Douglas Rushkoff
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the upcoming Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. His novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.
I’m honored to appear at 48:25 on Team Human episode Book Launch: A Live Team Human Conversation with Douglas Rushkoff and Seth Godin — the event where we met.
127: Douglas Rushkoff, part 1: Team Human
You’ve heard that with social media, Google, and most free services, you’re the product. The idea probably provoked thought when you heard it. Now it probably feels old, an ending point.
What if you considered it a starting point? Where does it lead? What does it tell you about yourself, society, the internet, markets, humanity?
Doug Rushkoff follows dozens of ideas like it and weaves them together into a tapestry of a new way of looking at media, individuality, advertising, algorithms, and more.
For example: the internet began as a medium to unite people. Over and over its innovations with the most promise to bring people together instead came to separate us — Google and Facebook being the biggest examples. They are now the greatest advertising media ever, increasingly getting in your business and personal life as much as you can. Their executives have to testify to Congress for undermining democracy.
How did such results happen? What do they mean? What can we do about it?
A few months ago friends started telling me to listen to Doug Rushkoff, because he talks about media like I do.
It turns out after he wrote many bestselling books and a renowned podcast, just after I heard about him, he wrote a new book, Team Human, and was speaking a few blocks away from me, introduced by his friend and guest of this podcast Seth Godin.
To prepare I listened to his podcast, which I loved, watched his TED talk, which got me thinking, and watched one of his several Frontline episodes, called Generation Like.
Seth introduced us and here’s the podcast.
I appear at 48:25 on Team Human episode Book Launch: A Live Team Human Conversation with Douglas Rushkoff and Seth Godin.
Read the transcript.