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Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Douglas Rushkoff: Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

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

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

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

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

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

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

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

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
Team Human, the book, is ready for Pre-Order! Don’t be shy. Everyone who has emailed to ask what can they do to help? Preorder the Team Human manifesto!

———-

Douglas Rushkoff

http://rushkoff.com

Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.

Team Human – my new podcast!

Photo by ashokboghani

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Mutiny of the Soul, Revisited

Charles Eisenstein — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 08:24:46 +0000

Over the years, I’ve probably received more mail about Mutiny of the Soul than any other essay I’ve written. The idea of the article has been hugely validating for many readers: that depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc. aren’t chemical malfunctions of the brain, nor spiritual malfunctions of the mind; rather, they are forms of legitimate rebellion against life structures that are unworthy of one’s full participation or attention. They are more symptoms of a social illness than of a personal deficiency. As Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I’ve also received my fair share of criticism for the article, mostly along the lines that it is dogmatically anti-medication. These critics say that pharmaceutical meds, while probably overprescribed, have an important role, and it is irresponsible for a layperson like myself with no psychiatric training to flout scientific consensus when people’s lives are at stake.

While I had seen a little of the science casting doubt on psych meds, I was in no position to make a strong argument against them. My piece was coming from an intuitive place: “These can’t be good.” But now the cracks are spreading in the foundation of pharmaceutical orthodoxy. I recently came across the work of one renegade psychiatrist, Kelly Brogan, who argues that depression and anxiety aren’t unlucky chemical imbalances in our brains that can be magicked away with medication, but are symptoms of something deeper. In Suffering: Who Needs It? she writes:

The entire pharmaceutical model of care is predicated on the belief that it is us against our vulnerable, dangerous, broken, annoying body. A body that needs to be chemically managed and put into its proper place of subservience relative to our prized functionality. We are prescribed to suppress and eliminate signs that are actually meaningful messages about our state of dis-ease. We don’t ask “why”, we don’t look to the roots of these symptoms. We just want to get back to work. To feel “normal.”

Later, speaking of psychiatric medications, she writes, “We are told that these medications are ‘fixing a chemical imbalance’ when they are doing anything but. They are suppressing consciousness and creating imbalance.”

Kelly Brogan also has a book coming out called A Mind of your Own that presents a devastating and well-referenced scientific case against the premises and practices of psychotropic medication. Her assessment: the drugs are worse than useless. Although I had been aware of weaknesses in the scientific justification for SSRIs and other meds, I was shocked at the degree of malfeasance, corruption, and cover-up the book details. It is an indictment not only of conventional psychiatry, but, implicitly, of our current system of knowledge production; i.e. academic research, increasingly corporate-funded, and the political and economic apparatus surrounding it.

Given that modern psychiatry, with its dominant pharmaceutical model, is very much part of said system of knowledge production and borrows its status and legitimacy from that of established social institutions of science and medicine, we should be wary of making too much of Dr. Brogan’s credentials. We should examine, therefore, any tendency we may have to take a book such as this one more seriously just because it is written by a credentialed psychiatrist. To say, now we can reject psychopharmaceuticals because an actual psychiatrist says so, still reinforces the same mindset of deference to medical authorities that led us to believe in psychopharmaceuticals to begin with. Why, to play on the book’s title, are our minds not our own? We (the American public) have abdicated our psychological authority to credentialed experts, diagnostic labels, and standards of sanity and well-being that coincide with submission to prevailing structures of power and privilege. We need to think for ourselves again.

That said, this book has the potency of an insider’s critique, all the more powerful because the author was once a believer herself. It is not the first exposé of its kind, but it is an unusually engaging and methodical one.

The embedding of pharmaceutical psychiatry within larger political and economic structures is apparent from the response to the book, which is backed by a major publisher (HarperCollins). Dr. Brogan described to me the consternation of its publicists at the mainstream media blackout (canceled TV appearances etc.) of the book. Perhaps they should not have been too surprised, given Big Pharma’s heavy advertising budget. Can you imagine a message that psychiatric medication is worse than useless, followed by a commercial suggesting, “Have you asked your doctor about ____?”

It would be a mistake, though, to blame direct financial conflict of interest for the establishment’s resistance to the book’s message. As an important element of the establishment itself, the mainstream media is most fond of crises and scandals that reinforce the legitimacy and the methods of existing authority. A new virus , an E. coli outbreak, an incident of terrorism, an escaped criminal, a university cheating scandal… all these underscore the need for better systems of control. The media takes them up without reservation. The response to issues that threaten the core narratives of our society are a different matter entirely.

Our world-defining stories have a kind of immune system that protects them from information that would disrupt them. The media exercises this immune response by attacking, marginalizing, or ignoring any critique that cuts too deeply. From the perspective of someone standing in the dominant story, these critiques indeed seem crazy; no wonder, because that story sets the boundaries of what is and is not real. Likewise, it seems crazy to question the narrative of “when you are sick, you go to the doctor and he or she makes you better, using the ever-expanding arsenal of modern medicine,” because so much else hinges on that narrative. Question that, and you also must question the political apparatus that is married to that story, as well as the deeper ideology of the onward march of science toward more complete knowledge and the onward march of technology toward more complete mastery. It isn’t just the financial self-interest of television networks and drug companies that is at stake.

The primary narratives of our culture form together a mythology that interweaves the very fabric of normality and tells us what is real. The simplest response to Dr. Brogan’s book is basically that she herself has gone crazy, and in her derangement is irresponsibly attacking the foundations of her profession. She is unhinged, hysterical (yes, this storyline is abetted by the fact she is a woman). There is then no need to directly address the arguments in her book, however trenchant they may appear. If they contradict established truth so violently, then we know, a priori, they must be wrong.

The reader will notice a parallel between the pathologizing of dissidents like Kelly Brogan, and the pathologizing of our personal impulses to resist or violate established social norms. If we take for granted the rightness of the world as we have known it, then to withhold full participation can only be a dysfunction, whether we label it with colloquial terms like laziness or psychiatric diagnoses like ADHD, depression, and so forth. The same fate befalls those who challenge that assumption on an ideological or political level.

What is true for critiques of the existing system also holds for alternatives to it, especially when those alternatives draw from a different basic worldview. On a personal level, the life choices people make outside normal professional pathways seem to others naïve, unrealistic, or, again, crazy. What, you left your Ph.D. program to learn permaculture? You dropped out of medical school to study acupuncture? Those who advocate such choices attract the same hostile incredulity from those who are ideologically threatened by them. If unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture, functional medicine, herbs, and thousands of other modalities actually work, what does that do to the credibility of the systems that have denied and suppressed them for so long? What does that do to the self-image and future status of those holding high positions in those systems? It is hard to admit one was wrong, especially when one has built a career and livelihood around being an authority. Therefore, paradigm-disrupting alternatives (and not only in medicine) provoke a degree of hostility that only makes sense when we recognize how much is at stake on the level of narrative. “Scientifically unproven” is the favored epithet with which to dismiss them; a neat rhetorical trick which casts their advocates as anti-science while ignoring the influence that money and ideology exert over the institutions of scientific research and knowledge production.

At best, alternative and holistic approaches to depression or anything else are kept in a safe compartment called “complementary,” tolerated perhaps, but certainly not taught in the medical schools, supported by insurance companies, or mandated by school systems. Acupuncture is welcomed, for example, as an adjunctive therapy to chemotherapy. But if someone forgoes the chemo entirely and opts to visit a cancer cure facility in Mexico, well that’s just – you know what I’m going to say – crazy.

A Mind of Your Own offers the equivalent by going beyond critique to offer a multi-dimensional holistic protocol for treating depression, involving diet, body ecology, exercise, and other practices. Clearly these subvert the dominant pharmoneurochemical paradigm, but it may not be immediately clear that they are part of a broader radicalism. After all, whether you “fix the patient” with chemicals or with other methods, aren’t you still helping her adjust to a “profoundly sick society”? That is a criticism frequently levied at so-called holistic treatments for depression. I asked Dr. Brogan to respond. She said:

My whole premise is that depression is an opportunity for transformation and that this transformation is best engaged, for many of us, through sending the body signals of safety; i.e. diet, movement, sleep, meditation/relaxation response. This isn’t a symptom management program. It’s a root-cause-resolution endeavor that seeks to illuminate connections between different bodily systems heretofore conceived of as separate. Acknowledging and accepting this invitation also begets a level of consciousness around bodily integrity that extends to engagement with the medical system, consumerism, and fear around adversity.

Clearly, this approach is not so simple as replacing a Prozac pill with a St. John’s Wort pill. In our culture of separation we like to divide the physical from the psychological, and, depending on our orientation, demote one or the other to secondary status; hence on the one hand the disparagement of certain conditions as “psychosomatic,” and on the other hand, the prejudice against treatments for depression that are “just physical.” In fact, somatic-level changes that require volition and commitment, such as radical dietary changes, may necessarily involve profound changes in the way one engages life and sees the world. Psychological state is not separate from lifestyle state, relationship state, work state, dietary state. Neither are cause and effect separable. Does poor diet cause depression? Or does depression cause poor diet?

The prescriptions in A Mind of Your Own encode a shift in basic worldview, not only diet and lifestyle. It pinpoints a major source of depression in chronic inflammation, linked to common medications as well as unhealthy intestinal flora, which in turn stems from practices that are foundational to the American way of birth and life. From hospital births and C-sections, to antibiotics, statins, and birth control pills, to practically everything in the standard Western diet, much of what is normal, advanced, or modern is actually making people miserable. To make the changes the book prescribes therefore requires a repudiation of norms, and consequently of the worldview that embeds them. That includes the ideology of progress, the veneration of science and technology, and the conception of the self as separate from, and in fundamental conflict with, the external world. Gone, then, is the War on Germs; gone is the regime of pharmaceutical control over body processes.

In contrast, the holistic therapies Kelly Brogan outlines are grounded in a sponsoring worldview of interconnectedness and wholeness, that seeks to cooperate with rather than conquer nature. Part of that worldview is trust in the body’s wisdom and innate healing capacity. No longer is depression an enemy to fight. It is a symptom of imbalance, and the response then is to restore wholeness on every level, including that of work, relationship, and life purpose. Therefore, depression is also a gateway to an expanded normal, that brings the qualities of interconnectedness and wholeness to all aspects of life.

I’m not asserting here that every case of depression or any other malady can be traced directly to something one can change with appropriate will and awareness. Life is more mysterious than that. Despite a profusion of psychosomatic maps of the kind Louise Hay made famous in You Can Heal Your Life, simplistic formulas like “Lung problems are about grief” or “Throat problems are about not speaking your truth” are not always helpful. Any serious disease (by which I mean a condition that makes it impossible to live normally) is an invitation into the unknown.

The difference between an allopathic therapy and a holistic therapy is that the former rejects that invitation and seeks to return the patient back to normal, back to the previously-known, while the latter accepts the invitation and opens the door to examining the whole of his or her life. That means that any therapy, whether pharmaceutical, herbal, or dietary, or even the application of colored lights and crystals, can conform to the allopathic mindset if it is reduced to a formula that effaces the unique individuality of the recipient.

The “whole of one’s life” extends to include that person’s relationships to others and to society. If we are to take Krishnamurti at his word, then this epidemic calls for therapies that are social, economic, and political, and not just physical or even mental. In other words, there is a political dimension to the epidemic of psychiatric illnesses. They alert us to a society that is indeed “profoundly sick.”

I believe that we can take Krishnamurti’s aphorism a step further. To be well in a profoundly sick society, one must contribute to the healing of that society. A Mind of Your Own would not be complete if it sought only to give advice to individuals seeking help and ignored the system that is harming them. Just as there is a political dimension to the depression epidemic, so also must any truly holistic book on the subject carry political implications.

On a sociopolitical level we face a choice that echoes the allopathic/holistic distinction: Do we attempt to “fix the patient” – our ailing body politic – or do we accept the invitation into the unknown? So far, the choice has mostly been the former. For example, after the 2008 financial crisis, we bolstered ailing financial institutions with “injections” of liquidity to keep the system going, rather than transitioning to a post-growth ecological economy. After the November terror attacks in Paris, France and the EU strengthened the security state, rather than moving into a post-imperial geopolitics that no longer seeks to maintain dominance. In the fashion of an addict, we address failure by doing even more of the same, hoping that more competent management of the situation will buy time for some miracle to happen.

Addressing psychiatry, A Mind of Your Own welcomes the invitation into new territory that the failure of pharmacological psychiatry offers. Will the profession accept that invitation? Will we accept it, when it comes, as individuals? Will we accept it as a civilization? As one of the defining diseases of our time, depression afflicts us on a collective level as well as a personal. Jimmy Carter identified it as “malaise.” It is hard to deny the signs: the going-through-the-motions, the lack of vision and direction, the feeling of being trapped in an intolerable but inescapable situation, a premonition of doom that swings from anxiety to panic to numbness, the feelings of powerlessness, the loss of agency, the deflation of former goals and ambitions. It was a telling moment when George W. Bush, hoping no doubt to rekindle that adventurous can-do spirit of the previous generation’s moon missions, announced the goal of a manned landing on Mars. Hooray, a new goal to incite our passion! It didn’t work, did it? Most of you probably don’t even remember the announcement. Inflated versions of old aspirations aren’t going to help. The old story that generated those aspirations is dying. It is time to stop fighting the invitation into the unknown that depression offers on a personal and collective level.

The age of the separate self is coming to an end. We can no longer stand to live in its boxes. I look forward to the day when psychiatric medication goes the way of lobotomy, electroshock therapy, straitjackets, and padded cells, to be followed by the demise of their kin in every realm: prisons, state surveillance, pesticides, genetic engineering, forced schooling, military occupation, confinement feedlots, the War on Drugs, economic austerity… the whole apparatus of domination and control. That is why, although it focuses on a small part of the bandwidth of suffering on this planet, A Mind of Your Own is a revolutionary book. I hope it reaches the many revolutionaries-in-the-making among the depressed, the anxious, the addicted – everyone who rebels against the story that rules our world.

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“The corollary of the derivative is the border”: Visions for the democratic control of movement

Vasilis Niaros — Wed, 18 May 2016 09:45:49 +0000

An article on openDemocracy By Max Haiven.

“All crisis phenomena have a common denominator: they reveal a general deficit of imagination. The present is being endured to the same degree as the future seems inconceivable. What will happen tomorrow with social security, education, affluence or culture? Some people bury their head in the sand of the present moment, others compensate for the missing vision with fear and aggression. Angela Merkel’s ‘we’ll make it’ doesn’t help much. It mostly means: if you can’t prevent something from happening, then just pretend you’re steering it. There are good reasons to be wary of big plans. In the past, the ones which didn’t fail made things even worse. On the other hand uncontrolled developments usually strengthen the rule of the stronger.

So how can we re-imagine the future? The Canadian thinker and activist Max Haiven has written several books on this question, among others Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed books, 2014). Now, he opens his rich tool box to focus on the movement of people, data and goods – a traffic that will not continue without control. Borders and infrastructure are the central sites for this control of movement, and therefore also crucial sites for the production of futures. How is it possible to achieve democratic oversight of borders and infrastructure? Which imperatives are required to reimagine and rebuild these sites accordingly? He explores this in cooperation with TACIT FUTURES, the 2016 programme of the Berliner Gazette.”

This essay is available here.

Photo by jennie Zed

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