . Because who wants to be a little newman. Human. This is General Electric style capitalism. The head of ge realized i make less money making and selling a washing machine to you than i do lending to the money to buy the washing machine. So that is when he stole the productive aspects and turned ge into a Financial Services company because the abstraction makes more money than the actual work. It worked well until 2008 when the financial crisis happened and they had productive assets. That is the tendency. You are right, that is the tendency of capitalism which is why it works great to a point. It works great for colonial empires if you are not looking at what people is being enslaved and what land is being taken away and it still can work. There is more balance forms of capitalism that we could use. When i tell that story about the real grill to people, drill, what if we borrow from each other peer what if we have a couple lawnmowers and share. Is that much less production and you have to earn as much money. Someone variable gets up at the end and says what about the lawnmower company, what about the people who work at the lawnmower and have stock shares and retirement plans the lawnmower companies . What are you going to do about them. . As the backwardness of starting as the underlying premise of our society rather than taking the economy of something that is supposed to serve us rather than us preserving the serving the economy. Host we are into our Douglas Rushkoff discussion with Douglas Rushkoff we are into our discussion with Douglas Rushkoff. A question from hawaii, what test can we devise . Douglas if we dont live in a digital simulation baited by a merchant graduate student of the future, lets say we live in a jewish or christian or buddhist reality, what would they say we are . What would they say this is . They would say this is the illusion, Something Else going on here. Way or another we live in a simulation because we dont even see what is going on. We have sensory organs that are trying create a picture of what is going on here, but that is all we get anyway. We are just sensory organs trying to process based on what we see. Finally, the question doesnt matter but no, i dont believe we are like in westworld, like a million simulations run by someone to figure out how society works. If we are iterating, it is much closer to karmic iteration of civilizations over time then it would be running simulations. Host a minute ago you were talking about the importance of the experience of awe. I want to go to your book about coercion and talk about the spectacles and how you define spectacle. Douglas spectacle is more like a nuremberg rally or trump rally or these days an nfl Football Game where the energy of a crowd and many of the features of awe are leveraged for a purpose. There is in between, like walking into the great cathedral as a catholic person and doing mass in their in there. Some architect dude made this inspiration machine, with an organ and lights and stained glass and arches and all to generate and experience awe. Go to a rave and they put the lights and music at 120 beats a second and beautiful, young people around dancing half dressed and all like a scene in the matrix, there is in between here but for me, spectacle is really less about inviting true participation and more about stoking the rage of a crowd against a unified enemy democrats or whoever. The spectacle is more of a designed experience, in order to focus the energy onto a named enemy, enmeshed cases. The other is more about breaking people out of the trap, of the illusion of individuality and letting the next dance themselves as part of something much larger. Do not mean that large thing for them. When i was playing, i was calling it seems human because it seems open enough that any person it is not team humanlike against Team Squirrel or a team tree, it is team human and this is the way that we experience ra our perspective. Think of any great spectacle. First, unify the cro. Third, speak as god or nature. Help me understand that their part a little bit more. Hitlers speaking about himself as the father or that it is interesting. You look at the twitter means that people like elon musk put up of himself. With them as guides. Look at zuckerberg and elon musk challenging each other to a mixed martial arts fight. As if they are demigods. They inhabit Silicon Valley, which is their mount olympus, and now they will have a spectacle battle through media that we get to see. Speaking as god or nature, it depends. There is a book on propaganda that is really good on this, but having people identify you as the mother, the father, as connected to god you are both universal and completely personal. The person feels that you are speaking just to then. Apparently, taylor swift has the ability to do that, but she is pretty benevolent about it. The message of empowerment and identification, but someone with her abilities could be doing it politically, could be doing it that way. How do we get people to blank . Then we are the same. There is a rally where we get people to believe in our god or get people to vote for our party or do this. There is a vulnerable moment where people are like, it happens when someone walks into one of the original shopping malls. They show it on tape. You can watch the videos of it. Their job opens and their eyes glaze over. That moment where you can drop in, whatever you want, whatever brand, whatever party or political ideology. When they drop that in, now we are meeting our destiny. With the blood and the soil in the rhetoric comes a certain assure ship a certain assertion that this is the natural way, that we are returning to some kind of pagan, barbarian, masculine, authentic map to what we are. It is a more natural, open, from my gut state of being. My we listen to what they say has a quote from bob carey on the front. Remind of who he was and why he ended up on the cover of your book. He was a senator from nebraska who actually lost his foot in the vietnam war. He was kind of a president ial candidate. There was a scandal about a particular episode during the war. It is unclear what exactly happened, but he was always nice to me. He was actually the boyfriend of my neighbor, when i lived in the west village, back when you can live there as a barely working writer. She lives across the hall from me and he was her boyfriend. I got to hang out with him a little bit. He did a really funny one. I thought they were foolish. Read this or else it is perfect because the book is called coercion. What ended up on the cover. Intentionally misleading the listener, reader or viewer. Read this book and nobody gets hurt. They send it back. He added to it so that they would accept him on there, but it was good. He then became president of the new school in new york for a while. A big building. He was controversial but a very useful figure in bringing that place to its current standing. This is michael. You are on with Douglas Rushkoff. And chatting with chatgpt, i discovered some information about governor desantis. Check this out. Because it is basically a semantics engine it the same reason they do it. They say things that are positive. Anything to do with racism, misogyny i guess you are right. But it really messes with your friends who are rich. It changes your brain so that you react in the exact same way, more quickly acting. They are causing a lot of what you are discussing. We verify that they can lead, but they start to catch the rabbit and we pool the information. And for 50 years, they have done randomized tests. We have never had more than 30 . Douglas the embracing feature of this is applying logic to our many social institutions. Whatever metric you put is the metric that you are going to get , right . That is what you are going to go forward. They are necessarily rejected metrics. You bring them in, in vitro and say, we are going to teach this kid long division. Without any understanding, what is going on in that kids house . They are moving from shelter to shelter. How do i take care of my mother . The challenge of that kid, what the child needs to learn at that moment is reflected in the assessment that they have done at the end of the week. That is the problem with a onesizefitsall Education System and everything. And the thatcher era, there was a story about how when they were trying to use incentives to get hospitals to perform better, they said they would give more money to hospitals that reduce the amount of time that people spent in the waiting room and for them to get beds as quickly as possible. What they did was they took the wheels of the gurneys and bind the hallways with the gurneys and declared them being in the room. The time and energy it took actually slow the rate at which people got medical care. In order to win the metric, they ended up reversing. What i hear in this callers concern is the way that we institutionalize shortterm, nuclear oversimplified values. The bigger and more convoluted, very often the harder and harder it is to get back to what it is that we want. Chatgpt people have to realize that chatgpt is hyped right now. It is a stock market desperate for another big thing. Zoom and all these apps are not being used as much. All the Media Companies are not being watched as much. Chatgpt is really just an advanced Search Engine right now. It pushes them into something that looks more like speech. It is not actually correct. It is reverting everything to the mean. What is the most average answer to that question . So, it is wrong and selfcentered. It is not what we think it is. These things are actually smart, but we are not there. Host ruth from st. George, utah. Caller hello. I have a couple points i want to go back to. It has been a little over two years. I live in this gorgeous area, so it is all about experiencing things in real time, not virtually. I love live performance. Teenage kids, adults, professional, i want to see people trying and delivering. It is great for my soul. Douglas i have been blessed a few times. If you dont have the if you have the opportunity to do it, do it. You feel connected to the creation. Creation itself. Go there and stare at a rock for five minutes. It is the trip is utah, some parts of new mexico do that as well. It is amazing, but the thing that amazes me about our state of disconnection is how quick the ev connect, recalibrating to reality is almost instantaneous. Find a friend, look in their eyes and take two or three breaths with them. It is almost unbearable, if you have not done it in a while. It reconnects you almost instantly. How long it took, how much engineering, how many billions or trillions of dollars in this crazy state. You are going to get an wellness app and a meditation at to get you over the facebook or snapchat cap. You touch ground and put your feet on the ground and look at another person. Look at a clip. Breathe in a forest. Look at the eyes of your dog or cat. You get it so quickly and it is so accessible. Even in a forest fire hayes, it is so accessible. When i have hope in the future, it is how quickly they restore when you give them half a chance. Host when you are creating your writing, when you are writing, is there a place you go to think . What is your process for writing . Douglas i tend to go about it the same way, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. I write no cards. I end up putting them on the wall. It is like content areas and then content areas mutate into chapters and then i order them so that each chapter flows as a structure. Because of that, i need to have a place where the book happens. A room, an office, because it ends up being physically represented with the no cards. I have had somebody years of experience with the no cards that i know how many i have. I know how important the topics are in each one. I feel it more intuitively. I have not i put the survival of the richest in here. My bookcase wall was the one where the book was written. I have been trying to use a program that is a substitute, but it does not quite organize the same way. I have to be in a physical relationship to the ideas. It is like a chapel of memory. They are in my head and located there in the chapter. Host chapel of memories. What was the hardest book for you to write . Douglas this last book came right out. That is what my agent told me. It is the stories. I tell all these ridiculous, fun stories and their antics. That one came right out. The most researched book was like eight. I went to the yale library, charters and the hardest one was probably a graphic novel. It is about the real but fictionalized of cold war between Alastair Crowley and adolf hitler. And three the first three artists who were hired to work on the book all had major life catastrophes like illness, suicide etc. , and i was starting to get scared that you start writing about someone like alastair rally Alastair Crowley and there is something dangerous happening. I got really scared when i was writing that, that i was touching energy that i should not. It was really hard to do and to tell that story as reality with history, while also getting into these characters and trying to distinguish in a responsible way. That was the most harrowing experience i had. Caller thank you very much, gentlemen. This is a fascinating conversation. Im interested in your role about research. How much of the research and writing . Do they overlap each other . Also, your role with agents. Thank you very much. Douglas with life, i like to have all the Research Done before i start writing. I will do a little bit of research to get to the stage, and the proposal is usually something that turns into a version of the introduction to the book. We would call it the research question. Where did the corporation come from . How did they become the religion of our society . What can we do about it . I have done enough research to know. I was going to figure it out, but i do not know when i wrote the proposal that i would find the nature of the deal between the monarchs and the first charter monopoly, and what that was, and how it work. I discovered things that were not understood before. That was real research, but once the research was done, i made my outline on the wall. I could see occasionally there would be a blank area. My process is, once i get that outline done, the only way i get through the book is going straight through you, and i justified it. I am digging the whole tunnel until i get to the light at the other end of the mind, and i have to go straight through it. The reader is going to have to go straight through it. I do not look back. If i look back, i have tried that, retry to rewrite the book. The end of the book it is like combing someone with really long hair. You end up different at the front, if you have not gotten all the way down. I get to the end of the book and then i added. The only thing we hear that may happen, i realize it is much bigger. This is actually two chapters. Occasionally, i will do research and say, i need to understand the story. I need to get more justification. I either drop it or i tell the story in a different way. Our relationship with agents is that we have a bunch of them. I started because i had written a screenplay. The screenplay had agent. The first literary agent through the back door and ended up doing i thought they had dropped me. The first agent was like, wait a minute. I got sued and had to give a bunch of money to this land and that one. Seven i was with this agent and that agent had a lot of issues. He was stealing money from a bunch of people. I went to william morris. My agent left morris. I stayed in the next agent wasnt so good, so i went with a science agent, who is a great literary agent. They ended up having an epstein association that i thought they were not fully acknowledging. I wanted to do more hollywood aims at that point. That agency i wanted to get things on the screen, so i ended up at the agency. I do not talk to my agent there that much, but she is really good. She is the one who told me, do not write another book like this. If you really want to reach people, you have to tell stories. But at least tell stories in the literary medium, stories of how you engage. So i started doing that. She was right. And now and always, i have seen my agent, but more so my editor as my partner in the project. I do not want to sell to a Publishing Company that has an editor that is not adding value to the book. Not just the distribution, the cover and the sales of the book, but they should be my partner. They really are the first audience, and im not going to leave him unless god knows what happened, but he was the one who told me to write this book. He wrote a couple articles. I did this article on the survival of the ricst who wanted advice on how to get out there doomsday bunkers. A year or two later, i wrote about the covid crisis, how i felt many people were retreating and adapting that billionaire mindset. I can make this work. I both at peace and that is when he called me and said, this is your next book. You have to do this. I called the agent and i said, the editors that i should do this. So it was actually a book that came from the editor to me. I was writing audience of one, but what about this and that. And to be anyplace it is a strange place to be. I see the notes and critiques from the editor as gifts, rather than as word, as ways to get in. This guy is helping me make this better. He is making me a better writer. To think that someone else does not know better than or at least as well as you it was really good for me. I look at all these people as my partners in crime here. It feels better to come out with a book that you know that your people are a part of. Of course, i am finally living it. Host it is his latest book. Also a professor of media theory and digital economics in new york. And we will go to new york. Mike is waiting. You are on with Douglas Rushkoff. Caller good afternoon. I have a question for the professor. Why it has been very ineffective and paste miserable failure, but details of the selfappointed uv, i just want the people listening to understand what complete hypocrites these people are. They are surrounded by highly trained, armed bodyguard. I just want people to understand that. There are these forms of government that do not work. Freemarket capitalism has been the most effective. By five, the most effective way to govern and live, in terms of economics. These Technology News it is disgusting. They are believed in hypocrisy, the entire way that they live. Host i think we got your point. Douglas capitalism has worked, as long as we get period of success, we have major reclamation. Big regulation. When things spun out of control, a wpa and a g. I. Bill, and an education bill. That is when capitalism works best is when you do that. Income tax rate went up 80 to 90 during that time. When capitalism works too well, you end up extracting so much value that you make the people around you poor. When huber, facebook and google are doing well they end up destroying markets. But it is actually destructive. They are storing more money. He did to the place where Mark Zuckerberg says, going to give act 5 of my money to places that i took it out. You made facebook less extracted if you had made facebook less extracted, he would not have the money back into the ecosystems and societies you decimated. I would argue that the reason why it has not worked is because they are trying to do the same at scale. I look at scale as the problem. When marx was writing about socialism, he was saying, how do we retrieve the social element of commerce and exchange . Need borrowing a drill from the neighboring by at home to. Is that a crime or is it ok . I understand the perspective that it is a crime. Even though i do not need a drill, if i do not by the drill, how little black and decker grow . It is my responsibility. That is the point where it gets off. Not just as a means to an end. When i look at socialism, im talking about how you put the social back into it. When you talk about communism, i like community. It is not something that you can orchestrate so well. This is where i think he went a little bit off and trying to exercise. He has this great track when he writes about Robinson Crusoe. That he had all these little measures. He needed to maximize his own efficiency. Hes going to spend this much time fishing and this much time collecting water and making road. And marx said, if Robinson Crusoe did it for himself, what if we created a ledger for the whole country, so you know how many people need to do this and that. You cannot plan that out. Markets can be good for figuring out supply and demand. They are bad at discovering how we share water. How do we deal with Something Like air . How do they best orchestrate . This is a river and we all share responsibility for the river. How many fish are you allowed to take from the river . We are going to force those who violate so that there is enough fish, pasture, air for everybody to use. Lets compete in capitalism. But a lot of stuff does not really work in terms of market sensibility. You need to create a scarcity of something for the market to work around it. It is much harder to do that. I think what we need is a multifaceted ecology of economic models that are different, depending on what it is we are trying to share together. Host one of the questions we always ask is about their favorite books in the books that they are beating right now. On favorite books, John Kennedys tools, Lewis Mumfords techniques and civilization. Virginia woolfs to the white hoe. Breaking together. What books do you want to talk about in this discussion today . Douglas i already talked about one. Lets see. That is an interesting one. With respect to the last conversation we were having, it was a great counterculture writer. He was responsible or partly responsible for the church of discord. It was the early 1960s style of intentional disinformation to promote that medical, hippie psychology. What he is arguing is that we can all hold perspectives at different times and not take any one of them too seriously. You could see it from that perspective or look at it as similar or as a new age fantasy person or a psychedelic person. There are different ways to look at things. It would have helped people today come in the whole conspiracy theories, qanon and people looking at what really happened. Did this happen . Is it connected to the Covid Vaccine . To be able to tolerate not knowing, to be able to tolerate that there are different perspective, it shields you from the same kinds of people that use skeptical. Use spectacle. I feel like a lot of these poor kids who were scooped into a medical right medium ended up being the victims of their imagination rather than being able to harvest their own creativity. This book is really good for walking through chapter parentless. What is true or not true . How are you going to get to the other side of that . The other one is the book that i finished last night. It was called what was it called again . Host the path of political disintegration. Douglas what that book does in a rigorous way is it was nice to feel wrong. I love getting corrected. When these revolution. When civilizations break down, it is not because the rich got so rich and the poor got so poor that the poor revolt. 70 people are in the villages and they will revolt. That is not what happens. What happens is, it is the creation of too many elite. There are so many elite that there is not enough for the elite to all be elite. They start competing with each other and that is what breaks things down. Im sure that there are too many. There are not enough. There are a lot of billionaires. I thought that when bezos and musk and zuckerberg i thought that they had more total wealth than the five billionaires, carnegie and those guys. They actually had less wealth. But there are more billionaires. The top ones have way more than everybody else. There is a larger billionaire class. Still a tiny number of people compared to the population, but it spread out through a bunch of wider billionaires competing against each other for scraps of billions. That is what breaks things down. Host to what extent do you think that americas societal tendency is contributing to anxiety trends . Douglas tremendously and totally. It is funny. When you have a lot of us are raising kids who have sensory disorders or sensory processing, too much corso or whatever it is. The easiest way to calibrate your kids is to bring them to bed with you or sit with them. Body to body, skin to skin, if they are little enough and it is still appropriate. But coal location it is the surest way to calibrate, to gain help. If you think about our society as being addicted to technology, addicted to money and this crazy stuff, this idea that just one more thing, then i will try to do good for the world. I just need another 1000 and then i can behave ethically. If we are addicts and we need the 12 step program, we need the equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous for our addiction to these crazy things what is the first thing you do . You go into a room with other people. You go to a meeting. You experience fellowship every day. Find the others. Absolutely. It is our lack of presence with each other that is making it harder for us to calibrate naturally and making us turally more distressful. You cannot ever feel the positive, not truly. You can get a dopamine hit. Somebody tweeted, i get a hit of dopamine but not oxytocin, which is the actual bonding chemical. You do not have an organic experience of camaraderie or fellowship. You do not have that. You not feel part of the group. It is a very different kind of group. It is much more spectacle. Look at this persons tweet. We all gave it a thumbs up. They are my they are mad at biden or russia. We all do that. Is not the same thing. And it leads kids who are on twitter, instagram and snapchat, instead of being with one another are suffering terribly. Everything from interacts yeah to to read and it is a symptom. They are killing themselves. It is becoming a Public Health crisis. You do not solve it with another app. The wellness app. He sold it with good, oldfashioned i sound like an old person. But it should not be considered nostalgic, being with other people it should always stay in fashion. For host for book readers do not know your social media presence, are you on facebook . Do you tiktok . Douglas i am not. I have a twitter account, and i will send a link to my podcast each week. Now i am considering stopping that. I used to participate when it was more conversational. But i will say, i will be a book tv today. If i get 50 likes for that and 30 of them are from bots pretending to be sex workers. There is a new bot out there that is a scam. People look at them as virtual or real strippers of some kind. But what is the point . Such a little cesspool and it is so aggravating. To see the conversations engendered there i do not even want to do that. It is a little bit more professional, but i do not have any social media presence. I do not do social media. I have a blue sky account i have not used yet. I have a mastodon account, which is a federated version of twitter that i use, but im not finding a real need for it. I get so much email that servicing the email feels like as much time as i want to been looking at a screen. I meeting my neighbors and finding out about the town. There is only so much life left. I do not want to spend it in there. Host you publicly quit facebook and he wrote a column about it. He wrote, facebook has never been merely a social platform. It exploits our actions the way tare rties do. It turns our network of connections, our social graphs come into a commodity for others to exploit. Douglas they would sell our social graphs. When i wrote that was when facebook decided they could use you to advertise. They broadcast that for money to your friends or anyone who follows you and more. Whether you enter or not, they were going crazy, but it got worse than that. You have to take your past behavior and use that to put you in a bucket. Forget what you are likely to do in the future and make sure that you do that. Facebook looks at your past activities and decides that you are 80 likely to go on a diet in the next two weeks. Your newsfeed will get filled with stories like, what happens if you are too fat or did you eat that food . What is going on in your bloodstream . What they are doing that for is to get that 80 accuracy after 90 . They are directed at 20 of people who choose to do Something Else, who are going to choose to do something that is not they take the 20 who are going to do some novel chemistry, wonderful beard and human thing. They will be less like the algorithm predicted them to be and reduce it down. It is basically auto tuning the soul, the weirdness and independent out of humanity. That is not an environment that you want to spend time in. Host about five minutes left in our conversation. Carla says, thank you for sharing your insight. I do see the repetitive nature of humans and agree. Humans are disconnected from each other and themselves. How do you recommend we begin a world hearing . Douglas i do yoga. I do yoga three times a week with someone who teaches in my neighborhood. After covid or during covid, she started doing it virtually, doing it on zoom. Some of the people do not want to go back, so it has become zoom yoga. A few months ago, i started crying afterwards. I was just like, this sucks. Yes, im glad to move my body in that way, but i was doing yoga with the other people doing it. But to be in a room with other people that was gone. I want to be in a room with people. It is great that we had two hawaii calls. Ive always had a spiritual thing about hawaii. To find others that is my whole purpose, but i want to do with whatever i have left. Host you mentioned find the others are the last words of the book in team human. We started our conversation today about being present versus future. Peace in the future is less a noun than a verb. I went to and with your thoughts on that. Douglas i was trying to rob from god is a verb, which is a great book as well. The future, especially these planners and institutionalists they look at the future as, we will hire people to tell us what is in the future so we can repair for it. Look at the most probable future. Nuclear war the way i prepare for the future is building a bunker, getting a rocketship, going to mars. The best i can do is predict the future, prepare and hang on for it. Im saying no, the future is something that we are creating right now. You are making the future with the choices that you make. You are way more likely of bringing that on. What if we prepare for a future where people realize that their neighbors are their friends . That mutual aid and togetherness, connection and community, and care, acknowledging nourishment and acknowledging the social reality that is the future that we want to create. We create that future by enacting it. We are future and with every action that we take now. Start featuring today and he will like how the world turns out. Host Douglas Rushkoff has been our guest for the past two hours. His latest book came out in 2022. Thank you for talking about some of them this morning. Douglas