To Climate Change or other catastrophic event. 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 technology 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 employ 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 physica