I sympathize with the systemic style of this perspective, but I think they’re looking at it the wrong way. No, we are not being attacked by nature for our sins — but this is a shared, collective illness. Covid-19 is an opportunistic infection, attacking the human organism as a whole.

I don’t look at it as a good thing — not at all — but it reminds me of how we get sick as individuals in real life. We get run down from too much work and stress. We don’t take any downtime for family and friends. We don’t have enough laughter in our lives. Or we do shift work, alternating days and nights with little regard for our biological clocks. We start drinking coffee or taking speed to keep going and then more medicine to deal with the depression.

We get the warnings: bad sleep, bad moods, and bad sex. We experience less satisfaction in general; our relationships decline. Then our body tries to warn us, too: We start feeling run down and get headaches that Advil won’t take away. Then something else stressful hits, and bam, we get sick. Does that mean germs and viruses aren’t real? That illness is entirely psychosomatic? Of course not. But the bacteria or virus is just the figure. It’s always there — or something like it is—ready to take advantage.

More important, though, surrendering to illness is our body’s last-gasp effort to resist the greater, environmental stresses. Getting sick is the last thing we do before either withdrawing from the stressors or collapsing altogether.

I’ve begun seeing the Covid-19 virus this way. It’s not a pretty thought, but what if this virus is our last-gasp resistance to the ravages of techno-capitalism? It’s not a good thing in itself — no. But it is addressing a real problem. Think of the virus as more like the President Trump phenomenon — an illness that reveals much bigger systemic woes and forces us to confront them. Only in this case, the virus is a weapon generated by life itself against the repression and exploitation of humanity by the market, technology, and other unchecked forces of death and destruction.

We were like a person working so hard and for so little nourishment in return that we had to take steroids to keep going. The market demanded growth from us collectively—more growth so that shareholders could passively extract more value from us. But they were taking our jobs and social safety nets away at the same time. We need to work more while earning less, patching together an income from three or four different gig jobs, each one with less support and security than the last.

This growth mandate — the one we’re supporting — has nothing to do with our survival or meeting human needs. The only ones who need the economy to keep growing—and for us to keep accelerating — are the bankers and shareholders passively extracting value from our labor, the people who are not on the ground working or creating value. But those of us on the ground have no way to push back. We have no way to slow the economy or to challenge its acceleration. China’s slaves keep making more cheap tech for America to keep deploying more surveillance and disaster capitalism.

The only way we humans could slow down the economy was to get sick. Just like the person whose body can’t take any more stress. It says “no more.” That’s what our collective body is doing. We couldn’t crash the market back in 2007, so now we are crashing ourselves.

The Chinese are in the same position. No, the transition of China from a farming nation to an urban slave metropolis didn’t work. Those colossal wet markets — where hundreds of species of living and dead animals fester all over each other and mutate new pathogens — that’s not some cultural tradition. It’s an artifact of rapid industrial expansion. And the transition of America from a worker/craftsperson economy to one of global digital extraction doesn’t work, either. It has decimated every other aspect of commerce and community. We’re dying here.

But if our conscious, political, social mechanisms are not capable of arresting this — if we can’t elect a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, develop sustainable local economies, or even bake bread profitably in a society dominated by the interests of corrupt global supply chains, then our corrective measures are going to come from somewhere else: the subconscious, like Trump. Or our biology itself, like Covid-19.

Remember when you’d get sick, and your parent or your partner would say, “You’ve been working too hard. I told you to take better care of yourself.” That’s your body revolting, saying “enough” — even if it does so in a self-destructive way. Well, in that sense, Covid-19 is our collective body saying “enough” and trying to do for us what our activism and politics and community organizing have failed to. Yes, some of us will die. That’s how desperate we’ve become. It’s a kamikaze attack of human biology against systems that threaten our very survival.

This is the intervention.

Lead Image: Lego DNA by mknowles

The post We Are Not the Virus. We Are the Kamikazes. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Will there be limits to what artificial intelligence will be able to “know” in the future?

I like Michael’s answer. It reminds me of Godel’s theorem. I have a much more pedestrian view of these things. I still think of artificial intelligence more as map than territory. So it can’t know everything without being as big as everything.

But more casually, I think you’re asking what practically won’t AI be able to know. And I think AI’s won’t know what it is like to be thinking. They’ll think or calculate, but they won’t know what it feels like to be thinking or calculating. I don’t think they’ll ever be aware. (Actually, that’s another way of saying what Michael just said.)

But that’s probably an almost religious conviction – the sort of view held by physicist Lee Smolin. I think consciousness preceded life. And I don’t think it inhabits stuff like chips in the same way it inhabits us.

I think humans are uniquely capable of embracing paradox. Of sustaining ambiguity. We even like it. We don’t need to resolve things. We can watch a David Lynch movie. AI won’t be able to know what that feels like.

How should a potential job seeker adapt oneself to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence?

Something feels a little sad to me about the idea that we should adapt ourselves to deal with AI. As if we’re optimizing humans for the digital future, instead of optimizing digital technology for the future of humanity. Screw that.

But, to your strategic point, I guess I’d suggest that we start doing what only human beings can do: empathy, compassion, nature, rapport, parenting, serving as an example. We can embody values.

We can also do what humans do, which is make nature and the world less cruel. We humans can instinctively tell right from wrong, cruel from kind. We know what pain is. We can see ourselves in someone else’s situation. We can identify.

What jobs do that?

Ultimately, I think we have to remember that jobs are not part of the human condition. Jobs are an invention of the late middle ages, when small businesses were declared illegal and replaced by chartered monopolies (porto-corporations). People were no longer allowed to be in an industry. They had to work for the king’s officially chartered friend. So instead of creating and selling value, we had to become employees of someone’s company, and sell our time. That’s when people started traveling to the cities for work, it’s when the plagues started, and it’s when the wonderful rise of the middle class was quashed by the aristocracy.

So I don’t know it’s jobs we want, anyway. We want a meaningful way to create value for one another. If AIs can do everything, fine. But they are really nowhere close. Look at how much slavery and pollution are externalized by today’s industrial processes? If we were a little bit *more* labor intensive in our soil management, we might not run out of topsoil in the next 60 years. Permaculture takes human labor. So does education – unless you’re just training people for jobs, which is never what education was supposed to be about.

How can the digital economy reward people instead of extracting their value?

The fast answer: platform cooperatives. Give workers and ownership stake.

The digital economy can distribute wealth if people own the means of production. If the drivers owned Uber, they’d be in a position to profit off their labor. Right now, they are not only driving for peanuts, but training their autonomous replacements. Their every move is recorded by machine learning programs. So they’re doing R&D for a company that will fire them.

If they owned the platform, then at least they’d continue to profit off their investment of labor.

Now, I hear a lot of folks asking, what about the investors? The people who put up the billions of dollars of investment for Uber to happen? Honestly? It didn’t cost that much. The reason why Uber has to bilk its employees (sorry, “contractors”) and hurt cities is because they need to pay back investors who are expecting much greater returns than could be delivered were Uber doing normal, appropriate business. The app is not that expensive. The lobbying of cities for legal accommodations, is, but they wouldn’t need to be paying for all that if they were good corporate citizens.

Cooperatives (read Nathan Schneider’s new book) distribute value to worker-owners, rather than extracting it from the top. And just as digital tech currently enables extraction on a scale unimaginable twenty years ago, digital tech could enable distributive enterprises on a scale unimaginable twenty years ago.

In Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, I offer “digital distributism” as the answer to our economic woes. Basically, a retrieval of medieval, p2p business practices. An economy optimized not for growth but for flow: the velocity of money through the system.

How can we best engage with people who hold opposing viewpoints?

This is a tough one, but I think we have to see them as human beings, and try to understand the fear or other emotion that is informing their position. I have a section in the book where I try to explain the emotional logic of racism – particularly of white supremacists. Or the emotional logic of former coal miners wanting to open the mines again – no matter what it means to the climate.

They’re not crazy. Or, maybe they’re a bit crazy, but they are human and coming from a recognizably human place if we try on their world view for a moment. It’s scary to do. It’s scary to realize that the American white supremacist thinks his culture – white European culture – won America. He doesn’t understand why people should be taught about ‘loser’ cultures in school – that it will only make America weaker.

Or that people really don’t see other people as human. They look at pictures of Mexican immigrants and see something less than human. But then – something unexpected happens – like when those tapes came out of the sounds of those refugee children crying – and then their impassivity is broken.

So I think the way to break through is by going deeper. It’s not logic that will arrest their intransigence. It’s human rapport. Spend time with the person. Look in their eyes. I noticed at a family holiday, that when my aunt was talking about how it’s okay to let the Syrians die, she’d always break off eye contact with me. It was as if she couldn’t be both human and inhuman at the same time. There’s a clue in there, for how to reach the “other” side. Don’t let them be the other side. Our ability to engage the other is all we really have if we want to get through.

For others, sometimes the best thing is to ignore their viewpoints. Who cares what they think? It’s what they do that matters. If we want to make “red state” people more progressive, we shouldn’t try to get them to think more progressively. Just go there, and start up some initiatives for mutual aid. Get them working again, using favor banks, credit unions, and other projects that make their own lives better by working positively for the community. Someday, they may come to realize that they are engaged in progressive, almost socialist activities.

How can we organize resistance to capitalism, technology, and fascism?

I’ve got a whole section on that in the book called Organize. I really should post highlights from it it as an excerpt, somewhere.

In short, find the others. I think it happens best locally. While resistance at scale matters, it’s really easy to fall into the same dehumanizing traps that the corporations fall into. It becomes mailing lists and website discussions ideological very quickly. Local activities – from land use and school policy to community currencies and business cooperatives – end up changing the way people think and act. Being involved directly with mutual aid or child literacy changes one’s perception of social programs and immigration.

Plus, when our activism is connected to the real world, we humans have the home field advantage. Corporations will always have the advantage in the “brand” space. Once we resort to branding for connecting to human beings, we surrender to their more propagandistic communications style and the values that go along with it.

So my main advice for organizers is to organize locally, and then network globally with other local organizers. Confront real, immediate issues. They trickle up, because the problems we’re dealing with locally are largely the results of top-down domination, laws written to protect corporations, or regulations that owe their legacies to segregation.

I’m also keen on organizing around activities, rather than ideologies. I don’t care what someone “believes in.” I care what they do. Maybe that’s some leftover Jewishness – a religion about behavior, not beliefs. But there’s some sense in this. People on the right and the left want the river clean. So let’s clean the river. I had a great talk with an in-law of mine, who is a Trump supporter but was really ticked off that the forests around his home had been clearcut. They were taken down by the landowner, because of a Virginia subsidy for renewable energy. The wood was considered renewable. Cutting down the forest was dumb and bad for the environment. My relative blamed it on the climate change enthusiasts. I’d probably blame it on corrupt or short-sighted regulation. But we agreed on the outcome, and if I lived there, we could have worked together on solutions.

Will rote jobs such as accountants and librarians be affected first by artificial intelligence?

It’s interesting, but I don’t think of accountants and librarians as having rote jobs. They may have to act like they have rote jobs. But what are accountants really for? To figure out ways to make your ledger look like it is normal and proper – but to actually find ways to hide your money from the tax man. What are librarians for? To protect the books and keep them on the shelves? No. They are there to help you figure out what you really need to know in order to accomplish a task. They are the way writers and researchers get a leg up. Make friends with a librarian, and you are almost cheating as a researcher.

So an AI accountant may not be there to create the wiggle room you need in your tax return. Especially if it’s not really yours. And an AI librarian, it may get you what you say you want, but it won’t get you what it suspects you need. It’s not on the journey with you. It’s not excited to see your eyes go wide when you see that new book for the first time.

We’ve got figure and ground reversed. None of these activities are about the pure utility value. Certainly the librarian. The librarian is there to celebrate knowledge, the dignity of learning, the passion of research. The librarian can use AI, but the AI can’t be the librarian.

So far, it’s not the rote jobs but the wealthy who are most affected by AI. They’re the ones using AIs to trade on the stock market. It’s the hedge fund guys who were first unseated by AIs, if you really want to think about it. People who are just looking for a way of gaming human systems, rather than contributing to or participating in them.

What do you think it will take for people to respect their personal privacy and human worth in the face of such seductive technology?

I often wonder that. Part of the problem is that while people are afraid to let someone else see them masturbate or eat or sleep, they don’t realize how much more dangerous it is to share seemingly meaningless meta-data. It’s not the embarrassing details of your kinks that you should be concerned about sharing. It’s the meaningless points of data that can be used by algorithms to put you in a particular statistical bucket, and then manipulate you.

Or, worse, deny your rights. In China, your social media contacts can determine your eligibility for a visa or a job. Actually, that’s becoming increasingly true in the US – whether you’re looking to be a babysitter, get a loan, or get out of prison.

As long as you’re in the majority, and don’t care about how these technologies are used against people, it may feel like none of this matters. But the minute you run afoul of the law, or lose your money to an illness, all of a sudden this data oppression starts to matter.

Right now, people are acting as if they’re in a prison camp. They accept the trinkets of their virtual keepers, in return for the souls. It’s not that they don’t value their humanity, but they’re atomized victims experiencing something like Stockholm syndrome. It may take some real tragedies for people to recognize it’s gone too far.

As for human dignity, well, capitalism did a number on that before this digital technology came around to finish the job. Marx wrote a lot about this. Technology under capitalism led us to think of ourselves in terms of our utility value. Our productive output, rather than our essential dignity.

How can we rebuild the intermediate layers of collective intelligence and avoid a hollow top and bottom-heavy social collective?

That’s interesting. I guess you mean a “momma bear” sort of right-sized collective intelligence?

My guess would be that there’s various Dunbar numbers for social organization. (Dunbar’s number is 150 – the number of stable relationships a person can maintain). There are likely various levels of social organization that function if they’re formulated properly. So maybe we individuals organize into groups of 150, and then 150 of those can network into something else.

In Team Human, I also make a strong case for cities. There’s also a piece I did about cities vs. nation states on Medium. I understand cities as the largest ‘organic’ organization of people. They form from the bottom up, but they can serve as a pretty robust and populous layer of collective intelligence. Or at least collective interest and organization.

Additionally, collective intelligence doesn’t just move through space, but through time. Works the Torah, mathematics, and cathedrals are multi-generational projects. The collective intelligences may be small at each moment, but scale up over the centuries.

But yeah, I guess my answer is that collective intelligences are somewhat fractal, with little parts coordinating into a whole. More of a federated model, with distributed autonomy. I don’t know that individuals ever really experience themselves as part of a collective intelligence. At least not at this stage of human evolution. But I do know what it’s like to see oneself as part of a collective project.

The protocols for interaction really mean a lot. I look to organizations like Loomio, which coordinate group activity, for learnings about how to think with different size groups.

Will “platform economies” benefit cooperatist movements or be appropriated to corporatism?

Well, so far most of the big platforms are monopolies, not coops. Amazon, Facebook, Google…. And in those cases, only Google’s employees seem willing to push back on the company’s policies. By their very nature, digital platforms seem biased toward non-human entities like corporations over local, flesh-and-blood entities.

It’s hard to tell, though. In the early internet days, it felt just the opposite. These platforms were so intrinsically unfriendly to business. Most businesses eschewed the net: everyone wanted everything for free. People were sharing. It seemed to herald the end of corporatism. But of course, Barlow and other well-meaning libertarians pushed government and regulation off the net, and the large corporate players walked into the vacuum.

So the net we have now is populated and dominated by these super capital-intensive projects, and they’ve gathered enough users to become entrenched monopolies.

That said, anybody could build a Facebook or Uber today, with an almost trivial effort. None of this is as hard as it was back then. They couldn’t build an Amazon, because they have a whole lot of real-world infrastructure at this point. They’re like WalMart and UPS (logistics) in one company. Plus the could services.

Platform economies tend to favor those who scale, and scale almost infinitely. But so do growth-based capitalism, an interest-bearing currency, and an investor-rewarding tax structure. So I do see ways that platform economics can favor cooperatives, but those choosing to use digital platforms should really make sure they need them to organize their collectives. Or they at least need to organize along the principles of distributism – more like an anarcho-syndicalist network than a corporation. More like Ace hardware or Associated Press.

Are we in the midst of a cultural renaissance? How is that different from a digital revolution?

Oh, a revolution is just a turn of the cycle. One set of rulers is replaced by another. Bankers get replaced by crypto hackers or something. Rockefeller replaced by Gates. Gates by Zuckerberg. The US government by Trump.

Re-naissance means rebirth. A renaissance is the rebirth of old values in a new context. So the original Renaissance brought forward the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome – citizenship, individuality, centrality of the government, Empire. Our renaissance, the digital renaissance, has retrieved what got repressed the last time out: peer-to-peer economics, women, holism. It’s part of why we’re seeing all this medievalism. That’s the moment before the renaissance.

I think a renaissance is more hopeful, because it offers us the opportunity to retrieve essential human values, and then embed them in the digital future. It’s not simply about one kind of company ‘disrupting’ another. The game doesn’t change in that case. A renaissance changes the whole playing field.

Is it necessary to have a content creation platform in 2019?

I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking. You mean, necessary for humanity or necessary for individuals?

I’m using Medium these days as my content creation platform, and I’m glad to have a “place” where people gather to read and write and share and comment and cross-references. I like it better than I liked having my own website and then being on various people’s blog rolls. As long as Evan Williams stays on the writers’ side of the equation, it seems like a good thing. He’s even experimenting with a paywall where writers share what they’ve earned based on views and “claps.” A bit like a commons. And because it’s ad-free (and will hopefully stay that way!) it’s not subject to the same problems as a GoogleAds or Facebook.

When I first read the question, though, I thought maybe you were referring to WordPress and other content management systems through which to create writing and posts. I am still a fan of the “open web” and just serving html pages to people. But thats’ probably a sign of age. The dynamic rendering you can do effortlessly on a CMS are pretty useful – so your content will work on a phone or web browser. You don’t have to test your content on every device and browser. Who really wants to do that if they’re just making videos or writing articles? We don’t each have to know how to do everything in the process.

But it does require we *trust* the people creating the layer on which we’re publishing. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t.

Finally, if you mean, does *everybody* need to be on a content creation platform of some kind? No. Not everyone needs to be a content creator. It used to be very few of us that wrote books – partly because it involved typing and a lot of work. It’s a whole lot easier to “publish” right now. But that doesn’t mean everyone should. There are many many other ways to participate meaningfully in society.

That’s part of why I’ve started thinking of Team Human as my last book. I am interested to see how else I can play – and I want get off the stage and let others get their work out there. Even the Team Human podcast is really about me using the platform I’ve developed to support the work of others.

What are the main absences in the “sociological imagination” of contemporary society?

I know people have a lot of definitions for “sociological imagination.” For me, it’s simply the way in which a person conceives of the relationship between individuals, each other, and society as a whole.

Right now, the issue I’m seeing – even from some intellectuals – is the inability to distinguish between human dignity and personal freedom. We’ve reached the zenith of individuality, and have come to imagine universal liberty as some expression of this individual liberty.

Even Constitutionally, I think it leaves out the right of assembly. That’s the First Amendment right that all these individuals have: to gather! Our current sociological imagination seems to miss that individuality and collectivism are not mutually exclusive. They’re more like yin and yang than either/or. The true expression of an individual occurs in a group. The true collective enhances the power or reach of all the individuals in it.

So I think the sociological imagination of today is confused about society itself. They’re still stuck in Maggie Thatcher’s rhetorical flourish, “there is no such thing as society.” which she didn’t even really mean that way. She was trying to adapt Hayek, and say that society is the reconciliation of a zillion bottom-up desires. More of a perfect, invisible hand, emergent market phenomenon. I don’t quite buy that, but at least she’s admitting that there’s a coordinated whole.

At my town’s meetings, I’ve heard people get up and ask, “why do we have to pay school tax if we no longer have kids in school?” Stuff like that. That’s a lack of sociological imagination. That’s part of why I wrote Team Human: to help people remember that being human is a group activity.

What is right and what is wrong for the world today?

Right and wrong? Them’s fightin’ words!

I’m reluctant to moralize, but whatever brings us together is right, whatever separates us is wrong. Yes, we’re entitled to private email and bathroom stalls, so I don’t mean to get all extreme. There’s room for both.

But when I look at right and wrong for the world today, I see people retreating from true connection with others. They do this either through strident individualism, or total conformity. It’s easy to see how individualism is a problem. And how algorithms further atomize us. We are easier targets when we’re picked off from the herd. When we have no social relationships, and look to products or ‘non-player characters’ for a feeling of satisfaction.

Totally conformist mobs – like the crowds at a fascist rally or the silent workers in a giant factory – they’re not really together, either. They’re under one banner, but each one has their own relationship to the leader or to the company. They’re not a labor union or a guild. They’re not a team working together. They’re just as atomized, afraid to speak to one another or share their doubts. They may march in lockstep, but they’re not together.

So right now, as a result of consumerism, social media, political divisiveness, and mass social programming designed to alienate us, the main “good” we can do is to help people see other people as humans. Even if they’re on the other side of some fence. Getting us to see others as “other” is an old trick. It’s what the lords and kings used to do to get peasants to fight against one another. It’s what earned them fealty.

Whenever you hear a leader telling you that the other side are rapists or cannibals, remember that it’s not really true. That’s a wrong thing for the world, today. The right thing is saying, “look at those people over there. They are just like us. These national boundaries we protect are not recognized by nature or humanity. We’re all one family. Their suffering is our suffering.”

Will Elon Musk be comfortable staying on the moon?

He will die up there if he goes. You know how hard it is to maintain a biosphere in a dome? We couldn’t even do it on earth, with two Biosphere attempts. I think a sustainable closed-terrarium for humans on inhospitable planets is a long way off – even longer than Musk’s extended life span.

Photo by gojogoj

The post A Q&A Session with Douglas Ruskhkoff appeared first on P2P Foundation.

My new book Team Human, launches today.  I’ve never written to everyone in my address book before, but this is by far the most important publication of my career: a manifesto arguing for human dignity and prosperity in a digital age.

Autonomous technologies, runaway markets and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. Yet the root causes for our collective disempowerment are based on some very old, false ideas about competition, individuality, scarcity, and progress. We needn’t embed these values in the digital landscape of tomorrow. They are obsolete. We must stop optimizing human beings for technology, and start optimizing technology for us.

It’s time we reassert the human agenda. And we must do so together – not as individual players  – but as the team we actually are. Team Human.

I would be grateful if you purchase this book, which also supports the Team Human podcast.

Video republished from Ted.com

The post How to be “Team Human” in the digital future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth. Find the book here.

Endorsements and Reviews

“Original and uplifting. Just the book America needs right now. In his unique and engaging style, Rushkoff reminds us of our human essence: we are social creatures, and if we trust this truth about ourselves we can accomplish the seemingly impossible.” — Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and Daring Democracy

“Rushkoff is the gold standard. He always knows what tech is up to—and he’s usually prophetic. Now he’s here to tell us how our Silicon masters are attempting to pit us against one another for their own gain. Go Team Human.” — Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out and Up in the Air

“A vivid thinker, Rushkoff is an insightful and acerbic antidote to Facebook, cultural hegemony, and the corporatization of everything.” — Seth Godin, bestselling author of The Dip, Linchpin, and What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn)

“Can the revolution start already? This book will help us. Thank God for Douglas Rushkoff.” — Parker Posey

“Technology can be a force for good or amplify our self-destructive capacities. In Team Human, the always-brilliant Douglas Rushkoff reminds us that the tools we design design us in turn, and offers a vision to invert our tools and make them better.” — Jason Silva, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games

“An astonishing, paradigm-shifting must-read for all inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Precisely and cogently written. Rushkoff’s best work so far.” — Grant Morrison

“A searing critique…Visionary, original, and inspirational. If you’re not already a member of Team Human, you will be once you’ve finished reading it.” — Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct

“[A] catalyst for conversations on what it means to be human.” — Booklist

The post Book of the Day: Team Human appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About Team Human

A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson

Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.

In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth.

Sourced from Amazon’s book description

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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!

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Photo by ashokboghani

The post Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human today, recorded live on the floor at the Personal Democracy Forum 2018, are Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff. Moira and Ben will be showing us how the tech industry’s promise to build less harmful products and programs is just capitalism’s way of proving that love means never having to say, “I’m sorry.”

Moira and Ben co-wrote the brilliant feature article in the Guardian, “Why Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Itself”

Just last week, Ben’s exposé and interview with an anonymous worker/organizer at Google revealed the internal fight led by workers against Google’s contracting with the Pentagon on Project Maven, a weaponized use of Google’s AI and cloud computing technology. The interview, published June 6th, can be found at Jacobin magazine: Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.

Ben’s articles in the Guardian and Jacobin have been disrupting tech industry gospel for the past decade. He is also the author of The Bohemians.

Moira Weigel is a postdoc at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her recent book Labor of Love; The Invention of Dating looks at the commodification of courtship under consumer capitalism.

Moira and Ben are editors of Logic, a print and digital magazine which features thought provoking journalism on technology. Like Team Human, Logic strives to host a “better conversation” about technology… learn more and subscribe here: https://logicmag.io/

Douglas opens the show with a monologue unpacking the bizarre news of the past week; G7, trade wars, and North Korea.

On today’s show you heard intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord records, R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time, and a Team Human original by Stephen Bartolomei.

You can sustain this show via Patreon. And please leave us a review on iTunes

Cross posted from Teamhuman.fm

Photo by hellocatfood

The post Team Human: Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff “Humane Tech or Capitalism Rebranded?” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle’s narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn’t just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero’s solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep – the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths – but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimately destructive?

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea – say, that agriculture was a wrong turn – and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story.

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment – imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way – not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths – if that’s our nature – then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story – and sharing one’s own – but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it’s more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it’s for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making – and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do – without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people’s myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all? Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice.

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen.

Photo by giveawayboy

The post Do we need a new myth, or no myth? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human today are Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen from the Small Planet Institute. Lappé and Eichen are out on the road with a mission to reinvigorate “civic courage” and inclusive participation in democracy. Their latest book Daring Democracy Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want offers a diagnosis of what has come to ail our democracy and recommends the necessary cures, offering concrete examples of ballot initiatives, reforms, and collective organizing happening across the country. Counter to a despairing narrative on the current state of democracy in the U.S., Lappé and Eichen argue that people are indeed rising to take the reigns. Inspired by examples of deep organizing and the convergence of movements in places such as Democracy Spring, Democracy Awakening, and Occupy Wall Street, Lappé and Eichen see power shifting back into the people’s hands. Their analysis of how we got to where we are, coupled with their passion and optimism for change, is both contagious and empowering. In this Team Human conversation, Lappé and Eichen join Douglas to make a case for hope, courage, and optimism in this moment of turmoil and division.

Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue on the theme of democracy inspired by this conversation. Though it may have been easy to have lost faith in democracy after the 2016 election, perhaps election day is the wrong place to look if we really see democracy in action. It’s a monologue that asks: where does democracy begin for team human?… and lucky for us, today’s guests Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen are ready with the answer.

This episode was made possible thanks to listener support. If you enjoy this show, consider subscribing via Patreon. There you’ll find subscriber rewards and the opportunity to connect with other listeners through the Team Human Slack Channel.

Also, if you enjoy this show and want to spread the word, please review Team Human on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform.

Democracy Spring Photo By Michele Egan (alsacienne from Washington, USA) (Democracy Spring “Elders” edition) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Team Human: Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen “The Thrill of Democracy” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human is systems thinker, currency designer, and social hacker Arthur Brock. Art joins Douglas to talk about how currency is less a thing you own and more a way of sharing. It’s a conversation that poses a crucial question of both money and cryptocurrencies alike–how might we design new exchanges that embody values of social and environmental betterment, rather than extraction and exploitation?

Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue about Instagram’s recent addition of an algorithm that removes mean comments from users’ threads. While on the surface the idea appears to be an attempt by Instagram to quell trolling, Rushkoff questions both the means and intentions. Is Instagram merely building an algorithmically programmed version of “see no evil, hear no evil”… or worse?

Team Human is produced each week thanks to listener subscriptions. Join us on patreon at patreon.com/teamhuman. There you’ll find a variety of subscription levels with exclusive patron rewards.

The music you heard on this show is thanks to the generosity of Mike Watt, R.U. Sirius, Josh Sitronand the Team Human band, and Fugazi.

Photo of Art by Twah Doughtery

Slider Photo: Igor Ovsyannykov

The post Team Human: Arthur Brock Reclaims Currency appeared first on P2P Foundation.