AI transcript
0:00:06 Support for this episode comes exclusively from Upwork, the world’s largest human and
0:00:10 AI-powered freelance marketplace helping businesses reimagine how work gets done.
0:00:16 Later in the show, we’ll hear from a real-life Upwork customer, a business owner who says
0:00:21 that his company would not be what it is today without the professionals he hired using Upwork.
0:00:27 You can see how Upwork is helping to reinvent work in the AI era at upwork.com slash updates.
0:00:37 Not long ago, I watched a talk by Douglas Rushkoff called Weirding the Digital.
0:00:44 It was a eulogy for the early internet and the idea that it was going to make the world smarter,
0:00:53 more open, more connected. I invited Douglas onto the show to chat about this talk and about how the
0:01:02 chaos of the early web was commodified and normified. That’s the conversation I wanted to have.
0:01:12 But what I got was so much more. More expansive, more intense, more provocative, and more fun, really.
0:01:28 Doug’s a media theorist, author, and host of the excellent podcast Team Human. But more than that,
0:01:34 he’s a keen observer of the moment with a real gift for dissecting the system that shaped society.
0:01:43 It turns out, his talk about weirding the digital wasn’t just a eulogy. It was more like a call to arms.
0:01:52 By weirding, he means rethink from top to bottom. And by the digital, he really means everything.
0:02:00 And this conversation reflects that. It is all over the place in the best sense possible.
0:02:03 And I’m excited for you to hear it.
0:02:09 Douglas Rushkoff, welcome to the show.
0:02:11 Thanks for having me.
0:02:22 So, we last spoke, as you recall, in 2019. And back then, you and I were lamenting what the internet had become.
0:02:26 I think you’d called it a vast anti-human infrastructure.
0:02:32 You talked about how we were being steamrolled by our technology, by our devices.
0:02:36 How are you feeling now, in 2025?
0:02:40 The same? Better?
0:02:42 A new hope.
0:02:46 Say more.
0:02:52 I feel like there’s a new window of opportunity.
0:03:05 You know, the early cyberdelic, cyberpunk, West Coast, rave-fueled
0:03:08 moment
0:03:12 of the early 90s.
0:03:16 You know, this was a moment of tremendous opportunity.
0:03:22 The kinds of conversations we were having on the well, which was this bulletin board, on Usenet.
0:03:37 The ways that the early net pioneers were envisioning using these technologies to unleash a new collective spirit of creativity was tremendous.
0:03:50 Short-lived, because the machines were very rapidly turned against us by industry in order to extend and amplify the industrial age, right?
0:03:57 Instead of giving people technologies to build new worlds, we used technologies on people to get them to reinforce the same old worlds.
0:04:15 But I feel like artificial intelligence, whether as an idea or as an actual technology, is forcing us to ask some really fundamental questions about how we do things.
0:04:27 And creating another opportunity for kind of a widespread socio-cultural economic reassessment.
0:04:45 You know, we have an opportunity to pivot this doomed civilization towards something way more pro-human, pro-nature, circular, cyclical, and regenerative, if we give it half a chance.
0:04:53 So, before we get there, I did want to talk a little bit about what we lost before we talk about how to make it good again.
0:05:05 You know, you gave a talk recently where you were describing that phase of the early, early internet as a kind of cultural frontier, right?
0:05:13 It was this completely new space for weirdness and experimentation and creativity and connection.
0:05:15 What made it feel that way?
0:05:20 What was possible then that feels impossible or near impossible now?
0:05:36 I wonder–I mean, that moment that you’re talking about when all these things seemed possible, I mean, it was pretty short, you know?
0:05:41 It was like three or four years of wonder.
0:05:48 It’s funny, when there’s a great interview with Jerry Garcia, the guitarist for The Grateful Dead, and they asked him about the ’60s.
0:05:54 And he said, “Well, the 1960s actually happened over a period of about two weeks in the summer of 1968.”
0:05:58 You know, that that was for him was, “The ’60s happened like that.”
0:06:05 It was that brief, that spirit of it.
0:06:23 But I think what happens–and I didn’t realize this, but it happens a lot–is, you know, a new technology or a new possibility, something destabilizing, like the internet, happens, and it creates wobble in a whole lot of systems.
0:06:36 And those of us in culture or even what we call the counterculture, artsy people, psychedelic people, thinking people, living, human, playful people, go, “Wobble, cool!”
0:06:37 You know?
0:06:38 This is cool.
0:06:39 Things can change.
0:06:40 Things are shifting.
0:06:42 The ground is moving.
0:06:44 Power relationships can change.
0:06:46 We can break free of old constructs.
0:06:52 It’s, you know, these–the–the–the–a lot of people look at change differently.
0:06:55 Even the death card in tarot is like, “Ooh!”
0:06:56 You know?
0:07:00 I’m going to shed a skin and something–death means rebirth, right?
0:07:02 Just, “Ooh, what’s going to–what’s coming after that?”
0:07:06 But the powers that be get really afraid.
0:07:16 So I think what happened was when–when the internet happened, we ended up getting a really–a reactionary force came in.
0:07:32 You know, the folks who were saying, “Let’s pedal to the metal with these technologies” were actually the–the people who had current monopolies of one sort or another, who were looking to sort of lock down what was going on.
0:07:42 You know, bless his heart, you know, Kevin Kelly wrote a book in the early internet era called Rules of the New Economy.
0:07:49 And it was about, “Oh, here’s how all the internet era businesses are going to happen,” as if it’s this great revolutionary thing.
0:08:00 But what you read in that book is, “Here’s ten ways for maintaining the old economy in the face of a new digital technology.”
0:08:02 “How do we maintain what we had?”
0:08:13 You know, so we had a bunch of young technologists coming up with an idea, and instead of deploying it the way we did in the early internet, which was as shareware.
0:08:18 “Here it goes. Pay me what you can if you like it, but I just want to see it used.”
0:08:21 And people stayed alive. It was fine.
0:08:30 We shifted from that to venture capital to, “How are we going to make the most money in the least amount of time with this stuff?”
0:08:34 And that’s a very different–very different priority, right?
0:08:40 We used it to double down on extractive capitalism.
0:08:44 And we did it in the most abstracting ways.
0:08:48 The internet kind of goes meta on things.
0:09:02 So just as the stock market goes meta on the economy and derivatives go meta on the stock market and so on and so on, digital systems are also very symbolic and once removed.
0:09:15 And so they further all the kinds of things that we saw, like people like Marx writing about in the industrial age, how there’s a rentier over the renter and an investor over the rentier.
0:09:23 The further away you get from the real world, the more money you make by leveraging those poor suckers down in the real world actually lifting dirt.
0:09:31 And so it feels like the internet was used for that and got us into this current very disconnected mess.
0:09:34 What was it that killed that organic weirdness?
0:09:36 Was it the monetization of everything?
0:09:39 I mean, was that when it started to shift?
0:09:56 A lot of time, I did blame, like, Wired Magazine, you know, 1993, you know, Wired Magazine launched and reframed this cultural renaissance as an economic revolution.
0:09:58 They said, you know, a tsunami is coming.
0:10:01 Either you get on the wave or you’re going to be run over by it.
0:10:04 They actually did a cover called The Long Boom.
0:10:14 They said, thanks to digital technology, the stock market, the global stock market and economy will grow exponentially uninterrupted forever.
0:10:17 That was their new economic model.
0:10:18 What’s not to like, Doug?
0:10:18 What’s not to like?
0:10:22 Even Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said, yeah, new paradigm.
0:10:26 You know, these digital technologies are going to increase the surface area on the market.
0:10:30 We had colonized every place we could colonize, the whole world.
0:10:36 We had reached, you know, full-tilt capitalism, but where could we expand to?
0:10:40 The internet was going to create infinite surface area on the market.
0:10:44 So now we had, you know, basically an infinite shopping mall.
0:10:49 But the thing that was fixed in that, and a few people realized this, was human attention.
0:10:54 There’s only so much surface area on humanity to pay attention and spend and do stuff.
0:11:02 So they created all these really anti-human metrics like eyeball hours and website stickiness.
0:11:04 Those are the metrics they used to use for success.
0:11:09 And it all had to do with operating humans through technologies.
0:11:11 And then social media came.
0:11:16 We turned an asynchronous technology into an always-on technology.
0:11:27 So you’re living in the state of constant kind of emergency interruption and digital manipulation of your nervous system.
0:11:30 And that, you know, that’s a big part of it.
0:11:31 So that’s economic.
0:11:38 But, you know, then as I talked more and more to the bros themselves, I guess, I realized-
0:11:39 The tech bros?
0:11:39 Yeah.
0:11:40 It wasn’t just money.
0:11:50 You know, there’s also something, a second lineage, which is in the way we develop science and technology
0:11:57 around sort of engineering feats rather than genuine discovery.
0:12:06 And, you know, when you look at the way we deployed science in order to quantify everything,
0:12:09 And if something can’t be quantified, it’s not real.
0:12:11 You kill the butterfly.
0:12:13 Stick a pin in it and weigh it.
0:12:16 And that’s your way of understanding life.
0:12:21 It’s decontextualized and abstracted and killed.
0:12:28 And it dovetailed really nicely with capitalism’s drive towards linear progress and always moving forward.
0:12:32 And you can pave over the world as long as you keep going.
0:12:33 It doesn’t matter who you kill.
0:12:35 The ends justifies the means.
0:12:37 We’re going to this thing.
0:12:40 Was this outcome inevitable?
0:12:41 You know this.
0:12:48 Capitalism is fantastic at neutralizing anything that might subvert it.
0:12:51 It doesn’t destroy counterculture.
0:12:55 It just absorbs it, packages it, sells it back to us.
0:13:10 I mean, is there a semi-plausible alternate timeline where the internet didn’t go this way, where it didn’t get devoured and transformed into whatever it is today, a giant profitable skinner box?
0:13:14 I mean, I guess this goes to questions of free will.
0:13:26 Um, whether it was inevitable or not, um, to me seems less important than is it fungible or not?
0:13:29 Is it changeable or not?
0:13:34 I mean, sure, we could have taken other paths.
0:13:49 Mark Andreessen could have chosen not to take Netscape public and become a complete, uh, uh, you know, libertarian, I don’t even know what you call it.
0:13:51 Uh, techno-idealist.
0:13:52 Techno-fantasist?
0:13:53 Yeah, techno-utopian.
0:13:53 Techno-fantasist.
0:14:04 You know, uh, uh, people could have seen that, you know, Steve Case using AOL to buy Time Warner was going to be a bad deal and not a good deal.
0:14:09 Uh, you know, people could have chosen differently.
0:14:23 But to me, that’s less important than whether we can recontextualize this last 30 or 40 years as our infancy, our practice.
0:14:30 You know, the, the, as far as I’m concerned, the internet’s only really starting now.
0:14:40 Marshall McLuhan said that each new medium begins by taking the prior medium and turning it into its content.
0:14:48 So, on the internet, you know, the internet turned books and magazines and newspapers into its content.
0:14:56 Then it turned radio into its content with their early pre-podcasts.
0:15:00 Then it turned TV into its content, which is its main content today.
0:15:06 It’s Netflix and all of our streaming media is basically internet content.
0:15:14 But now, I feel like AI may be the first kind of native app of the internet.
0:15:21 AI is the first medium that is using the internet as its content.
0:15:23 It’s the first one.
0:15:30 So, if we can look at this whole catastrophe that we’ve lived through and that most of us lament
0:15:39 as that early stage, our early lessons with the internet before it began as preschool,
0:15:43 now we can say, oh, now that we’ve got this stuff,
0:15:50 what if instead of just doubling down on extractive, industrial, closed-minded capitalism,
0:15:58 what if we explored the generative potential of cybernetic technologies?
0:16:05 Well, that talk I mentioned earlier that you gave at South by Southwest, I mean, the whole,
0:16:10 I forget what it was called, but the theme was, you know, re-weirding the internet or-
0:16:10 Yeah, or something like that.
0:16:11 Re-weirding the net.
0:16:12 Weirding the net.
0:16:13 We’ve got to re-weird the world.
0:16:15 We’ve got to re-weird each other.
0:16:17 Fold the weird back into the middle.
0:16:18 Yeah.
0:16:20 What does that mean?
0:16:23 What is it that you mean by weirdness?
0:16:24 Why do we need more of it?
0:16:36 I mean, most simply, what I like to do, and I do this in most of my books,
0:16:40 is I try to make things strange.
0:16:48 And once you make things strange, we can look at them objectively.
0:16:55 So, a guy was on, I was on Jake Tapper talking about AI, and they were trying to get me upset
0:16:58 about AI on one of the days when I couldn’t care less about AI.
0:17:03 And finally, he goes, well, what about the unemployment problem?
0:17:08 And I said, well, what about the unemployment solution?
0:17:12 What’s a job?
0:17:13 Do you want a job?
0:17:14 I don’t want a job.
0:17:16 I want stuff.
0:17:20 I want meaningful participation in society.
0:17:22 I want people to care about me.
0:17:25 I might even like a place to go where people know who I am.
0:17:27 But I don’t want a job.
0:17:30 Where do jobs come from?
0:17:35 And then if you really play, you know, sociologist or anthropologist, jobs were invented in the
0:17:36 late Middle Ages.
0:17:37 People didn’t used to have jobs.
0:17:38 They worked.
0:17:38 They created stuff.
0:17:39 They traded stuff.
0:17:45 Jobs only came about because the kings invented this thing called chartered monopolies, which
0:17:48 was to prevent regular people from making money.
0:17:52 The kings invented the chartered monopoly, which said that the only one who was allowed to do
0:17:57 business in a particular vertical, in a particular industry, is going to be this friend who’s going
0:17:58 to give me a kickback.
0:18:04 So, Sean, you have His Majesty’s Royal Jams and Jellies Company, and anybody else who
0:18:11 makes jams and jellies now has to be an employee of His Majesty’s Royal Jams and Jellies Company.
0:18:13 That’s when they invented wage labor.
0:18:16 That’s when you started to punch the clock.
0:18:17 That’s when they-
0:18:18 All right, hold on, hold on.
0:18:19 You’re going too big.
0:18:20 You’re losing me.
0:18:21 What does this have to do with being weird?
0:18:24 I’m making jobs strange.
0:18:28 So, most people wake up thinking, you have to have a job.
0:18:31 Jobs have always been here.
0:18:34 The way you live is by having a job.
0:18:36 God made jobs.
0:18:44 What I’m saying is, if you look back and think, wait a minute, what is a job?
0:18:46 Where did jobs come from?
0:18:48 Who invented jobs?
0:18:51 Who do they favor?
0:18:53 Why do we have this system?
0:18:54 And is there another one?
0:19:03 When you make jobs weird, then those who’ve been weirded out, we the weird people, can then
0:19:07 remake them in ways that make sense, right?
0:19:11 You make things weird so the weird can make things.
0:19:14 If you get stoned and look at money, right?
0:19:20 You look at money when you’re high, and you’re just like, what is this?
0:19:21 What is this?
0:19:26 Why do people, or when you’re three or four, and you see your parents putting this money
0:19:27 and they get stuff.
0:19:31 It’s like, oh, give me some of that paper so I can get some toys, right?
0:19:32 What is this?
0:19:34 This is, we know this is nothing, right?
0:19:38 And then it’s faith, it’s something, it’s federal.
0:19:39 What is this?
0:19:41 And why does it work the way it does?
0:19:43 And why do certain people get to have it and other ones don’t?
0:19:48 And we see that you understand, again, go back, when was this kind of money invented?
0:19:52 There used to be other kinds of money that was to allow people to trade and get what they
0:19:52 wanted.
0:19:57 It wasn’t to make bankers rich at the expense of people who need to transact, which is what
0:19:58 this money’s for.
0:20:04 So by making money weird, you open it up for discussion and reinvention.
0:20:07 Now we can rewrite our own money.
0:20:09 That’s what making things weird is for.
0:20:14 And the internet made a lot of things weird at the beginning.
0:20:15 Wait a minute.
0:20:24 Money, value, communication, power, any new medium, any new media environment makes things
0:20:24 weird.
0:20:30 And then there’s a scramble for who’s going to get to define what this is.
0:20:37 So what I was arguing was that the opportunity with all these new technologies is to make obsolete
0:20:41 cultural, social, societal systems to make them weird.
0:20:48 To do in a more advanced philosophical language, it would be called denaturalizing power.
0:20:53 There’s a lot of things that have been naturalized, like the idea that you have to commute to work,
0:21:01 the idea that you have to pay taxes for this, or a lot of the way that power is distributed
0:21:04 in our society have been naturalized and institutionalized.
0:21:11 When you look at the institution from the perspective of a hacker, what we used to call the hacker
0:21:15 mentality, it’s like, oh, is this up for reinvention?
0:21:17 But look, on the ground level, right?
0:21:18 I mean, look, I agree.
0:21:27 If you peer closely enough into the foundations of any system of power or control, you’ll find
0:21:28 that it’s all made up.
0:21:36 But here, on the ground, where we all live and breathe and try to survive, these are real
0:21:37 dangers, right?
0:21:38 And people depend on jobs.
0:21:39 Without them, they’ll go hungry.
0:21:40 They can’t feed their family.
0:21:42 They can’t send their kids to school.
0:21:47 It’s one thing to pontificate about the weirdness of it all and how it could all be—it’s all
0:21:51 a construct, and we could transform it overnight or almost overnight.
0:21:52 Who says that?
0:21:53 That’s the part that—you’re tricky.
0:21:54 That’s the part—
0:21:54 Well, you know what I’m saying.
0:21:55 I’m just saying, like, what do we do?
0:21:56 Yeah, but I do know what you say.
0:22:02 So first, we need to understand that even though on the internet you click on something
0:22:10 and it happens, if you’re going to have a widespread civilizational shift, it’s going
0:22:12 to take time, right?
0:22:13 You’re going to have to breathe.
0:22:16 We’re not going to flip the entire civilization overnight.
0:22:17 It’s true.
0:22:18 Absolutely true.
0:22:21 So how do you start, right?
0:22:26 The way you start is really simply, really locally, and really at home, right?
0:22:37 The first step I would take towards a post-employment society of 2300, say, you know, let’s say
0:22:40 year 2300, we get there.
0:22:45 The first thing would be something as simple, and I’ve talked about this before.
0:22:49 It’s like, if you need to hang a picture in your house and you realize you don’t have a
0:22:55 drill, what’s the first thing most Americans will do is go to the Home Depot, buy a minimum
0:23:01 viable product drill, charge it up, use it to drill one hole in the wall, put it in the
0:23:05 garage, maybe never use it again, or come back in a year and it won’t recharge and you throw
0:23:05 it out.
0:23:12 So the huge carbon imprint, huge amount of labor and a huge expenditure in this anti-social
0:23:13 consumer act.
0:23:19 The alternative, and this is super hard for a lot of people, but the alternative would be to walk down
0:23:21 the street, go to Bob’s house.
0:23:22 Bob has all these tools.
0:23:23 He’s always making shit.
0:23:26 Knock on his door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill?
0:23:30 And use Bob’s drill that once and give it back.
0:23:33 Or in most cases, Bob is going to come over and drill the hole for you because you don’t
0:23:35 know how to find a stud, you fucking nerd.
0:23:37 You know, I’m going to find the stud for it.
0:23:41 I’m going to drill it, hang the picture, and he’s going to plug it in the wall like God intended,
0:23:44 a real fucking drill, and go home.
0:23:49 And after he does that, though, Bob is then going to expect, well, you know, I just did this
0:23:54 nice thing for Doug, and now he’s having a party, barbecue party this weekend.
0:23:58 He’s going to smell the steaks cooking and think, well, I drilled a hole for Doug.
0:24:00 He should probably invite me over.
0:24:01 So then I invite Bob over.
0:24:05 Then the other neighbors are wondering why they’re not over at my house.
0:24:08 And so I end up inviting most of my neighbors, and we have a block party at our house and talk
0:24:09 about how we’re borrowing shit.
0:24:14 Then someone gets an idea, hey, you know, what if we all use the same two lawnmowers on our
0:24:16 block rather than everyone buy their own lawnmower?
0:24:17 You know, it’s an expense.
0:24:19 It’s a lot of pollution and stuff.
0:24:22 You know, we could just, you know, I can have this one Mondays, Wednesdays.
0:24:23 You can have Tuesdays, Thursdays.
0:24:24 Yeah, that makes sense.
0:24:25 Let’s do that, and we’ll save some money.
0:24:29 That’s the way you transform a society.
0:24:35 Now, I talked about that at a more economics-type businessy conference, and someone got up at
0:24:39 the end and said, well, yeah, but what about the drill company?
0:24:45 If you let people borrow drills and lawnmowers from each other, people are going to lose their
0:24:46 jobs.
0:24:49 They’re going to lose their jobs at the drill company.
0:24:51 And what about the shareholders of the drill company?
0:24:53 And so, again, it doesn’t happen overnight.
0:24:58 Let’s say we have 100 years to slowly adapt to people borrowing more.
0:24:59 It’s not going to get everything.
0:25:02 We’re still going to need some drills and some lawnmowers.
0:25:06 But what if we only need 10 or 20 percent of the amount that we’re making now?
0:25:10 You know, what if we need actually less stuff than the economy needs?
0:25:17 Then what we would have to do is decide, just as they decided in the late Middle Ages, to
0:25:22 build an economy around the needs of monarchs who wanted to maintain their aristocracy in
0:25:23 the face of a rising middle class.
0:25:31 We might have to rejigger the economy a little bit incrementally over time.
0:25:37 Again, it’s radical, but to support human flourishing in a time of abundance.
0:25:38 It’s not against the rules.
0:25:40 But we were talking about the internet.
0:25:48 And I’m wondering, the internet that we have now, how can it help us get closer to that world?
0:25:54 Because the internet we have now seems to be pulling us further and further apart.
0:26:00 It seems to be making us less and less weird, more and more predictable, more and more isolated.
0:26:05 And, you know, that seems to be the opposite of the kind of world you want to live in and
0:26:07 the kind of world I want to live in.
0:26:07 Right.
0:26:10 I think it’s by people making different choices.
0:26:17 You know, the best thing the internet can do immediately is pose these sorts of questions.
0:26:26 Now, that’s what AI is doing, I think, right now, more than the last few rounds.
0:26:28 Is it what people are doing?
0:26:35 The platforms that we’re using to think and speak and communicate and share information,
0:26:37 are they allowing us to do this?
0:26:42 Or are they incentivizing precisely the opposite, which is why we have the problem that we have?
0:26:45 Well, most of them are incentivizing the opposite.
0:26:50 But our money system incentivizes the opposite.
0:26:54 Our competitive educational system emphasizes the opposite.
0:27:03 Even kids in elementary and middle school are already learning, adopting a style of learning
0:27:08 designed to get them into an elite college rather than learn anything or explore anything.
0:27:18 So, yes, you know, existing institutions, of course, they are, if anything, working hard
0:27:25 and consciously to reinforce the mindsets that serve the people at the top.
0:27:26 Absolutely.
0:27:31 Which could mean we shouldn’t try.
0:27:40 It could mean we just make as much money as you can, as quickly as you can, and enjoy the years that you have left
0:27:46 before the climate refugees and other horrible things and diseases kill you and your children.
0:28:00 Or you can slowly, and I’m starting to see it, I see people kind of either hitting bottom with the tech,
0:28:07 with the social media, with the way it works, or discovering embodied experiences,
0:28:14 making eye contact with someone else, having a walk, going to a museum, breathing clean air,
0:28:18 going to a European country.
0:28:23 I mean, it’s really fun to watch students come back from Europe and go,
0:28:26 God, you know, they had these, like, public services.
0:28:28 Isn’t that a really cool idea?
0:28:34 Like, clean trains and parks and stuff and health care and, oh, look at all those possibilities.
0:28:42 Not that we have to go socialist or lefty, but just they see that there’s other ways of living.
0:28:45 And then you slowly change.
0:28:52 You know, every minute that a person chooses to spend engaged in meaningful interaction with another person
0:28:57 in their life is one minute less, you know, surrendered to these dudes.
0:29:05 So, yeah, it may be that Twitter may not be an environment conducive to the conversation
0:29:08 that we think will heal us as a society.
0:29:09 You’re right there.
0:29:16 Well, I will say, I mean, look, certainly when there are periods of significant change,
0:29:24 that does create the space for seeing things differently, reorganizing relationships in society.
0:29:32 And if I understand you, right, if we take weirdness to mean not just individuality, right,
0:29:38 but something more than that, it’s thinking outside the constraints of the system and imagining something different and new.
0:29:40 And that is awesome.
0:29:42 We need more weirdos.
0:29:45 Yeah, but that’s only the first step.
0:29:51 I think a lot of creativity, a lot of dissent comes out of weirdness, and I’m here for it, man.
0:29:59 But I am curious how you explain a paradox that I’m constantly wrestling with.
0:30:03 I mean, we’ve never had more tools to express ourselves.
0:30:16 And yet, digital culture, social media especially, feels so homogenous and derivative, like it’s engineered to just produce sameness.
0:30:23 I mean, is that just what happens when shit gets monetized at scale like this?
0:30:30 Because it’s making it harder and harder to be weird in the ways you’re describing.
0:30:34 Well, there’s a difference, yeah.
0:30:39 I mean, there’s a difference between being weird and being noticed.
0:30:40 Say more.
0:30:46 Well, the object of the game on social media is for people to notice you.
0:30:51 It’s to perform and get an audience.
0:30:58 And that’s not the only metric for successful cultural engineering.
0:31:10 There’s people interacting hand-to-hand, face-to-face in communities, changing lives, who have no clicks, or may not even be on there.
0:31:28 You know, I met a death doula who is, you know, a death doula is someone who sits with people when they die and helps them metabolize that passage and helps the family, you know, experience this shift in a transformative way rather than just as the ending of something.
0:31:31 And they change lives.
0:31:34 They change the way people move through the world.
0:31:45 You know, they sit with a family for one week and change five lives so profoundly that those five people, every interaction they have, you know, over the next 10 years is different.
0:31:51 The way they are at work, the way they vote, the way they engage with their friends, the way they talk at the pub, everything is different.
0:32:02 So that ripples out, out and up in a way that the million person following, follower, influencer does not.
0:32:06 You know, so there are ways, there are ways to do that.
0:32:16 I mean, it’s also, you know, I put out this kind of a theory of change that it really, it starts with the weird, right?
0:32:17 With embracing the weird.
0:32:21 It starts with denaturalizing power.
0:32:30 But once you’ve denaturalized power, it only really matters if it triggers your agency to re-engineer things in a different way.
0:32:39 Once Dorothy sees that the Wizard of Oz is a social construction, it’s just this dude behind a curtain, right?
0:32:42 She has weirded power, right?
0:32:43 She goes, oh, I get it.
0:32:45 That’s just a hologram up there.
0:32:45 It’s this.
0:32:47 What do they do next?
0:32:49 Is they reconstruct their own contract.
0:32:50 Here’s your heart.
0:32:51 Here’s your brain.
0:32:55 You know, having those things is a matter of you deciding that’s what you have.
0:32:56 And they’ve been innate in you all along.
0:32:57 You don’t need this thing.
0:32:59 They go to the next level.
0:33:06 So triggering agency is triggering people to say, oh, if this currency doesn’t work for us, what would a local currency look like?
0:33:08 What would a blockchain look like even?
0:33:17 What kinds of ways can we trade that don’t just require the infinite expansion of capital to preserve a banking system?
0:33:22 And once you do that, you realize, oh, once my agency’s triggered, I can’t do this alone.
0:33:23 I need other people.
0:33:28 So the third stage of my theory of change is re-socialize people.
0:33:38 Have people working and playing together in order to realize these things rather than being, you know, a single sole person on social media, which is what social media wants to do.
0:33:43 You know, and then finally, once you’ve re-socialized, you cultivate awe.
0:33:50 Once you’re working with other people, you start to get those, all those great feelings you get when you’ve established rapport with other humans.
0:33:58 And that’s, to the powers that be, our experiences of true awe is the most dangerous thing to them.
0:34:10 When you experience true awe of socializing or being with other people, you’re so much less dependent on the vertigo of their platforms that imitate, you know, awe.
0:34:11 But they’re not awe at all.
0:34:43 And they’re not awe at all.
0:34:45 Fox Creative.
0:34:47 This is advertiser content from Upwork.
0:34:54 Brian Goldsman says his company started the way most do, as a side hustle.
0:34:58 What we say is we’re a physical marketing company.
0:35:03 Liquid screen design, merch, or promotional products, or swag, whatever anybody calls it, that’s what we do.
0:35:10 But after seven years of profit, Brian and his business partner had to decide if liquid screen design could become more than a hobby.
0:35:18 We were talking about it, and we said, we have to make $300,000 in the year in sales.
0:35:22 Okay, how are we ever going to do $1,000 a day in sales?
0:35:26 We realized it could not just be the two of us, and we needed to start hiring additional support.
0:35:39 You know, it’s not just fixing the logo that you already have, but it’s also full custom design.
0:35:46 Anything from caricatures of people, to logo redesigns, to unique products that we’re specking out.
0:35:54 We can do things that a lot of other people in our industry can’t do because we basically have created our own art department.
0:35:59 It’s about getting the best possible talent wherever they are in the world.
0:36:03 What started out as a side hustle turned into a thriving business.
0:36:05 At this point, we have 30 employees.
0:36:08 Nine of them are what we call global talent.
0:36:15 They’re full-time employees of liquid screen design, but they’ve been hired, and we manage the whole process through Upwork.
0:36:21 We could not be what liquid screen design is today without our Upwork freelancers.
0:36:23 Smarter work starts here.
0:36:27 See how Upwork can help your business grow at upwork.com slash updates.
0:36:44 We can’t go back to the old internet.
0:36:47 It just doesn’t work like that, right?
0:36:50 Well, we can retrieve the best qualities of the old internet.
0:36:57 Is there a version of the internet we have now that can replicate that?
0:36:59 Can it be redesigned?
0:37:10 Is there a new business model that can make it work, or does this thing have to be torn down to the studs so that some other thing can take its place?
0:37:13 I’m not a tear-down-to-the-studs kind of guy.
0:37:19 I mean, I’m more mycelial in my approach, I guess.
0:37:20 You’re such a hippie.
0:37:21 You’re such a hippie.
0:37:23 But I do think you can…
0:37:24 I love it.
0:37:26 …grow new tendrils.
0:37:37 I think we can treat the current internet as the latticework on which a new structure of vines can develop.
0:37:56 I mean, here you and I are talking about the real thing on a medium that, as you say, 90% of the conversations between dudes on here would be about, you know, our friggin’ stoicism and penile strength and bro thing.
0:38:00 You know, all that shit, you know, that or…
0:38:01 That’s my C block.
0:38:06 Yeah, or we’d be Gary Vee kind of like, oh, and here’s what you do.
0:38:12 And then, you know, send a second email back to them that automatically comes and takes your followers and then puts them in the second group.
0:38:13 And then you A-B test that.
0:38:16 You know, there’s all that.
0:38:18 And here we are talking about earnestly together.
0:38:20 Doug, you got to get back on the rails here.
0:38:21 All right.
0:38:21 We got to…
0:38:23 We have to produce a show here.
0:38:26 And I had a plan, but I’m…
0:38:28 That plan is so far in the fucking ether now.
0:38:29 We can do the plan.
0:38:30 We can do the plan.
0:38:31 I’m just trying to ride with you.
0:38:33 Like, I just…
0:38:34 I want…
0:38:34 I want…
0:38:36 Well, you sounded so negative, so I wanted to fight back.
0:38:37 No, no, no.
0:38:38 Well, I may be a little negative.
0:38:40 But I want to feel like we’re going somewhere.
0:38:43 And I want to feel like there’s something concrete and useful here.
0:38:45 And you are trying to…
0:38:46 To which person?
0:38:47 The audience?
0:38:48 Which kind of person?
0:38:48 Right.
0:38:53 Well, the person who thinks the internet is fucked up in the ways we do and is pining for
0:38:57 something better and wondering if we can get there with the system that we have?
0:38:58 Well, it depends.
0:38:59 So there’s different peoples.
0:39:00 All right.
0:39:02 So let’s talk to different communities.
0:39:02 There’s builders.
0:39:04 All right.
0:39:10 So let’s talk to the builders, the actual software engineers who have already partnered with people
0:39:20 who understand how human beings socialize and who already have positive visions for more
0:39:28 regenerative communities of care and who are leaning into human flourishing.
0:39:35 I would say, first off, use a nonprofit model rather than a for-profit model.
0:39:40 You can make a ton of money with a nonprofit by paying yourself a big salary rather than
0:39:43 taking investment and needing to pay off somebody else.
0:39:48 There’s a lot of people playing around in this space.
0:39:56 And I don’t think it’s beyond the realm if you look at what do people actually need in
0:39:57 order to engage with each other.
0:40:04 You know, the other thing I’m starting to notice in functional social networks is more of
0:40:13 the kind of the discord effect where a tide pool of people with a common interest do better than
0:40:16 these infinite social networks.
0:40:21 You don’t want a social network that’s open to everybody all the time because no one wants
0:40:23 to speak to the whole world at once.
0:40:24 And if they do, they’re crazy.
0:40:25 Can I ask you a question?
0:40:26 Yeah.
0:40:31 You may hate me for asking, but I trust our budding friendship can survive it.
0:40:31 Yeah.
0:40:39 Do you ever wonder if the real problem isn’t the tech but us, that most people don’t actually
0:40:45 want to be weird or free in the ways you talk about, that we just want to be distracted,
0:40:49 entertained, stupefied, and that’s why this system that we have is so profitable?
0:40:50 Yeah.
0:40:53 Well, that’s what I’ve been saying all along, but you keep taking it back to, yeah, but how
0:40:54 do we make tech that does this?
0:40:56 Or how do we make tech that does that?
0:41:03 What I’m saying is the best the tech can offer us right now is to reveal to us the problems
0:41:06 in our other social institutions and systems.
0:41:16 So what we need is the courage to realize, no, human nature is not the extractive force of
0:41:17 central currency.
0:41:23 When central currency, and this is on topic, not off, when central currency was implemented,
0:41:24 there were wars.
0:41:30 People fought to be able to use their own local currency in their own local marketplace.
0:41:38 You need to borrow coin of the realm at interest, at usury prices in order for you to trade laterally
0:41:39 between each other.
0:41:40 Same thing.
0:41:43 We had an internet that was a public utility.
0:41:44 You’re all talking to each other.
0:41:45 No, no, no, no.
0:41:49 If you’re going to use the internet, you need a four-pay ISP.
0:41:50 You need a four-pay this.
0:41:55 You need to be on commercial platforms in order to engage with one another.
0:42:00 No one thinks of the internet as the public utility that it really is.
0:42:02 So absolutely, absolutely, you’re right.
0:42:04 But it’s not human nature.
0:42:10 It’s only human nature to the extent that we’ve internalized the values of the systems that
0:42:19 we use, which is why we need to start looking at things as weird as they are, as imposed,
0:42:21 as arbitrary as they are.
0:42:27 And new media environments, the best thing they do, the best thing the internet does is
0:42:29 lead us to see the world differently.
0:42:35 Once you’ve programmed something, once you’ve had to save a program as read or read-write,
0:42:43 you think, how much else of this world has been saved as read-only but is actually read-write?
0:42:46 And that’s what I’m trying to engender.
0:42:55 Where you’re right is that human beings may be too lazy and too passive to actually want to
0:43:03 take on the responsibility of rethinking how things work.
0:43:05 But most of us don’t.
0:43:07 By the way, I don’t believe that to be true.
0:43:08 I was just floating the question.
0:43:08 Oh, good.
0:43:09 Yeah.
0:43:10 I mean, it’s possible.
0:43:10 I’m not that cynical.
0:43:13 I am cynical enough to believe in the Pareto principle.
0:43:17 You know, 80% of people just tell me what to do.
0:43:23 And 20% of people are like, oh, let me participate in the committee to figure out how things are done.
0:43:25 You know, I would buy that.
0:43:37 But what we need is more widespread willingness to lean into these more interdependent but uncertain futures together.
0:43:43 No, I think people are pretty plastic or certainly more plastic than we think.
0:43:44 I don’t think human nature is fixed.
0:43:54 I think what we have now is a really profound misalignment between our actual interest and the incentives of the systems that we live in.
0:43:58 And I’m always interested in how to correct that misalignment.
0:44:05 I mean, it’s part of what you preach that, look, the internet can be a lot of things, some of them good, some of them bad.
0:44:07 Right.
0:44:22 Are there spaces on the web now that feel like maybe not like rough approximations of what the early internet was, but spaces that give you hope that it can be this rather than what we have now for the most part?
0:44:28 Where I generally see it is like a Google Doc that someone will set up after, oh, there’s been a flood here.
0:44:29 Who needs what?
0:44:30 Who has what?
0:44:31 Where do we pick it up?
0:44:35 And they’ll make a Google Doc or a spreadsheet and just list stuff.
0:44:38 You know, the tech is so easy.
0:44:39 It’s not the tech.
0:44:42 It’s the will to use it in those ways.
0:44:50 So I see it more locally and less sustained, but I am starting to see it.
0:45:10 There’s a friend of mine in Yonkers started a website for people to share unused medical supplies, and then she ships them to Africa and parts of America where they need gauze and diapers and tubes and whatever.
0:45:12 There’s those kind of things.
0:45:14 Sure.
0:45:15 Sure.
0:45:18 They’re just not usually scaled in that way.
0:45:20 That’s the word that was on the tip of my tongue.
0:45:23 Maybe it’s just too damn big.
0:45:24 I mean, the thing about the early internet-
0:45:26 But do you need scale is the question.
0:45:28 Well, that is the question.
0:45:29 I’m into more distributed.
0:45:34 You know, scale, people always look at my things and they say, oh, how would they scale?
0:45:34 How would they scale?
0:45:35 What if scale is the problem?
0:45:38 What if operating society at scale doesn’t work?
0:45:43 And there’s certain things that have to happen at scale as a last resort, but most things we just do for each other locally.
0:45:46 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:47 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:48 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:48 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:49 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:50 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:51 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:51 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:52 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:53 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:54 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:54 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:56 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:57 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:58 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:59 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:00 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:01 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:03 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:03 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:20 This episode comes exclusively from Upwork, the human and AI-powered freelance marketplace
0:46:25 that says they can help your company connect to expert talent using AI-native tools, so
0:46:28 you can scale faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
0:46:32 One of those tools is Uma, Upwork’s mindful work companion.
0:46:36 Uma can help streamline the process from start to finish, from generating job descriptions
0:46:40 to filtering candidates and facilitating team communication.
0:46:45 Uma can even help the freelance professionals you hire by supporting proposal writing, project
0:46:49 management, and features to focus less on busy work and more on the high-value work they
0:46:50 were hired to do.
0:46:56 And when you sign up with the Business Plus, you’ll get access to Upwork’s top 1% of talent,
0:46:59 freelancers who have been vetted for their skill and reliability.
0:47:03 Upwork will even send a personalized list of freelancer recommendations within hours of
0:47:04 signing up.
0:47:10 As AI becomes a bigger part of business, Upwork is here to help you not just adapt, but thrive
0:47:11 in this new world of work.
0:47:16 Check out what Upwork can do for your business at Upwork.com/updates.
0:47:20 That’s Upwork.com/updates for more information.
0:47:28 You seem like the type that lives out your ideas.
0:47:43 I mean, like, what are you doing in your own life?
0:47:46 What are you doing to re-weird the world and the internet or whatever?
0:47:56 I mean, I’m catching up in some ways or making up for lost time.
0:48:00 I spent a majority of my career in the mind.
0:48:09 You know, I’ve written, what, 25 books, delivered thousands of lectures and written hundreds and
0:48:10 hundreds of articles.
0:48:28 But, you know, I only kind of recently rediscovered, you know, ceremony, ecstatic dance, you know,
0:48:31 embodied kind of somatic experience.
0:48:35 So, I’m kind of catching up there.
0:48:43 I’m kind of experimenting with sort of the re-enchantment of moment to moment existence.
0:48:44 I’m…
0:48:49 That just sounds like logging the fuck off and touching some grass and saying hello to
0:48:50 your neighbor, Steve, down the street or…
0:48:52 Yeah, but…
0:48:55 Just getting together with people in three dimensions.
0:49:02 And appreciating how profoundly enriching and satisfying it is.
0:49:05 We’re here for such a short amount of time.
0:49:16 We are living on a planet when so many people are suffering unnecessarily, largely as a result
0:49:20 of our own actions.
0:49:32 I feel like the more social and integrated and connected I can help people be, the less strain
0:49:40 we’re going to put on these global systems, um, the less brittle those systems will be and
0:49:50 the… the less damaging, um, we will be to, um, the people who are, are, uh, uh, uh, necessarily
0:49:54 damaged by the systems that we no longer need to support.
0:50:00 I can’t tell if you’re a reform or a revolutionary guy.
0:50:01 Are you reform or revolution?
0:50:10 You know, I, I would put it like this: I used to see myself as an activist.
0:50:21 And I feel like I’ve changed from an agent of change to an agent of care.
0:50:28 That it’s not about me knowing where things need to go or what we need to implement.
0:50:31 But I’ve kind of shifted, originally I was thinking I was shifting toward palliative care.
0:50:33 I’m not going to try to save the world anymore.
0:50:37 I’m just going to try to make people feel better.
0:50:45 Um, and now I realize that making people feel better actually is probably the shortest path
0:50:53 toward the kind of changes that we need to save the world in the process.
0:50:57 That’s a nice breath.
0:50:59 I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to end this.
0:51:02 We were, we were so all over the place.
0:51:08 Um, I don’t know, is there anything, is there anything else you want to say?
0:51:13 Is there anything else you feel like we could talk about that would help, um, everything
0:51:15 else we said hang together?
0:51:16 Yeah.
0:51:22 I mean, I would say this, um, one experiment that I’ve been doing is when I’m on the internet,
0:51:27 and I think of it, I put my feet on the ground.
0:51:29 I notice my feet are off the ground a lot.
0:51:34 I put my feet on the ground and become conscious of my feet on the ground.
0:51:41 Or if I’m doing a series of emails and feeling myself getting weird in the bad way, I stop
0:51:46 and take two nice, slow, conscious breaths.
0:51:55 And I know it sounds new age, I know it sounds weird and all that, but it actually does make
0:52:07 a difference to remember I am an embodied frigging human being in front of a computer looking at letters
0:52:20 and words, and it changes the amount of power I feel I have over what’s going on, and it changes,
0:52:32 it increases the number of options I feel I have in how I respond to each ping.
0:52:40 And that alone, um, does change the way I look at this stuff.
0:52:50 You seem, maybe more than anyone else I’ve talked to or listened to or read, you have this way of
0:53:01 being very pessimistic about what’s happening, but also exuberant and joyful in the way you talk
0:53:06 about it so that it actually doesn’t feel like you’re pessimistic. It feels like you’re actually
0:53:09 hopeful, even though you’re describing all the ways things are completely fucked.
0:53:11 Right. I mean, we have to acknowledge-
0:53:12 Is that a conscious thing for you, or?
0:53:17 Yeah, I guess so. I mean, we have to acknowledge that
0:53:25 it’s likely that a majority of human beings on this planet will
0:53:32 die, you know, by the end of this century, even, unnecessarily.
0:53:34 Well, that’s dark.
0:53:40 Given that, right? You know, given that, um…
0:53:54 Given that death, what, what can be reborn in such a context? You know?
0:53:58 What? What can be?
0:54:00 Let’s see.
0:54:08 You know, we, we, I think we have to be open to what can be reborn in such a context.
0:54:16 You know, I don’t think we can strategize it. I feel like that’s what keeps me writing in some ways.
0:54:22 Do you think I’m too fatalistic or too deterministic? You mentioned McLuhan. I’ve read McLuhan. I read
0:54:27 Neil Postman and some of the other media ecologists, and they sort of convinced me over time that
0:54:34 we really are prisoners of our technologies in ways I never quite appreciated before. And I just,
0:54:40 I look at what these tools have done to us, how they’ve, how we’ve become the tools of our tools
0:54:47 in so many ways. And I sometimes have a hard time seeing how we can escape the gravitational pull
0:54:52 of all these forces of the digital world that you mentioned earlier. But do you think I’m, anyway,
0:54:53 I’ll stop talking.
0:55:06 No, I mean, I think you, um, admirably keep asking, “So what can we do about this, this, this, and that?”
0:55:13 And are correctly saying, “Well, we can’t do this. We can’t do that. We can’t do this.”
0:55:22 And it makes it feel like we’re out of options. And what I’m suggesting is
0:55:31 start by not doing anything. That doing is…
0:55:32 I can do that.
0:55:33 Right.
0:55:34 I can definitely do that.
0:55:44 Stop, breathe, be with it for a moment and go, “Okay, not everything is okay as it should
0:55:48 be and all that.” Because obviously it’s fucked up and a lot of people are dying and suffering
0:55:55 unnecessarily. And our technologies and the way we use them, you know, I may do more damage with a
0:56:03 brilliant substack post than I do good, just from the energy that’s extracted by doing it. I know that
0:56:11 every frigging, you know, AI query, every plane trip I take to do a talk, uh, is, is probably doing more
0:56:20 more damage than I’m doing good. Or maybe, or maybe is. Um, so sometimes the best option is to stop
0:56:28 wriggling, to stop for a moment, for like 48 hours, try not to figure out what is the best tweet to
0:56:37 respond to what Musk or Trump or someone just did. What if there is none? You know, what if a whole lot of our
0:56:42 people are doing is a form, one form or another, of feeding the trolls.
0:56:51 That’s why I’m like, stop for a second. That you sort of had to stop and breathe and say, uh,
0:57:05 in order to begin to, um, generate some truly alternative pro-social solutions. Um, but no,
0:57:14 the, the path from here to there looks pretty rocky and treacherous. You know, if, if we don’t go there,
0:57:21 there we all die. And even if we do go there, it’s pretty fucking awful, right? On the way there. So
0:57:27 what do you do with that? Is love each other as much as possible, be here to metabolize each other’s
0:57:36 pain, try to bring, you know, as many other people into a state of, uh, uh, compassion as possible, and
0:57:44 hold out some faith that a global mind shift is still possible.
0:57:49 You know, I’ve always thought of you as someone who, uh, kind of systems level thinker.
0:57:49 Yeah.
0:57:54 You’re always a macro thinker in that way. But the more I listen to you in this conversation,
0:58:00 it sounds more and more like you’re saying we have to stop thinking about, not entirely,
0:58:04 but we need to pause for a second and stop thinking about the system and what things need
0:58:10 to change in order to create the space to do X, Y, and Z. And instead just act immediately,
0:58:17 act locally, just do something small in the real world, in the community around you and just start
0:58:17 there.
0:58:22 Yeah. I mean, which is still systems thinking. It’s just way more fractal or trim tab or,
0:58:28 uh, you know, and how many systems are in you that you’re not even listening to,
0:58:33 you know, the gut biome is smarter than we are. And, you know, we might just be a medium,
0:58:38 right? We might just be at the service of gut biomes. The reason you pick a sex partner is because
0:58:43 your gut biome wants to mix bacteria with that gut biome and interact with their cultures. We don’t
0:58:54 even know, right? So, um, I think there’s, there’s other ways for the embodied human to move in concert
0:59:00 with these systems other than sort of systems analysis. We’ll see.
0:59:05 Yeah. We’ll see. I’m not even going to try to put a bow on all this. I’m just going to leave it.
0:59:10 There is no bow. It’s all good. I appreciate, I appreciate what you’re doing. I’m sorry if I
0:59:15 gave you a hard time. I was just responding in the moment to the things you were asking and to what I
0:59:23 felt was some of your, uh, resistance to the possibilities of human beings to, uh,
0:59:26 rise to this occasion. I think we can do it.
0:59:30 I don’t even know how to describe this conversation, but it was awesome. You’re
0:59:33 awesome. Douglas Rushkoff. Thanks so much for coming in.
0:59:36 Thank you. Thanks for enabling me.
0:59:42 And check out, uh, Doug’s podcast team human. It is really great. It’s the bomb.
0:59:58 All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I absolutely did because Douglas is weird and awesome.
1:00:05 And talking to him is always a bit of an adventure. As always, we want to know what you think. We’ve
1:00:12 been overwhelmed by the number of voicemails and emails that we’ve been getting lately. So please
1:00:19 keep them coming. We read them all. We listen to them. They help us make a better show. So drop us a
1:00:25 line at the gray area at vox.com, or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at
1:00:34 1-800-214-5749. And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and
1:00:40 subscribe to the pod. It helps other people find our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
1:00:47 edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
1:00:52 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays.
1:00:58 Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership
1:01:05 program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show,
1:01:13 let us know. And finally, I want to say thank you to my guest, Douglas Rushkoff, for being so much fun.
1:01:26 Thank you to Upwork for supporting this episode. With Upwork, you can hire hourly,
1:01:32 set a fixed price, or pay by the milestone for bigger products. You and the professionals you hire
1:01:38 will have access to Upwork’s mindful AI integrations at every step to work faster and smarter. To see what
1:01:51 Upwork can do for your business in the AI era, go to Upwork.com/updates. That’s Upwork.com/updates for more information.
0:00:10 AI-powered freelance marketplace helping businesses reimagine how work gets done.
0:00:16 Later in the show, we’ll hear from a real-life Upwork customer, a business owner who says
0:00:21 that his company would not be what it is today without the professionals he hired using Upwork.
0:00:27 You can see how Upwork is helping to reinvent work in the AI era at upwork.com slash updates.
0:00:37 Not long ago, I watched a talk by Douglas Rushkoff called Weirding the Digital.
0:00:44 It was a eulogy for the early internet and the idea that it was going to make the world smarter,
0:00:53 more open, more connected. I invited Douglas onto the show to chat about this talk and about how the
0:01:02 chaos of the early web was commodified and normified. That’s the conversation I wanted to have.
0:01:12 But what I got was so much more. More expansive, more intense, more provocative, and more fun, really.
0:01:28 Doug’s a media theorist, author, and host of the excellent podcast Team Human. But more than that,
0:01:34 he’s a keen observer of the moment with a real gift for dissecting the system that shaped society.
0:01:43 It turns out, his talk about weirding the digital wasn’t just a eulogy. It was more like a call to arms.
0:01:52 By weirding, he means rethink from top to bottom. And by the digital, he really means everything.
0:02:00 And this conversation reflects that. It is all over the place in the best sense possible.
0:02:03 And I’m excited for you to hear it.
0:02:09 Douglas Rushkoff, welcome to the show.
0:02:11 Thanks for having me.
0:02:22 So, we last spoke, as you recall, in 2019. And back then, you and I were lamenting what the internet had become.
0:02:26 I think you’d called it a vast anti-human infrastructure.
0:02:32 You talked about how we were being steamrolled by our technology, by our devices.
0:02:36 How are you feeling now, in 2025?
0:02:40 The same? Better?
0:02:42 A new hope.
0:02:46 Say more.
0:02:52 I feel like there’s a new window of opportunity.
0:03:05 You know, the early cyberdelic, cyberpunk, West Coast, rave-fueled
0:03:08 moment
0:03:12 of the early 90s.
0:03:16 You know, this was a moment of tremendous opportunity.
0:03:22 The kinds of conversations we were having on the well, which was this bulletin board, on Usenet.
0:03:37 The ways that the early net pioneers were envisioning using these technologies to unleash a new collective spirit of creativity was tremendous.
0:03:50 Short-lived, because the machines were very rapidly turned against us by industry in order to extend and amplify the industrial age, right?
0:03:57 Instead of giving people technologies to build new worlds, we used technologies on people to get them to reinforce the same old worlds.
0:04:15 But I feel like artificial intelligence, whether as an idea or as an actual technology, is forcing us to ask some really fundamental questions about how we do things.
0:04:27 And creating another opportunity for kind of a widespread socio-cultural economic reassessment.
0:04:45 You know, we have an opportunity to pivot this doomed civilization towards something way more pro-human, pro-nature, circular, cyclical, and regenerative, if we give it half a chance.
0:04:53 So, before we get there, I did want to talk a little bit about what we lost before we talk about how to make it good again.
0:05:05 You know, you gave a talk recently where you were describing that phase of the early, early internet as a kind of cultural frontier, right?
0:05:13 It was this completely new space for weirdness and experimentation and creativity and connection.
0:05:15 What made it feel that way?
0:05:20 What was possible then that feels impossible or near impossible now?
0:05:36 I wonder–I mean, that moment that you’re talking about when all these things seemed possible, I mean, it was pretty short, you know?
0:05:41 It was like three or four years of wonder.
0:05:48 It’s funny, when there’s a great interview with Jerry Garcia, the guitarist for The Grateful Dead, and they asked him about the ’60s.
0:05:54 And he said, “Well, the 1960s actually happened over a period of about two weeks in the summer of 1968.”
0:05:58 You know, that that was for him was, “The ’60s happened like that.”
0:06:05 It was that brief, that spirit of it.
0:06:23 But I think what happens–and I didn’t realize this, but it happens a lot–is, you know, a new technology or a new possibility, something destabilizing, like the internet, happens, and it creates wobble in a whole lot of systems.
0:06:36 And those of us in culture or even what we call the counterculture, artsy people, psychedelic people, thinking people, living, human, playful people, go, “Wobble, cool!”
0:06:37 You know?
0:06:38 This is cool.
0:06:39 Things can change.
0:06:40 Things are shifting.
0:06:42 The ground is moving.
0:06:44 Power relationships can change.
0:06:46 We can break free of old constructs.
0:06:52 It’s, you know, these–the–the–the–a lot of people look at change differently.
0:06:55 Even the death card in tarot is like, “Ooh!”
0:06:56 You know?
0:07:00 I’m going to shed a skin and something–death means rebirth, right?
0:07:02 Just, “Ooh, what’s going to–what’s coming after that?”
0:07:06 But the powers that be get really afraid.
0:07:16 So I think what happened was when–when the internet happened, we ended up getting a really–a reactionary force came in.
0:07:32 You know, the folks who were saying, “Let’s pedal to the metal with these technologies” were actually the–the people who had current monopolies of one sort or another, who were looking to sort of lock down what was going on.
0:07:42 You know, bless his heart, you know, Kevin Kelly wrote a book in the early internet era called Rules of the New Economy.
0:07:49 And it was about, “Oh, here’s how all the internet era businesses are going to happen,” as if it’s this great revolutionary thing.
0:08:00 But what you read in that book is, “Here’s ten ways for maintaining the old economy in the face of a new digital technology.”
0:08:02 “How do we maintain what we had?”
0:08:13 You know, so we had a bunch of young technologists coming up with an idea, and instead of deploying it the way we did in the early internet, which was as shareware.
0:08:18 “Here it goes. Pay me what you can if you like it, but I just want to see it used.”
0:08:21 And people stayed alive. It was fine.
0:08:30 We shifted from that to venture capital to, “How are we going to make the most money in the least amount of time with this stuff?”
0:08:34 And that’s a very different–very different priority, right?
0:08:40 We used it to double down on extractive capitalism.
0:08:44 And we did it in the most abstracting ways.
0:08:48 The internet kind of goes meta on things.
0:09:02 So just as the stock market goes meta on the economy and derivatives go meta on the stock market and so on and so on, digital systems are also very symbolic and once removed.
0:09:15 And so they further all the kinds of things that we saw, like people like Marx writing about in the industrial age, how there’s a rentier over the renter and an investor over the rentier.
0:09:23 The further away you get from the real world, the more money you make by leveraging those poor suckers down in the real world actually lifting dirt.
0:09:31 And so it feels like the internet was used for that and got us into this current very disconnected mess.
0:09:34 What was it that killed that organic weirdness?
0:09:36 Was it the monetization of everything?
0:09:39 I mean, was that when it started to shift?
0:09:56 A lot of time, I did blame, like, Wired Magazine, you know, 1993, you know, Wired Magazine launched and reframed this cultural renaissance as an economic revolution.
0:09:58 They said, you know, a tsunami is coming.
0:10:01 Either you get on the wave or you’re going to be run over by it.
0:10:04 They actually did a cover called The Long Boom.
0:10:14 They said, thanks to digital technology, the stock market, the global stock market and economy will grow exponentially uninterrupted forever.
0:10:17 That was their new economic model.
0:10:18 What’s not to like, Doug?
0:10:18 What’s not to like?
0:10:22 Even Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said, yeah, new paradigm.
0:10:26 You know, these digital technologies are going to increase the surface area on the market.
0:10:30 We had colonized every place we could colonize, the whole world.
0:10:36 We had reached, you know, full-tilt capitalism, but where could we expand to?
0:10:40 The internet was going to create infinite surface area on the market.
0:10:44 So now we had, you know, basically an infinite shopping mall.
0:10:49 But the thing that was fixed in that, and a few people realized this, was human attention.
0:10:54 There’s only so much surface area on humanity to pay attention and spend and do stuff.
0:11:02 So they created all these really anti-human metrics like eyeball hours and website stickiness.
0:11:04 Those are the metrics they used to use for success.
0:11:09 And it all had to do with operating humans through technologies.
0:11:11 And then social media came.
0:11:16 We turned an asynchronous technology into an always-on technology.
0:11:27 So you’re living in the state of constant kind of emergency interruption and digital manipulation of your nervous system.
0:11:30 And that, you know, that’s a big part of it.
0:11:31 So that’s economic.
0:11:38 But, you know, then as I talked more and more to the bros themselves, I guess, I realized-
0:11:39 The tech bros?
0:11:39 Yeah.
0:11:40 It wasn’t just money.
0:11:50 You know, there’s also something, a second lineage, which is in the way we develop science and technology
0:11:57 around sort of engineering feats rather than genuine discovery.
0:12:06 And, you know, when you look at the way we deployed science in order to quantify everything,
0:12:09 And if something can’t be quantified, it’s not real.
0:12:11 You kill the butterfly.
0:12:13 Stick a pin in it and weigh it.
0:12:16 And that’s your way of understanding life.
0:12:21 It’s decontextualized and abstracted and killed.
0:12:28 And it dovetailed really nicely with capitalism’s drive towards linear progress and always moving forward.
0:12:32 And you can pave over the world as long as you keep going.
0:12:33 It doesn’t matter who you kill.
0:12:35 The ends justifies the means.
0:12:37 We’re going to this thing.
0:12:40 Was this outcome inevitable?
0:12:41 You know this.
0:12:48 Capitalism is fantastic at neutralizing anything that might subvert it.
0:12:51 It doesn’t destroy counterculture.
0:12:55 It just absorbs it, packages it, sells it back to us.
0:13:10 I mean, is there a semi-plausible alternate timeline where the internet didn’t go this way, where it didn’t get devoured and transformed into whatever it is today, a giant profitable skinner box?
0:13:14 I mean, I guess this goes to questions of free will.
0:13:26 Um, whether it was inevitable or not, um, to me seems less important than is it fungible or not?
0:13:29 Is it changeable or not?
0:13:34 I mean, sure, we could have taken other paths.
0:13:49 Mark Andreessen could have chosen not to take Netscape public and become a complete, uh, uh, you know, libertarian, I don’t even know what you call it.
0:13:51 Uh, techno-idealist.
0:13:52 Techno-fantasist?
0:13:53 Yeah, techno-utopian.
0:13:53 Techno-fantasist.
0:14:04 You know, uh, uh, people could have seen that, you know, Steve Case using AOL to buy Time Warner was going to be a bad deal and not a good deal.
0:14:09 Uh, you know, people could have chosen differently.
0:14:23 But to me, that’s less important than whether we can recontextualize this last 30 or 40 years as our infancy, our practice.
0:14:30 You know, the, the, as far as I’m concerned, the internet’s only really starting now.
0:14:40 Marshall McLuhan said that each new medium begins by taking the prior medium and turning it into its content.
0:14:48 So, on the internet, you know, the internet turned books and magazines and newspapers into its content.
0:14:56 Then it turned radio into its content with their early pre-podcasts.
0:15:00 Then it turned TV into its content, which is its main content today.
0:15:06 It’s Netflix and all of our streaming media is basically internet content.
0:15:14 But now, I feel like AI may be the first kind of native app of the internet.
0:15:21 AI is the first medium that is using the internet as its content.
0:15:23 It’s the first one.
0:15:30 So, if we can look at this whole catastrophe that we’ve lived through and that most of us lament
0:15:39 as that early stage, our early lessons with the internet before it began as preschool,
0:15:43 now we can say, oh, now that we’ve got this stuff,
0:15:50 what if instead of just doubling down on extractive, industrial, closed-minded capitalism,
0:15:58 what if we explored the generative potential of cybernetic technologies?
0:16:05 Well, that talk I mentioned earlier that you gave at South by Southwest, I mean, the whole,
0:16:10 I forget what it was called, but the theme was, you know, re-weirding the internet or-
0:16:10 Yeah, or something like that.
0:16:11 Re-weirding the net.
0:16:12 Weirding the net.
0:16:13 We’ve got to re-weird the world.
0:16:15 We’ve got to re-weird each other.
0:16:17 Fold the weird back into the middle.
0:16:18 Yeah.
0:16:20 What does that mean?
0:16:23 What is it that you mean by weirdness?
0:16:24 Why do we need more of it?
0:16:36 I mean, most simply, what I like to do, and I do this in most of my books,
0:16:40 is I try to make things strange.
0:16:48 And once you make things strange, we can look at them objectively.
0:16:55 So, a guy was on, I was on Jake Tapper talking about AI, and they were trying to get me upset
0:16:58 about AI on one of the days when I couldn’t care less about AI.
0:17:03 And finally, he goes, well, what about the unemployment problem?
0:17:08 And I said, well, what about the unemployment solution?
0:17:12 What’s a job?
0:17:13 Do you want a job?
0:17:14 I don’t want a job.
0:17:16 I want stuff.
0:17:20 I want meaningful participation in society.
0:17:22 I want people to care about me.
0:17:25 I might even like a place to go where people know who I am.
0:17:27 But I don’t want a job.
0:17:30 Where do jobs come from?
0:17:35 And then if you really play, you know, sociologist or anthropologist, jobs were invented in the
0:17:36 late Middle Ages.
0:17:37 People didn’t used to have jobs.
0:17:38 They worked.
0:17:38 They created stuff.
0:17:39 They traded stuff.
0:17:45 Jobs only came about because the kings invented this thing called chartered monopolies, which
0:17:48 was to prevent regular people from making money.
0:17:52 The kings invented the chartered monopoly, which said that the only one who was allowed to do
0:17:57 business in a particular vertical, in a particular industry, is going to be this friend who’s going
0:17:58 to give me a kickback.
0:18:04 So, Sean, you have His Majesty’s Royal Jams and Jellies Company, and anybody else who
0:18:11 makes jams and jellies now has to be an employee of His Majesty’s Royal Jams and Jellies Company.
0:18:13 That’s when they invented wage labor.
0:18:16 That’s when you started to punch the clock.
0:18:17 That’s when they-
0:18:18 All right, hold on, hold on.
0:18:19 You’re going too big.
0:18:20 You’re losing me.
0:18:21 What does this have to do with being weird?
0:18:24 I’m making jobs strange.
0:18:28 So, most people wake up thinking, you have to have a job.
0:18:31 Jobs have always been here.
0:18:34 The way you live is by having a job.
0:18:36 God made jobs.
0:18:44 What I’m saying is, if you look back and think, wait a minute, what is a job?
0:18:46 Where did jobs come from?
0:18:48 Who invented jobs?
0:18:51 Who do they favor?
0:18:53 Why do we have this system?
0:18:54 And is there another one?
0:19:03 When you make jobs weird, then those who’ve been weirded out, we the weird people, can then
0:19:07 remake them in ways that make sense, right?
0:19:11 You make things weird so the weird can make things.
0:19:14 If you get stoned and look at money, right?
0:19:20 You look at money when you’re high, and you’re just like, what is this?
0:19:21 What is this?
0:19:26 Why do people, or when you’re three or four, and you see your parents putting this money
0:19:27 and they get stuff.
0:19:31 It’s like, oh, give me some of that paper so I can get some toys, right?
0:19:32 What is this?
0:19:34 This is, we know this is nothing, right?
0:19:38 And then it’s faith, it’s something, it’s federal.
0:19:39 What is this?
0:19:41 And why does it work the way it does?
0:19:43 And why do certain people get to have it and other ones don’t?
0:19:48 And we see that you understand, again, go back, when was this kind of money invented?
0:19:52 There used to be other kinds of money that was to allow people to trade and get what they
0:19:52 wanted.
0:19:57 It wasn’t to make bankers rich at the expense of people who need to transact, which is what
0:19:58 this money’s for.
0:20:04 So by making money weird, you open it up for discussion and reinvention.
0:20:07 Now we can rewrite our own money.
0:20:09 That’s what making things weird is for.
0:20:14 And the internet made a lot of things weird at the beginning.
0:20:15 Wait a minute.
0:20:24 Money, value, communication, power, any new medium, any new media environment makes things
0:20:24 weird.
0:20:30 And then there’s a scramble for who’s going to get to define what this is.
0:20:37 So what I was arguing was that the opportunity with all these new technologies is to make obsolete
0:20:41 cultural, social, societal systems to make them weird.
0:20:48 To do in a more advanced philosophical language, it would be called denaturalizing power.
0:20:53 There’s a lot of things that have been naturalized, like the idea that you have to commute to work,
0:21:01 the idea that you have to pay taxes for this, or a lot of the way that power is distributed
0:21:04 in our society have been naturalized and institutionalized.
0:21:11 When you look at the institution from the perspective of a hacker, what we used to call the hacker
0:21:15 mentality, it’s like, oh, is this up for reinvention?
0:21:17 But look, on the ground level, right?
0:21:18 I mean, look, I agree.
0:21:27 If you peer closely enough into the foundations of any system of power or control, you’ll find
0:21:28 that it’s all made up.
0:21:36 But here, on the ground, where we all live and breathe and try to survive, these are real
0:21:37 dangers, right?
0:21:38 And people depend on jobs.
0:21:39 Without them, they’ll go hungry.
0:21:40 They can’t feed their family.
0:21:42 They can’t send their kids to school.
0:21:47 It’s one thing to pontificate about the weirdness of it all and how it could all be—it’s all
0:21:51 a construct, and we could transform it overnight or almost overnight.
0:21:52 Who says that?
0:21:53 That’s the part that—you’re tricky.
0:21:54 That’s the part—
0:21:54 Well, you know what I’m saying.
0:21:55 I’m just saying, like, what do we do?
0:21:56 Yeah, but I do know what you say.
0:22:02 So first, we need to understand that even though on the internet you click on something
0:22:10 and it happens, if you’re going to have a widespread civilizational shift, it’s going
0:22:12 to take time, right?
0:22:13 You’re going to have to breathe.
0:22:16 We’re not going to flip the entire civilization overnight.
0:22:17 It’s true.
0:22:18 Absolutely true.
0:22:21 So how do you start, right?
0:22:26 The way you start is really simply, really locally, and really at home, right?
0:22:37 The first step I would take towards a post-employment society of 2300, say, you know, let’s say
0:22:40 year 2300, we get there.
0:22:45 The first thing would be something as simple, and I’ve talked about this before.
0:22:49 It’s like, if you need to hang a picture in your house and you realize you don’t have a
0:22:55 drill, what’s the first thing most Americans will do is go to the Home Depot, buy a minimum
0:23:01 viable product drill, charge it up, use it to drill one hole in the wall, put it in the
0:23:05 garage, maybe never use it again, or come back in a year and it won’t recharge and you throw
0:23:05 it out.
0:23:12 So the huge carbon imprint, huge amount of labor and a huge expenditure in this anti-social
0:23:13 consumer act.
0:23:19 The alternative, and this is super hard for a lot of people, but the alternative would be to walk down
0:23:21 the street, go to Bob’s house.
0:23:22 Bob has all these tools.
0:23:23 He’s always making shit.
0:23:26 Knock on his door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill?
0:23:30 And use Bob’s drill that once and give it back.
0:23:33 Or in most cases, Bob is going to come over and drill the hole for you because you don’t
0:23:35 know how to find a stud, you fucking nerd.
0:23:37 You know, I’m going to find the stud for it.
0:23:41 I’m going to drill it, hang the picture, and he’s going to plug it in the wall like God intended,
0:23:44 a real fucking drill, and go home.
0:23:49 And after he does that, though, Bob is then going to expect, well, you know, I just did this
0:23:54 nice thing for Doug, and now he’s having a party, barbecue party this weekend.
0:23:58 He’s going to smell the steaks cooking and think, well, I drilled a hole for Doug.
0:24:00 He should probably invite me over.
0:24:01 So then I invite Bob over.
0:24:05 Then the other neighbors are wondering why they’re not over at my house.
0:24:08 And so I end up inviting most of my neighbors, and we have a block party at our house and talk
0:24:09 about how we’re borrowing shit.
0:24:14 Then someone gets an idea, hey, you know, what if we all use the same two lawnmowers on our
0:24:16 block rather than everyone buy their own lawnmower?
0:24:17 You know, it’s an expense.
0:24:19 It’s a lot of pollution and stuff.
0:24:22 You know, we could just, you know, I can have this one Mondays, Wednesdays.
0:24:23 You can have Tuesdays, Thursdays.
0:24:24 Yeah, that makes sense.
0:24:25 Let’s do that, and we’ll save some money.
0:24:29 That’s the way you transform a society.
0:24:35 Now, I talked about that at a more economics-type businessy conference, and someone got up at
0:24:39 the end and said, well, yeah, but what about the drill company?
0:24:45 If you let people borrow drills and lawnmowers from each other, people are going to lose their
0:24:46 jobs.
0:24:49 They’re going to lose their jobs at the drill company.
0:24:51 And what about the shareholders of the drill company?
0:24:53 And so, again, it doesn’t happen overnight.
0:24:58 Let’s say we have 100 years to slowly adapt to people borrowing more.
0:24:59 It’s not going to get everything.
0:25:02 We’re still going to need some drills and some lawnmowers.
0:25:06 But what if we only need 10 or 20 percent of the amount that we’re making now?
0:25:10 You know, what if we need actually less stuff than the economy needs?
0:25:17 Then what we would have to do is decide, just as they decided in the late Middle Ages, to
0:25:22 build an economy around the needs of monarchs who wanted to maintain their aristocracy in
0:25:23 the face of a rising middle class.
0:25:31 We might have to rejigger the economy a little bit incrementally over time.
0:25:37 Again, it’s radical, but to support human flourishing in a time of abundance.
0:25:38 It’s not against the rules.
0:25:40 But we were talking about the internet.
0:25:48 And I’m wondering, the internet that we have now, how can it help us get closer to that world?
0:25:54 Because the internet we have now seems to be pulling us further and further apart.
0:26:00 It seems to be making us less and less weird, more and more predictable, more and more isolated.
0:26:05 And, you know, that seems to be the opposite of the kind of world you want to live in and
0:26:07 the kind of world I want to live in.
0:26:07 Right.
0:26:10 I think it’s by people making different choices.
0:26:17 You know, the best thing the internet can do immediately is pose these sorts of questions.
0:26:26 Now, that’s what AI is doing, I think, right now, more than the last few rounds.
0:26:28 Is it what people are doing?
0:26:35 The platforms that we’re using to think and speak and communicate and share information,
0:26:37 are they allowing us to do this?
0:26:42 Or are they incentivizing precisely the opposite, which is why we have the problem that we have?
0:26:45 Well, most of them are incentivizing the opposite.
0:26:50 But our money system incentivizes the opposite.
0:26:54 Our competitive educational system emphasizes the opposite.
0:27:03 Even kids in elementary and middle school are already learning, adopting a style of learning
0:27:08 designed to get them into an elite college rather than learn anything or explore anything.
0:27:18 So, yes, you know, existing institutions, of course, they are, if anything, working hard
0:27:25 and consciously to reinforce the mindsets that serve the people at the top.
0:27:26 Absolutely.
0:27:31 Which could mean we shouldn’t try.
0:27:40 It could mean we just make as much money as you can, as quickly as you can, and enjoy the years that you have left
0:27:46 before the climate refugees and other horrible things and diseases kill you and your children.
0:28:00 Or you can slowly, and I’m starting to see it, I see people kind of either hitting bottom with the tech,
0:28:07 with the social media, with the way it works, or discovering embodied experiences,
0:28:14 making eye contact with someone else, having a walk, going to a museum, breathing clean air,
0:28:18 going to a European country.
0:28:23 I mean, it’s really fun to watch students come back from Europe and go,
0:28:26 God, you know, they had these, like, public services.
0:28:28 Isn’t that a really cool idea?
0:28:34 Like, clean trains and parks and stuff and health care and, oh, look at all those possibilities.
0:28:42 Not that we have to go socialist or lefty, but just they see that there’s other ways of living.
0:28:45 And then you slowly change.
0:28:52 You know, every minute that a person chooses to spend engaged in meaningful interaction with another person
0:28:57 in their life is one minute less, you know, surrendered to these dudes.
0:29:05 So, yeah, it may be that Twitter may not be an environment conducive to the conversation
0:29:08 that we think will heal us as a society.
0:29:09 You’re right there.
0:29:16 Well, I will say, I mean, look, certainly when there are periods of significant change,
0:29:24 that does create the space for seeing things differently, reorganizing relationships in society.
0:29:32 And if I understand you, right, if we take weirdness to mean not just individuality, right,
0:29:38 but something more than that, it’s thinking outside the constraints of the system and imagining something different and new.
0:29:40 And that is awesome.
0:29:42 We need more weirdos.
0:29:45 Yeah, but that’s only the first step.
0:29:51 I think a lot of creativity, a lot of dissent comes out of weirdness, and I’m here for it, man.
0:29:59 But I am curious how you explain a paradox that I’m constantly wrestling with.
0:30:03 I mean, we’ve never had more tools to express ourselves.
0:30:16 And yet, digital culture, social media especially, feels so homogenous and derivative, like it’s engineered to just produce sameness.
0:30:23 I mean, is that just what happens when shit gets monetized at scale like this?
0:30:30 Because it’s making it harder and harder to be weird in the ways you’re describing.
0:30:34 Well, there’s a difference, yeah.
0:30:39 I mean, there’s a difference between being weird and being noticed.
0:30:40 Say more.
0:30:46 Well, the object of the game on social media is for people to notice you.
0:30:51 It’s to perform and get an audience.
0:30:58 And that’s not the only metric for successful cultural engineering.
0:31:10 There’s people interacting hand-to-hand, face-to-face in communities, changing lives, who have no clicks, or may not even be on there.
0:31:28 You know, I met a death doula who is, you know, a death doula is someone who sits with people when they die and helps them metabolize that passage and helps the family, you know, experience this shift in a transformative way rather than just as the ending of something.
0:31:31 And they change lives.
0:31:34 They change the way people move through the world.
0:31:45 You know, they sit with a family for one week and change five lives so profoundly that those five people, every interaction they have, you know, over the next 10 years is different.
0:31:51 The way they are at work, the way they vote, the way they engage with their friends, the way they talk at the pub, everything is different.
0:32:02 So that ripples out, out and up in a way that the million person following, follower, influencer does not.
0:32:06 You know, so there are ways, there are ways to do that.
0:32:16 I mean, it’s also, you know, I put out this kind of a theory of change that it really, it starts with the weird, right?
0:32:17 With embracing the weird.
0:32:21 It starts with denaturalizing power.
0:32:30 But once you’ve denaturalized power, it only really matters if it triggers your agency to re-engineer things in a different way.
0:32:39 Once Dorothy sees that the Wizard of Oz is a social construction, it’s just this dude behind a curtain, right?
0:32:42 She has weirded power, right?
0:32:43 She goes, oh, I get it.
0:32:45 That’s just a hologram up there.
0:32:45 It’s this.
0:32:47 What do they do next?
0:32:49 Is they reconstruct their own contract.
0:32:50 Here’s your heart.
0:32:51 Here’s your brain.
0:32:55 You know, having those things is a matter of you deciding that’s what you have.
0:32:56 And they’ve been innate in you all along.
0:32:57 You don’t need this thing.
0:32:59 They go to the next level.
0:33:06 So triggering agency is triggering people to say, oh, if this currency doesn’t work for us, what would a local currency look like?
0:33:08 What would a blockchain look like even?
0:33:17 What kinds of ways can we trade that don’t just require the infinite expansion of capital to preserve a banking system?
0:33:22 And once you do that, you realize, oh, once my agency’s triggered, I can’t do this alone.
0:33:23 I need other people.
0:33:28 So the third stage of my theory of change is re-socialize people.
0:33:38 Have people working and playing together in order to realize these things rather than being, you know, a single sole person on social media, which is what social media wants to do.
0:33:43 You know, and then finally, once you’ve re-socialized, you cultivate awe.
0:33:50 Once you’re working with other people, you start to get those, all those great feelings you get when you’ve established rapport with other humans.
0:33:58 And that’s, to the powers that be, our experiences of true awe is the most dangerous thing to them.
0:34:10 When you experience true awe of socializing or being with other people, you’re so much less dependent on the vertigo of their platforms that imitate, you know, awe.
0:34:11 But they’re not awe at all.
0:34:43 And they’re not awe at all.
0:34:45 Fox Creative.
0:34:47 This is advertiser content from Upwork.
0:34:54 Brian Goldsman says his company started the way most do, as a side hustle.
0:34:58 What we say is we’re a physical marketing company.
0:35:03 Liquid screen design, merch, or promotional products, or swag, whatever anybody calls it, that’s what we do.
0:35:10 But after seven years of profit, Brian and his business partner had to decide if liquid screen design could become more than a hobby.
0:35:18 We were talking about it, and we said, we have to make $300,000 in the year in sales.
0:35:22 Okay, how are we ever going to do $1,000 a day in sales?
0:35:26 We realized it could not just be the two of us, and we needed to start hiring additional support.
0:35:39 You know, it’s not just fixing the logo that you already have, but it’s also full custom design.
0:35:46 Anything from caricatures of people, to logo redesigns, to unique products that we’re specking out.
0:35:54 We can do things that a lot of other people in our industry can’t do because we basically have created our own art department.
0:35:59 It’s about getting the best possible talent wherever they are in the world.
0:36:03 What started out as a side hustle turned into a thriving business.
0:36:05 At this point, we have 30 employees.
0:36:08 Nine of them are what we call global talent.
0:36:15 They’re full-time employees of liquid screen design, but they’ve been hired, and we manage the whole process through Upwork.
0:36:21 We could not be what liquid screen design is today without our Upwork freelancers.
0:36:23 Smarter work starts here.
0:36:27 See how Upwork can help your business grow at upwork.com slash updates.
0:36:44 We can’t go back to the old internet.
0:36:47 It just doesn’t work like that, right?
0:36:50 Well, we can retrieve the best qualities of the old internet.
0:36:57 Is there a version of the internet we have now that can replicate that?
0:36:59 Can it be redesigned?
0:37:10 Is there a new business model that can make it work, or does this thing have to be torn down to the studs so that some other thing can take its place?
0:37:13 I’m not a tear-down-to-the-studs kind of guy.
0:37:19 I mean, I’m more mycelial in my approach, I guess.
0:37:20 You’re such a hippie.
0:37:21 You’re such a hippie.
0:37:23 But I do think you can…
0:37:24 I love it.
0:37:26 …grow new tendrils.
0:37:37 I think we can treat the current internet as the latticework on which a new structure of vines can develop.
0:37:56 I mean, here you and I are talking about the real thing on a medium that, as you say, 90% of the conversations between dudes on here would be about, you know, our friggin’ stoicism and penile strength and bro thing.
0:38:00 You know, all that shit, you know, that or…
0:38:01 That’s my C block.
0:38:06 Yeah, or we’d be Gary Vee kind of like, oh, and here’s what you do.
0:38:12 And then, you know, send a second email back to them that automatically comes and takes your followers and then puts them in the second group.
0:38:13 And then you A-B test that.
0:38:16 You know, there’s all that.
0:38:18 And here we are talking about earnestly together.
0:38:20 Doug, you got to get back on the rails here.
0:38:21 All right.
0:38:21 We got to…
0:38:23 We have to produce a show here.
0:38:26 And I had a plan, but I’m…
0:38:28 That plan is so far in the fucking ether now.
0:38:29 We can do the plan.
0:38:30 We can do the plan.
0:38:31 I’m just trying to ride with you.
0:38:33 Like, I just…
0:38:34 I want…
0:38:34 I want…
0:38:36 Well, you sounded so negative, so I wanted to fight back.
0:38:37 No, no, no.
0:38:38 Well, I may be a little negative.
0:38:40 But I want to feel like we’re going somewhere.
0:38:43 And I want to feel like there’s something concrete and useful here.
0:38:45 And you are trying to…
0:38:46 To which person?
0:38:47 The audience?
0:38:48 Which kind of person?
0:38:48 Right.
0:38:53 Well, the person who thinks the internet is fucked up in the ways we do and is pining for
0:38:57 something better and wondering if we can get there with the system that we have?
0:38:58 Well, it depends.
0:38:59 So there’s different peoples.
0:39:00 All right.
0:39:02 So let’s talk to different communities.
0:39:02 There’s builders.
0:39:04 All right.
0:39:10 So let’s talk to the builders, the actual software engineers who have already partnered with people
0:39:20 who understand how human beings socialize and who already have positive visions for more
0:39:28 regenerative communities of care and who are leaning into human flourishing.
0:39:35 I would say, first off, use a nonprofit model rather than a for-profit model.
0:39:40 You can make a ton of money with a nonprofit by paying yourself a big salary rather than
0:39:43 taking investment and needing to pay off somebody else.
0:39:48 There’s a lot of people playing around in this space.
0:39:56 And I don’t think it’s beyond the realm if you look at what do people actually need in
0:39:57 order to engage with each other.
0:40:04 You know, the other thing I’m starting to notice in functional social networks is more of
0:40:13 the kind of the discord effect where a tide pool of people with a common interest do better than
0:40:16 these infinite social networks.
0:40:21 You don’t want a social network that’s open to everybody all the time because no one wants
0:40:23 to speak to the whole world at once.
0:40:24 And if they do, they’re crazy.
0:40:25 Can I ask you a question?
0:40:26 Yeah.
0:40:31 You may hate me for asking, but I trust our budding friendship can survive it.
0:40:31 Yeah.
0:40:39 Do you ever wonder if the real problem isn’t the tech but us, that most people don’t actually
0:40:45 want to be weird or free in the ways you talk about, that we just want to be distracted,
0:40:49 entertained, stupefied, and that’s why this system that we have is so profitable?
0:40:50 Yeah.
0:40:53 Well, that’s what I’ve been saying all along, but you keep taking it back to, yeah, but how
0:40:54 do we make tech that does this?
0:40:56 Or how do we make tech that does that?
0:41:03 What I’m saying is the best the tech can offer us right now is to reveal to us the problems
0:41:06 in our other social institutions and systems.
0:41:16 So what we need is the courage to realize, no, human nature is not the extractive force of
0:41:17 central currency.
0:41:23 When central currency, and this is on topic, not off, when central currency was implemented,
0:41:24 there were wars.
0:41:30 People fought to be able to use their own local currency in their own local marketplace.
0:41:38 You need to borrow coin of the realm at interest, at usury prices in order for you to trade laterally
0:41:39 between each other.
0:41:40 Same thing.
0:41:43 We had an internet that was a public utility.
0:41:44 You’re all talking to each other.
0:41:45 No, no, no, no.
0:41:49 If you’re going to use the internet, you need a four-pay ISP.
0:41:50 You need a four-pay this.
0:41:55 You need to be on commercial platforms in order to engage with one another.
0:42:00 No one thinks of the internet as the public utility that it really is.
0:42:02 So absolutely, absolutely, you’re right.
0:42:04 But it’s not human nature.
0:42:10 It’s only human nature to the extent that we’ve internalized the values of the systems that
0:42:19 we use, which is why we need to start looking at things as weird as they are, as imposed,
0:42:21 as arbitrary as they are.
0:42:27 And new media environments, the best thing they do, the best thing the internet does is
0:42:29 lead us to see the world differently.
0:42:35 Once you’ve programmed something, once you’ve had to save a program as read or read-write,
0:42:43 you think, how much else of this world has been saved as read-only but is actually read-write?
0:42:46 And that’s what I’m trying to engender.
0:42:55 Where you’re right is that human beings may be too lazy and too passive to actually want to
0:43:03 take on the responsibility of rethinking how things work.
0:43:05 But most of us don’t.
0:43:07 By the way, I don’t believe that to be true.
0:43:08 I was just floating the question.
0:43:08 Oh, good.
0:43:09 Yeah.
0:43:10 I mean, it’s possible.
0:43:10 I’m not that cynical.
0:43:13 I am cynical enough to believe in the Pareto principle.
0:43:17 You know, 80% of people just tell me what to do.
0:43:23 And 20% of people are like, oh, let me participate in the committee to figure out how things are done.
0:43:25 You know, I would buy that.
0:43:37 But what we need is more widespread willingness to lean into these more interdependent but uncertain futures together.
0:43:43 No, I think people are pretty plastic or certainly more plastic than we think.
0:43:44 I don’t think human nature is fixed.
0:43:54 I think what we have now is a really profound misalignment between our actual interest and the incentives of the systems that we live in.
0:43:58 And I’m always interested in how to correct that misalignment.
0:44:05 I mean, it’s part of what you preach that, look, the internet can be a lot of things, some of them good, some of them bad.
0:44:07 Right.
0:44:22 Are there spaces on the web now that feel like maybe not like rough approximations of what the early internet was, but spaces that give you hope that it can be this rather than what we have now for the most part?
0:44:28 Where I generally see it is like a Google Doc that someone will set up after, oh, there’s been a flood here.
0:44:29 Who needs what?
0:44:30 Who has what?
0:44:31 Where do we pick it up?
0:44:35 And they’ll make a Google Doc or a spreadsheet and just list stuff.
0:44:38 You know, the tech is so easy.
0:44:39 It’s not the tech.
0:44:42 It’s the will to use it in those ways.
0:44:50 So I see it more locally and less sustained, but I am starting to see it.
0:45:10 There’s a friend of mine in Yonkers started a website for people to share unused medical supplies, and then she ships them to Africa and parts of America where they need gauze and diapers and tubes and whatever.
0:45:12 There’s those kind of things.
0:45:14 Sure.
0:45:15 Sure.
0:45:18 They’re just not usually scaled in that way.
0:45:20 That’s the word that was on the tip of my tongue.
0:45:23 Maybe it’s just too damn big.
0:45:24 I mean, the thing about the early internet-
0:45:26 But do you need scale is the question.
0:45:28 Well, that is the question.
0:45:29 I’m into more distributed.
0:45:34 You know, scale, people always look at my things and they say, oh, how would they scale?
0:45:34 How would they scale?
0:45:35 What if scale is the problem?
0:45:38 What if operating society at scale doesn’t work?
0:45:43 And there’s certain things that have to happen at scale as a last resort, but most things we just do for each other locally.
0:45:46 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:47 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:48 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:48 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:49 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:50 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:51 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:51 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:52 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:53 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:54 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:54 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:56 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:57 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:58 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:45:59 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:00 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:01 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:03 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:03 We’ll see you in the next resort.
0:46:20 This episode comes exclusively from Upwork, the human and AI-powered freelance marketplace
0:46:25 that says they can help your company connect to expert talent using AI-native tools, so
0:46:28 you can scale faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
0:46:32 One of those tools is Uma, Upwork’s mindful work companion.
0:46:36 Uma can help streamline the process from start to finish, from generating job descriptions
0:46:40 to filtering candidates and facilitating team communication.
0:46:45 Uma can even help the freelance professionals you hire by supporting proposal writing, project
0:46:49 management, and features to focus less on busy work and more on the high-value work they
0:46:50 were hired to do.
0:46:56 And when you sign up with the Business Plus, you’ll get access to Upwork’s top 1% of talent,
0:46:59 freelancers who have been vetted for their skill and reliability.
0:47:03 Upwork will even send a personalized list of freelancer recommendations within hours of
0:47:04 signing up.
0:47:10 As AI becomes a bigger part of business, Upwork is here to help you not just adapt, but thrive
0:47:11 in this new world of work.
0:47:16 Check out what Upwork can do for your business at Upwork.com/updates.
0:47:20 That’s Upwork.com/updates for more information.
0:47:28 You seem like the type that lives out your ideas.
0:47:43 I mean, like, what are you doing in your own life?
0:47:46 What are you doing to re-weird the world and the internet or whatever?
0:47:56 I mean, I’m catching up in some ways or making up for lost time.
0:48:00 I spent a majority of my career in the mind.
0:48:09 You know, I’ve written, what, 25 books, delivered thousands of lectures and written hundreds and
0:48:10 hundreds of articles.
0:48:28 But, you know, I only kind of recently rediscovered, you know, ceremony, ecstatic dance, you know,
0:48:31 embodied kind of somatic experience.
0:48:35 So, I’m kind of catching up there.
0:48:43 I’m kind of experimenting with sort of the re-enchantment of moment to moment existence.
0:48:44 I’m…
0:48:49 That just sounds like logging the fuck off and touching some grass and saying hello to
0:48:50 your neighbor, Steve, down the street or…
0:48:52 Yeah, but…
0:48:55 Just getting together with people in three dimensions.
0:49:02 And appreciating how profoundly enriching and satisfying it is.
0:49:05 We’re here for such a short amount of time.
0:49:16 We are living on a planet when so many people are suffering unnecessarily, largely as a result
0:49:20 of our own actions.
0:49:32 I feel like the more social and integrated and connected I can help people be, the less strain
0:49:40 we’re going to put on these global systems, um, the less brittle those systems will be and
0:49:50 the… the less damaging, um, we will be to, um, the people who are, are, uh, uh, uh, necessarily
0:49:54 damaged by the systems that we no longer need to support.
0:50:00 I can’t tell if you’re a reform or a revolutionary guy.
0:50:01 Are you reform or revolution?
0:50:10 You know, I, I would put it like this: I used to see myself as an activist.
0:50:21 And I feel like I’ve changed from an agent of change to an agent of care.
0:50:28 That it’s not about me knowing where things need to go or what we need to implement.
0:50:31 But I’ve kind of shifted, originally I was thinking I was shifting toward palliative care.
0:50:33 I’m not going to try to save the world anymore.
0:50:37 I’m just going to try to make people feel better.
0:50:45 Um, and now I realize that making people feel better actually is probably the shortest path
0:50:53 toward the kind of changes that we need to save the world in the process.
0:50:57 That’s a nice breath.
0:50:59 I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to end this.
0:51:02 We were, we were so all over the place.
0:51:08 Um, I don’t know, is there anything, is there anything else you want to say?
0:51:13 Is there anything else you feel like we could talk about that would help, um, everything
0:51:15 else we said hang together?
0:51:16 Yeah.
0:51:22 I mean, I would say this, um, one experiment that I’ve been doing is when I’m on the internet,
0:51:27 and I think of it, I put my feet on the ground.
0:51:29 I notice my feet are off the ground a lot.
0:51:34 I put my feet on the ground and become conscious of my feet on the ground.
0:51:41 Or if I’m doing a series of emails and feeling myself getting weird in the bad way, I stop
0:51:46 and take two nice, slow, conscious breaths.
0:51:55 And I know it sounds new age, I know it sounds weird and all that, but it actually does make
0:52:07 a difference to remember I am an embodied frigging human being in front of a computer looking at letters
0:52:20 and words, and it changes the amount of power I feel I have over what’s going on, and it changes,
0:52:32 it increases the number of options I feel I have in how I respond to each ping.
0:52:40 And that alone, um, does change the way I look at this stuff.
0:52:50 You seem, maybe more than anyone else I’ve talked to or listened to or read, you have this way of
0:53:01 being very pessimistic about what’s happening, but also exuberant and joyful in the way you talk
0:53:06 about it so that it actually doesn’t feel like you’re pessimistic. It feels like you’re actually
0:53:09 hopeful, even though you’re describing all the ways things are completely fucked.
0:53:11 Right. I mean, we have to acknowledge-
0:53:12 Is that a conscious thing for you, or?
0:53:17 Yeah, I guess so. I mean, we have to acknowledge that
0:53:25 it’s likely that a majority of human beings on this planet will
0:53:32 die, you know, by the end of this century, even, unnecessarily.
0:53:34 Well, that’s dark.
0:53:40 Given that, right? You know, given that, um…
0:53:54 Given that death, what, what can be reborn in such a context? You know?
0:53:58 What? What can be?
0:54:00 Let’s see.
0:54:08 You know, we, we, I think we have to be open to what can be reborn in such a context.
0:54:16 You know, I don’t think we can strategize it. I feel like that’s what keeps me writing in some ways.
0:54:22 Do you think I’m too fatalistic or too deterministic? You mentioned McLuhan. I’ve read McLuhan. I read
0:54:27 Neil Postman and some of the other media ecologists, and they sort of convinced me over time that
0:54:34 we really are prisoners of our technologies in ways I never quite appreciated before. And I just,
0:54:40 I look at what these tools have done to us, how they’ve, how we’ve become the tools of our tools
0:54:47 in so many ways. And I sometimes have a hard time seeing how we can escape the gravitational pull
0:54:52 of all these forces of the digital world that you mentioned earlier. But do you think I’m, anyway,
0:54:53 I’ll stop talking.
0:55:06 No, I mean, I think you, um, admirably keep asking, “So what can we do about this, this, this, and that?”
0:55:13 And are correctly saying, “Well, we can’t do this. We can’t do that. We can’t do this.”
0:55:22 And it makes it feel like we’re out of options. And what I’m suggesting is
0:55:31 start by not doing anything. That doing is…
0:55:32 I can do that.
0:55:33 Right.
0:55:34 I can definitely do that.
0:55:44 Stop, breathe, be with it for a moment and go, “Okay, not everything is okay as it should
0:55:48 be and all that.” Because obviously it’s fucked up and a lot of people are dying and suffering
0:55:55 unnecessarily. And our technologies and the way we use them, you know, I may do more damage with a
0:56:03 brilliant substack post than I do good, just from the energy that’s extracted by doing it. I know that
0:56:11 every frigging, you know, AI query, every plane trip I take to do a talk, uh, is, is probably doing more
0:56:20 more damage than I’m doing good. Or maybe, or maybe is. Um, so sometimes the best option is to stop
0:56:28 wriggling, to stop for a moment, for like 48 hours, try not to figure out what is the best tweet to
0:56:37 respond to what Musk or Trump or someone just did. What if there is none? You know, what if a whole lot of our
0:56:42 people are doing is a form, one form or another, of feeding the trolls.
0:56:51 That’s why I’m like, stop for a second. That you sort of had to stop and breathe and say, uh,
0:57:05 in order to begin to, um, generate some truly alternative pro-social solutions. Um, but no,
0:57:14 the, the path from here to there looks pretty rocky and treacherous. You know, if, if we don’t go there,
0:57:21 there we all die. And even if we do go there, it’s pretty fucking awful, right? On the way there. So
0:57:27 what do you do with that? Is love each other as much as possible, be here to metabolize each other’s
0:57:36 pain, try to bring, you know, as many other people into a state of, uh, uh, compassion as possible, and
0:57:44 hold out some faith that a global mind shift is still possible.
0:57:49 You know, I’ve always thought of you as someone who, uh, kind of systems level thinker.
0:57:49 Yeah.
0:57:54 You’re always a macro thinker in that way. But the more I listen to you in this conversation,
0:58:00 it sounds more and more like you’re saying we have to stop thinking about, not entirely,
0:58:04 but we need to pause for a second and stop thinking about the system and what things need
0:58:10 to change in order to create the space to do X, Y, and Z. And instead just act immediately,
0:58:17 act locally, just do something small in the real world, in the community around you and just start
0:58:17 there.
0:58:22 Yeah. I mean, which is still systems thinking. It’s just way more fractal or trim tab or,
0:58:28 uh, you know, and how many systems are in you that you’re not even listening to,
0:58:33 you know, the gut biome is smarter than we are. And, you know, we might just be a medium,
0:58:38 right? We might just be at the service of gut biomes. The reason you pick a sex partner is because
0:58:43 your gut biome wants to mix bacteria with that gut biome and interact with their cultures. We don’t
0:58:54 even know, right? So, um, I think there’s, there’s other ways for the embodied human to move in concert
0:59:00 with these systems other than sort of systems analysis. We’ll see.
0:59:05 Yeah. We’ll see. I’m not even going to try to put a bow on all this. I’m just going to leave it.
0:59:10 There is no bow. It’s all good. I appreciate, I appreciate what you’re doing. I’m sorry if I
0:59:15 gave you a hard time. I was just responding in the moment to the things you were asking and to what I
0:59:23 felt was some of your, uh, resistance to the possibilities of human beings to, uh,
0:59:26 rise to this occasion. I think we can do it.
0:59:30 I don’t even know how to describe this conversation, but it was awesome. You’re
0:59:33 awesome. Douglas Rushkoff. Thanks so much for coming in.
0:59:36 Thank you. Thanks for enabling me.
0:59:42 And check out, uh, Doug’s podcast team human. It is really great. It’s the bomb.
0:59:58 All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I absolutely did because Douglas is weird and awesome.
1:00:05 And talking to him is always a bit of an adventure. As always, we want to know what you think. We’ve
1:00:12 been overwhelmed by the number of voicemails and emails that we’ve been getting lately. So please
1:00:19 keep them coming. We read them all. We listen to them. They help us make a better show. So drop us a
1:00:25 line at the gray area at vox.com, or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at
1:00:34 1-800-214-5749. And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and
1:00:40 subscribe to the pod. It helps other people find our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
1:00:47 edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
1:00:52 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays.
1:00:58 Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership
1:01:05 program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show,
1:01:13 let us know. And finally, I want to say thank you to my guest, Douglas Rushkoff, for being so much fun.
1:01:26 Thank you to Upwork for supporting this episode. With Upwork, you can hire hourly,
1:01:32 set a fixed price, or pay by the milestone for bigger products. You and the professionals you hire
1:01:38 will have access to Upwork’s mindful AI integrations at every step to work faster and smarter. To see what
1:01:51 Upwork can do for your business in the AI era, go to Upwork.com/updates. That’s Upwork.com/updates for more information.
The internet was supposed to set us free. But somewhere along the way, it became a tool for surveillance, extraction, and control. What happened? And is there still time to reclaim the weird, untapped potential of the digital world?
This week, Sean is joined by Douglas Rushkoff. He’s a media theorist, author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human, and host of the Team Human podcast. They trace the arc of the internet from its utopian beginnings to its corporate capture, and explore what it would take to build something different. Along the way, they talk about the loss of weirdness, the logic of capitalism, the dangers of scale, and the difference between systems thinking and systems feeling. They also reflect on whether it’s still possible to use technology to foster a more connected and communal life.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and host of Team Human
We’d love to hear from you. Email us at tga@voxmail.com or leave a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your questions and feedback help us make a better show.
Watch full episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.
Listen ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Leave a Reply