“The moment we stop optimizing the digital economy for the growth of capital, and optimize it for the circulation of value between people, everything will start to get better really fast.”

Another eye-opening interview with our friend Douglas Rushkoff. This one was conducted by Jesse Hicks and originally published at The Kernell.

For more than two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has provided incisive commentary on our increasingly connected, digitized, and corporatized world. From Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace to Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back to his newest, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, he’s chronicled both the promise and the peril of of a global society being remade by the Internet and high-tech corporations.

In his new work he argues that, appearances to the contrary, today’s online colossi—think Facebook, Google, Apple, and the like—haven’t truly revolutionized our economy. Instead, they’ve reproduced the Industrial Age corporation at a global scale, with all the benefits of digital innovation. At heart, though, they’re still designed to extract value and to pursue growth above all else. That mission, he argues, is becoming increasingly untenable, and for perhaps the first time there’s an alternative: companies that leverage technology to spread abundance rather than hoard wealth to themselves. But making that happen first requires rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what corporations do—and why they exist.

Via email just prior to his book launch at SXSW, we discussed why our global economy is stuck in an Industrial Age mindset, why Wall Street considers Twitter a failure, and why Silicon Valley needs to start building companies that aren’t just meant to be sold for a healthy return on investment.

What made you write a book about the failings of the digital economy?

I got the idea the day that Twitter went public, when I saw my friend, one of the co-founders, on the cover of the Wall Street Journal with the number of billions he made that day. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sorry for him. Yes, he was rich, and he had disrupted the communications industry—but he was surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry on the block: finance.

Worse, Twitter would have to somehow deliver impossible returns to its new investors. They were demanding growth. So even today, Twitter—which earns half a billion dollars a quarter—is considered an abject failure by Wall Street.

Worst of all, this obligation to grow has turned otherwise promising companies into extractive monopolies. In order to grow, they use scorched-earth practices that take value from people and places and turn it into capital for their shareholders. This growth mandate is cause for the increasing disparity of wealth, and it has been energized and accelerated by digital technology. Digital technology was supposed to distribute this wealth to more people, not impoverish the many for the wealth of a few.

The main target of your critique is what you call “the growth trap.” Since at least the birth of the corporation, you argue, our economic thinking has been dominated by an unrelenting drive for growth: Companies have to continue to extract more and more value in order to be seen as successful. You suggest that we’ve reached a point where this is no longer tenable—and that digital technology in particular can enable a new way of thinking. Can you explain the growth trap and how it undergirds our current thinking?

Well, it takes a whole book to explain this properly, because the requirement for companies to grow really traces all the way back to the institution of interest-bearing currency, which requires that the economy grow in order for that interest to be paid back.

Today, the equivalent of those bankers are shareholders. They expect not just interest, but tremendous returns on their initial investments. They witnessed the success of Facebook and Google and want those sorts of returns, too. So they put money into a company like Twitter, and then expect to earn back 100 or 1,000 times on their original investment. The fact that Twitter makes 500 million dollars a quarter is considered an abject failure by the investors. And so Twitter must look for some way to “pivot”—that is, change from a super successful company that lets people send 140-character messages, into something else.

Regular companies are in the same position. Pepsi, McDonald’s, Exxon all have shareholders who demand that the share price go up—that the company grow. And the bigger these companies get, the harder it is for them to grow. They are already worth billions of dollars. In fact, corporate profits over total value have been declining for over 75 years.

The CEOs of these companies read my articles about getting out of the growth trap, and they call me begging for the way out. They all know they can’t keep growing at the rate demanded by their shareholders. They can fake it a while, but in the end, these scorched-earth policies just kill the markets and consumers on which they’re depending. Well, in the real end, they end up extracting all the value out of people and places until there’s nothing left.

Growth depends on expansion. Not just that, but on accelerating expansion. You have to grow faster and faster. And it’s just not possible for companies of this size to do that. They must instead learn to pay shareholders with dividends. Run themselves like family businesses, for the long term.

You noted that at the beginning of the Net, there were serious and deeply felt expectations that it might not become, as you’ve characterized it, a strip mall. Today we have “social media” that basically recruits people to become marketers to their friends, and a “sharing economy” driven by the idea that if you’re not monetizing every bit of your time, you’re wasting it. Does it feel different this time—that this time there might be a role for the Net to play in genuinely reimagining our economic world?

Well, the thing that feels different to me is that pretty much everyone sees that it’s not sustainable. How can everyone get paid to advertise? What’s left to advertise? Marketing has never ever accounted for more than 3 or 4 percent of GDP. And now it’s supposed to be our main industry? That, and finance? They’re both abstractions. When we see a company as successful as Twitter failing, we come to understand that the model itself is broken.

As for “sharing,” Uber drivers taught us that this is a crock. The unemployed gig drivers of Uber are now as smart about labor politics as the cabbies from London. Uber’s monopoly and policies have been rendered so transparent.

And yes, while I’m not a techno-solutionist, I do believe that networking technologies could enable much more distributed prosperity. The digital economy, so far, is just corporate industrialism on steroids: extract value from people and places. Digital companies are like software programmed to take currency out of circulation, and deliver it up to shareholders. They could just as easily—more easily, in fact—be optimized to promote the circulation of currency. Most simply stated, less like Amazon, more like eBay. It’s as simple as letting Uber drivers have shares in the company, proportionate to the amount of work they’ve done. And that would be pretty easy to calculate and authenticate with something like a blockchain. Networking technologies are biased toward more distributed solutions. That’s what they were originally built for.

But the real problem here is that our technology development is driven solely by the needs of capital.

The book’s title comes from an incident in which protesters in Oakland, frustrated by the way Silicon Valley companies are remaking the social fabric of San Francisco, threw rocks at the private buses that ferry Google employees to work. What did that event clarify for you, and why do you think those rocks were aimed in the wrong direction?

I don’t know that rocks needed to be thrown in any direction. Not just yet. The original protests did not involve rocks, and were entirely well-founded. Still are. Google and other Silicon Valley companies are behaving like foreign corporations. Workers move into SF, impacting rents, driving local businesses out of the neighborhood. Then they use public bus stops to take private buses to workplaces outside the city.

“The whole ‘startup’ process is really just the old wine of venture capital in a new digital bottle. These companies are built to be sold.”

And this crisis of poor wealth distribution is both real and symbolic of a bigger disappointment we all have with the poorly distributed gains of the digital economic boom. I try not to blame individuals for this—as if there are some mean people making this happen. They’re not mean so much as clueless. They have built very disruptive—positively disruptive— businesses, but haven’t disrupted the economic operating system on which they are operating. They are not truly digital companies so much as industrial companies running on digital steroids.

You point to the popularity of books such as The Second Machine Age as evidence that despite being in an entirely new economic environment, we’re still saddled with thinking from the Industrial Age. Why is that the case, and what’s the new kind of thinking that we ought to be embracing?

It’s only natural for our first response to be reactionary. Most books on how to thrive in a new economy are really about how to maintain a traditional industrial corporation. The whole “startup” process is really just the old wine of venture capital in a new digital bottle. These companies are built to be sold. And their revenue, when they even have it, is based on the company’s ability to extract value—not their ability to create it.

Where do we look for hope that we can shake off dead ideas and adapt to the new environment we’re in the process of creating?

We look for hope right there in the despair. Every person who can’t get a job at a big corporation is another person who gets to figure out how to create and exchange value in the real world. Every person who can’t get a loan is another person willing to consider how alternative currencies, favor banks, and the commons work. Every town whose economy has been trashed by a corporation is another community about to learn that the only things you need for a thriving economy are people with skills and people with needs.

The moment we stop optimizing the digital economy for the growth of capital, and optimize it for the circulation of value between people, everything will start to get better really fast.

Illustration via Max Fleishman

– See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/15982/douglas-rushkoff-throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus-interview/?curator=MediaREDEF#sthash.fn9gVnLQ.dpuf

Photo by designbyfront

The post Douglas Rushkoff’s vision for a new, better world appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I’m less frustrated by people’s blindness to the problem than I am to their blindness to the solutions – by how easy it is to develop local currencies, to use alternative websites, to do simple investments in their communities rather than in far-flung mining companies. People don’t realise how much power they have. And that’s partly because the real world has been dwarfed by this digital simulacra which seems much more important than our reality but it’s not – it needs to be in service of our reality.”

Our frequent collaborator Douglas Rushkoff was recently interviewed in the Guardian by Ian Tucker. Rushkoff says: “This is a pretty good new interview about the upcoming book, and a good excuse for me to say the time has come: please support Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by pre-ordering through your favorite bookseller or Amazon.” The full interview is reproduced below.

Douglas Rushkoff emerged as a media commentator in 1994 with his first book, Cyberia. His debut examined “the early psychedelic, rave roots of digital technology. I was trying to infer what a digital society might be like given the beliefs of these people,” he tells me during a phone interview from his home in Hastings on Hudson, New York.

He has published 10 books detailing an increasingly fierce critique of digital society. Along the way Rushkoff has coined terms that have slipped into the lexicon such as “digital natives”, “social currency” and “viral media”. He has also made several documentaries and written novels both graphic and regular; consulted for organisations from the UN to the US government and composed music with Genesis P-Orridge. In 2013 MIT named him the sixth most influential thinker in the world, sandwiched between Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson.

His latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, is published by Portfolio Penguin on 3 March.

Was this a topic for this book something you’d been pondering for a while or was this book inspired by the Google bus protests in San Francisco?

Actually the germ of the idea was when in 2000 AOL announced they were buying Time Warner, which was a huge deal. It was the moment where I realised that digital businesses were not disrupting the underlying operating system of traditional corporate capitalism. The question I had been asking myself before that point was: will digital media ‘networkise’ capitalism or will capitalism commodify and destroy the internet? Initially, with people like Howard Rheingold and Stewart Brand the internet promised a retrieval of a 60s hippy communal approach to the world.

What do you find most objectionable about the kind of economy that technology appears to create?

What’s most pernicious about it is that we are developing companies that are designed to do little more than take money out of the system – they are all extractive. There’s this universal assumption that we have to turn working currency into share price.

You call this the “growth trap”?

The growth trap is the assumption of business that growth and health are the same thing – and I understand how they got back that way – that when you have a debt-based monetary system it has to pay back to the central banks more than was borrowed and that requires growth. So if you have a currency that requires growth in order to have value you’re going to have all these businesses biased towards growth rather than everything else.

For example?

Uber has nothing to do with helping people get rides in towns. Uber is a business plan. It’s a platform monopoly getting ready to leverage that monopoly into another vertical whether it be delivery, drones or logistics. The prosperity of all the people who used to be in the cabbie industry ends up sacrificed to the growth of this company. Corporations are like these obese people, they suck money out of our economy and store it in the fat of share price. That’s not business, that’s value extraction. They take all the chips off the board.

You’re an advocate of local currencies and bartering. Do you see “sharing economy” platforms such as Airbnb as their internet manifestation?

Yes and no. Initially they seemed to be leaning in the right direction, they appeared to be encouraging peer-to-peer exchange. Which is what we need the ability to do – I want to buy from you, you want to sell to me but without some big corporation being involved. The real problem is they end up taking too much venture capital and then the money people say you’ve got to extract more from that transaction – you can’t just take 5% for your little app, you should be taking half. So the young developer is forced to pivot from whatever the original idea was to become a monopoly that allows the company to reach a sellable event – an IPO or an acquisition – in order for the original investors to get 100 times their initial investment. Anything less than that is a loss for them, they need a home run.

Douglas Rushkoff speaks at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Alamy

You left Facebook in 2013. How is that working out for you? 

Professionally, I’m thinking it may be good for one’s career and business to be off social media altogether. Chris Anderson was wrong. “Free” doesn’t lead to anything but more free. Working for free isn’t leverage to do a talk for loads of money; now they even want you to talk for free. What am I supposed to do? Join YouTube and get three cents for every 100,000 views of my video? That is crap; that is insane!

So business-wise I’m thinking that every time I post an article summarising what my book is about I’m hurting the sales and I end up delivering my ideas in a piecemeal, context-less fashion which ends up communicating less. And it makes my ideas much more easily applied for evil by corporations. That’s the lesson I should have learned in 1994 when I published Media Virus and my concept got turned into “viral marketing”, which took a slither of an idea and used it for pernicious applications.

I hope you don’t regard this interview as part of that process.

Not at all, but if I write a piece for someone, they ask: “Are you gonna tweet it? Facebook it? Are you going put it on your blog? Are you RSSing that blog? Do you have a newsletter?” Oh my God, I became an author to sit alone and write ideas. It used to be when you finished a book it would be a celebration. Now it’s when the work starts. It’s torture.

You’re an established writer, but social media can be useful to someone just starting out.

Maybe I’m unfair. I’m sure there is a way of using Facebook as a ladder to get to somewhere else. But also knowing what Facebook does behind the scenes, I thought it was bad digital hygiene to encourage people to “like” me and make them more vulnerable to nasty things.

What kind of nasty things?

They’ll get marketed to. Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to. I didn’t want Facebook to advertise something through me as an influencer where my every act becomes grist to marketing.

Do you ever feel like you’re shouting into the abyss? Most people are relaxed about the levels of surveillance and tracking that happen on the internet. They enjoy and use the services too much to care …

I’m less frustrated by people’s blindness to the problem than I am to their blindness to the solutions – by how easy it is to develop local currencies, to use alternative websites, to do simple investments in their communities rather than in far-flung mining companies. People don’t realise how much power they have. And that’s partly because the real world has been dwarfed by this digital simulacra which seems much more important than our reality but it’s not – it needs to be in service of our reality.

Is it true that in the early 90s your publishers cancelled your first book Cyberia because they thought the internet wouldn’t last?

I finished it in 1992 but the publisher believed the net would be over by 1993 so they cancelled it. So I sold it to HarperCollins – a Rupert Murdoch imprint, so I took a whole load of grief from my leftie friends.

You’ve been credited with coining the term “digital natives” – saying they are better equipped to navigate the current landscape. Is it not harder for them since they don’t have an experience of anything pre-Google, pre-smartphone etc?

Originally I thought they could navigate it better and my generation were the immigrants. I think they have more facility with these networks and platforms as they are designed but they have less insight that they are designed environments. They don’t see how they are tilted towards extracting value from them. They could benefit from engaging with those of us that saw how those networks were put together. That’s why I wrote the book Program or Be Programmed – if you don’t know what a piece of software is for, the chances are you are being used by it.

Do you still advocate taking a digital sabbath?

I came up with this thing which I now don’t like: the digital sabbath. It feels a little forced and arbitrary, and it frames digital detox as a deprivation. I would much rather help people learn to value looking into other people’s eyes. To sit in a room talking to people – I want people to value that, not because they aren’t being interrupted by digital media but because it’s valuable in its own right.

Lead image by Seth Kushner, from his e-comic with Douglas Rushkoff Taking Back the World

The post Douglas Rushkoff on the Malfunctioning Tech Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The interviewer, seemingly a little bemused by Rushkoff’s (to him) radical proposition that creating ‘jobs’ in and of themselves, might not be the answer to all America’s problems, falls back on the old ‘isn’t this all a bit simplistic?’ line of questioning – often used by embedded mainstream journalists to muddy the waters and suggest that things might not be as straightforward as is being proposed by the interviewee. I seem to remember a great deal of that kind of criticism aimed at the Occupy movement – ‘too simplistic, too naive’. When we see where the ever-increasing complexity of financial derivatives and company law is leading us, I feel inclined to suggest that a little more simplicity might be in order. Rushkoff is of course equal to the questioning and it makes for a fascinating interview.

The post Does America Really Need More Jobs? Video with Douglas Rushkoff appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — the annual opportunity for the President to engage directly, and humorously, with reporters who cover him — it was expected that most of the jibes would be aimed at Barack Obama. Sure, he gets the chance to defend himself, but it’s pretty much a roast: A leading comedian is invited every year to make jokes, while the commander in chief tries to laugh instead of squirm.

Maybe that’s why I was so jolted when this year’s headliner, comedian Joel McHale of TV’s “The Soup,” took such a hard swipe at Google. “America still has amazing technological innovations. Google Glass has hit the markets. Now, just by walking down the street, we’ll know exactly who to punch in the face.”

It got a pretty good laugh — perhaps because both the press and the politicians in the room were relieved to have been spared for at least one joke. But the violence of the imagery, and the intensity of the rage that it expressed, gave me serious pause: Are we in the midst of a new kind of tech industry backlash? And is it for something these companies are actually doing, or have they simply lost control of the technology story?

This is more than the traditional sort of commentary and critique of a new form of culture that we’ve seen waged against everything from television advertising or fashion iconography in the past.

When the artists called Like4Real rebel against the ubiquity of the Facebook “Like” by holding a funeral for the thumbs-up symbol, it comments effectively, if acerbically, on the changing nature of social relationships in a commercial space. Meanwhile, artists from KillYourPhone.com are encouraging people to make special pouches for cell phones and PDAs, which prevent them from receiving signals. Again — agree with them or not about the need for an occasional digital detox — it’s clever, provocative and memorable satire.

But the notion, even expressed jokingly, of punching people in the face for wearing Google Glass — as if the device somehow signals a traitor to the cause of humanity — pushes things over the top. Yes, we can all imagine how people wearing an augmented reality device might be annoying: They can surf the Web while pretending to converse with us or, worse, record us when we don’t know it. No sooner had the very first prototypes been spotted last year than TechCrunch reported a new, purely apprehensive moniker for its wearers: Glassholes. But it’s as if the public is now being primed to go after early adopters — almost to a point where one might be reluctant to put on the device.

Are technology companies such as Google shouldering the blame for too much? It seems as if they are bearing responsibility not only for people’s fears about the future of technology but the excesses of corporate capitalism.

Consider the hullabaloo now centered on the buses that convey Google employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. This winter, protesters waylaid one of the Google shuttles, going so far as to hurl a brick through one of its windows in protest of what they see as the tech giant’s gentrifying influence on the city. When San Francisco introduced the new Muni 83X bus line, locals were quick to point out that its sparsely utilized buses run suspiciously close to Twitter headquarters. More protests, and more vitriol ensued.

Of course, in reality, Google’s buses spare the highway a whole lot of traffic, and the atmosphere from countless tons of carbon emissions from what would otherwise be an extra few thousand cars on the highways every day. And suspicions about local government adding commuter lines to accommodate Twitter appear to be unfounded.

The deeper angst in San Francisco appears to be over the way each new tech initial public offering creates another few thousand millionaires who want to buy apartments, jacking up the real estate prices for everyone else. But even this local economics issue seems unlikely to be motivating such widespread disdain for tech business. Besides, there are a number of corporations with much worse records of displacing locals or hurting business than the new tech giants.

No, I think the reason these young corporations are getting so much pushback is that they were once seen as the upstarts — as the companies on the people’s side of things. Digital technology was supposed to disrupt business as usual, create new opportunities for both self-expression and small business, and — perhaps most of all — change the very nature of the corporation and its relationship to real people and places. They’re being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations.

Now that these little garage businesses are some of the biggest companies in the world, it’s a whole lot harder for them to exhibit the qualities that once made them the darlings of the culture and counterculture alike. Yes, digital companies are being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations. But this is largely because we all understand that they are building the infrastructure in which our economics, culture and perhaps even a whole lot of human consciousness will take place.

That’s why they have to pay more attention to communicating their intentions than might otherwise seem justified. Steve Jobs was famous for keeping great secrets, but Apple is largely a consumer electronics firm. We like being surprised about the features on our next phone.

A company such as Google can’t be as secretive when it purchases a military robotics firm. Without clear messaging about the reasons for such acquisitions, the public mind reels, particularly in the wake of National Security Agency disclosures, jobs lost to automation and movies from “Her” to “Transcendence.”

Instead of balking at our widespread suspicions, the leaders of Silicon Valley must begin communicating honestly and effectively about what they hope and dream for. If people are scared of Google’s Glass, of Facebook’s purchase of a virtual reality company or of Twitter’s use of big data, then it’s up to those companies to explain loud and clear how these developments will serve us all.

For once, protecting strategy secrets has to take a back seat to clear communications. If these companies really are building the world we’re all going to be living in, they have to let us in on their plans. Otherwise, we’re going to feel like we’ve been left off the bus.

The post Rushkoff: “Punching nerds in the face is never a good thing” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s a blast to be on Rushkoff’s mailing list. After his much-publicised abandonment of Facebook, he created this list “…to keep people aware of my latest writing, upcoming appearances, and as-yet-unpublished pieces. It’s the easiest way for me to reach you directly, without social network filters, advertisements, or editorial interference. ”  It works pretty well. There you are, looking at your inbox, and, Bam! Along comes a note from Rushkoff. You can sign up for the mailing list on his webpage (look for “Rushkoffmail” on the right-hand column). Also, if you haven’t read Present Shock yet, I heartily recommend that you do.

He’s give us permission to repost his mailing lists missives, so here goes the latest, related to our own critiques over the fetishization of start-up culture by the young entrepreneurs of today.

I’ve always credited ‘Beavis & Butt-head’ creator Mike Judge for bringing down MTV.

The simple cartoon, originally a short segment on late-night Liquid Television, consisted mostly of two teenage boys watching rock videos, making commentary about them, and then rejecting them: “this sucks, change it.” For me, the show was armchair media criticism – a lesson in deconstructing television. Where a rock video used to be able to lure a teenage boy with sexual imagery, it was a whole lot harder to fall into the spell with Beavis shouting “nice set!” No, it may not have been the sophisticated analysis of McLuhan, but it was at least as alienating an effect as Bertolt Brecht.

And MTV’s ratings went down, along with the ability of the network to pass off advertising as programming.

After watching Judge’s latest effort, a live-action tech industry satire on HBO called ‘Silicon Valley,’ I began to wonder if he might deflate another value-challenged culture as effectively as he took down MTV. It’s a buddy show along the lines of Entourage, except the lead is a geeky, horny developer instead of a handsome, horny movie star. But the potential brilliance of the series lies in Judge’s only slight exaggerations of the hypocrisy underlying the digital startup landscape: these are people claiming to be saving the world, when they’re really just the latest generation of desperate yuppies chasing capital and, in turn, reinforcing Wall Street’s monopoly over our society. Digital business is revolutionary only in the way it camouflages business as usual.

And while I’m pondering all this, the NASDAQ stock exchange has its worst decline since 2011 or maybe before, led down by the poster children of Silicon Valley excess: Facebook, Twitter, Tesla. Coincidence? Not really. For while there may be no direct cause and effect between the airing of a TV show and the immediate slide of the valuation of the companies satires, there is a sea change occurring.

It was significant enough for Silicon Valley hero billionaire Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and Tesla, to immediately criticize the program: “I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley. If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.” That Musk would credit Silicon Valley for Burning Man is kind of like crediting the Conquistadors for Quetzalcoatl – but that’s besides the point. What’s interesting is that he doth protest too much, which just underscores for me how important public perception is to an economic model based on hype.

Anyway, I’ll be glad to see the hype fade, as it has before, leaving those who truly love the possibilities of digital technology to keep on developing it – without the pressures of venture capital firms and their requirement to achieve spectacular results instead of good, sustainable ones.

—

That’s what I’m thinking about this weekend, and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s not something I’ve published anywhere, but may incorporate it into a future piece.

The post Douglas Rushkoff on the death of start-ups appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Douglas Rushkoff @ Code Academy

KMO welcomes Douglas Rushkoff back to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about the themes of his most recent book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens now, and between tangets related to Scientology, the IRS, Colbert Report schwag, ceremonial magick, the faded out look of rock stars who’ve had their juju drained by millions of adoring fans and the little known collapse of WTC Building 12 on 9/11, they do manage to make at least passing reference to the themes of Doug’s book. KMO ends with listener feedback on last week’s conversation with Guy McPherson and announcements about the upcoming 2013 Age of Limits gathering and an Evolver NYC event, The Singularity is Where?

Music by Mamie Minch.

The post Podcast of the Day/C-Realm: Douglas Rushkoff on… Everything! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rushkoff talks about how, while many see Occupy as dead, in fact it “has barely begun”, and that the movement will never lend itself to being described “in a 28-second commercial.”

He also speaks about social media and the special interests it serves, the lure of the Zombie apocalypse as a grasp-able concept amidst so much confusion, and the runaway impact of what we now know as capitalism and its centralised model of currency.

If Rushkoff’s latest book “Present Shock” revisits themes from his earlier works “Life Inc.” and “Program or be Programmed”, Pasternack’s interview could serve as a bridge between the latter and former.

For someone who likes to talk about the virtues of disconnecting, the media critic Douglas Rushkoff seems surprisingly always on. When I visited him at his storefront office near his home in Hastings on Hudson, New York, he was preparing to teach a new class, getting ready for a BBC interview, writing an essay, staring down a pile of articles to read, trying to figure out his new iPhone, and hurrying to finish his third book in three years – a graphic novel called ADD, which revolves around gaming culture, celebrity and the pharmaceutical industry. “It also asks the question,” he says, “what if attention deficit disorder weren’t a bug, but a feature?”
The hyper-speed, hyperlinked life is familiar ground for Rushkoff, whose first book Cyberia, made him a popular tour guide to the Internet in the early 1990s, and an early prognosticator of its radical potential. But much has changed between the awkward days of “the ’Net” – then a non-commercial collection of public networks, accessed by local ISPs – and the overloaded era of Facebook, YouTube and iPhones. If Rushkoff is well versed in the language underneath the “digital revolution,” he’s also become one of its most outspoken critics.

The post Rushkoff: "The object of the game in the 21st century is not to win but to develop a sustainable model" appeared first on P2P Foundation.