Aengus Anderson Radio

Among other things, Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and documentarian. His books include Life, Inc. and Program or be Programmed, while his documentaries include Frontline's The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders.

Our conversation started with Rushkoff's concept of "present-shock" and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable.

Connections, you ask? There are lots, especially with Timothy Morton, Wes Jackson, and Frances Whitehead. We also talk about transhumanism a fair bit, so expect some contrasts with Max More and Tim Cannon. Equally important, albeit less obvious, are the nuanced differences between Rushkoff and thinkers like Chris McKay. But to quote LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it.

Priscilla Grim is one of Occupy Wall Street's organizers, co-founder of the website We Are the 99 Percent, and co-editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

We talk about her politicization, the current economic system, and the tension between class and environmental concerns. There are predictably strong contrasts with the libertarian philosophies of David Miller and Max More but, in one of the more unexpected connections in the project, Grim takes an attitude towards natural resources that is close to Robert Zubrin and far from Jan Lundberg and Wes Jackson.

Micah and I have been talking about a new interstitial episode for several weeks but, with the election last night, we decided to pick up our microphones and talk about the relationship between the political conversation and The Conversation. Relationship is probably the wrong word there—rupture might be more accurate.

Long before we devised this project, both of us were concerned that the American political conversation was divorced from substantive issues, especially the interconnected tangle of economy and environment. In fact, this lack of political substance was one of the concerns that caused us to undertake The Conversation in the first place. Given that, we're going to take this opportunity to revisit these ideas and sharpen our definition of what is (and isn't) The Conversation. We'll also interpret the current political conversation through the lens of systems thought, which featured in my conversations with Morton, Korten, Jackson, and Whitehead.

Claire Evans is half of YACHT, a "band, business, and belief system" started by Jona Bechtolt in 2002. In addition to her musical/artistic adventures, she's also a writer and regular science blogger. Unlike most bands, YACHT has a developed a detailed and public philosophy (read their FAQ or visit the YACHT Trust for more details) and they regularly explore ideas about the future in their work. I was especially intrigued by the themes of utopia and dystopia which tie together their album ​Shangri-La​.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. is the Director for the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo and the Project Coordinator for the Perry Choice Neighborhood Initiative. His work has focused on the intersection of urban planning, regional development, and history in both the United States and Cuba. Dr. Taylor also studies the relationship between urban planning, race, and class.

Our conversation focuses on inequality, racism, reconfiguring government institutions, and the physical structure of neighborhoods—several large, tangible issues that have been inadequately discussed or completely ignored by earlier interviewees. American exceptionalism is an early theme that leads into the mental frameworks that distort how we view the world. Dr. Taylor offers some concrete ideas about refocusing policy to foster stronger neighborhoods and ends musing on humanity's slow march towards the light.

For both Micah and myself, listening to the final edit of Dr. Taylor's conversation was a good, if unsettling experience: we're almost half a year into production and this will be the first time race has been seriously discussed. As a result, this conversation has remarkably few explicit connections to the rest of the project because Dr. Taylor has had to build a new wing of the conversation from scratch. We find this embarrassing because it reflects the whiteness of the project back at us, from our choices of interviewees to the priorities of the interviewees themselves. Micah and I have been talking about race and our own perspectives a lot recently and we're going to dedicate the next interstitial episode to putting some of those thoughts down in audio.

Dr. Lawrence Torcello is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Micah and I learned about him through his article "Is The State Endorsement of Any Marriage Justifiable?" in Public Affairs Quarterly. Having said that, we barely touched the idea of marriage privatization. Lawrence had listened to the entirety of The Conversation before we spoke, so this is the first meta-conversation in the project: we spend a lot of our time discussing how one can bring conversation about in a pluralistic world. To tackle the idea, Lawrence takes us through the thought of John Rawls, Enlightenment liberalism, and a good dose of his own thinking.

This was an incredibly fun conversation to record and a tremendously frustrating one to edit—because Lawrence knew the project so well, our conversation covered more diverse themes than I could fluidly integrate into a single episode. To keep the discussion manageable, I have focused his conversation narrowly on liberalism and education. I made this choice for obvious reasons: liberalism hasn't appeared in the series yet and it opens up new ideas about managing diversity, while education has been woefully under discussed. Listen for a memorable response to Andrew Keen.

While I feel that this episode works as a coherent unit, there is more I want to include and I may post a few short MP3s on the site for those of you curious to hear our discussion of scientism, transhumanism, and climate-denialism. There's no shame to geeking out.

Tim Cannon is a co-founder of Grindhouse Wetware, a group of open-source biohackers in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. What does that sentence mean, you ask? Biohacking is the process of augmenting the human body to do new things, whether with technology or biology. Max More introduced the theme of transhumanism back in Episode 2, but Tim is going to take the idea and run with it—the Grindhouse crew are actively developing and implanting technologies in themselves now. 

Tim and I don't dwell on current augmentation technologies for long. Instead, we plunge into a conversation about the nature of humanity and why he wants to leave biology behind. As always, questions of value crop up and we oscillate between nihilism and iterative, socially constructed moralities. Determinism, inevitability, and collective versus individual rights are also major themes.

You'll hear lots of connections with other conversations. Tim directly responds to the neoprimitivism of John Zerzan, but he also offers an indirect critique of Max More by discussing the political (and classist) implications of human augmentation.

If all that makes you feel like your head is about to explode, may we suggest Grindhouse's Thinking Cap to over-clock your brain?

Patrick Crouch is the Program Manager at the Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, Michigan. The farm is a project of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and is the only certified organic farm in the city. 

Agriculture's urban history is an early theme in our conversation, as is the need to make food a human right rather than a market commodity. We also discuss how the structure of modern civilization, from our urban planning to our economy, encourages us to value people solely for their productive capacity.

Like Wes Jackson, Patrick walks between two ideological poles we have seen in this project. His outlook is at once physicalist, secular, and scientific, but he is unimpressed by scientific utopianism. At the same time, while he encourages communing with the world and appreciating its intangible qualities, he rejects biocentrism as impossible and argues that one can find other life intrinsically valuable without spirituality.

Jenny Lee is a co-director of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit organization focused on the intersection of media and social justice. AMP stages the annual Allied Media Conference and, partnered with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, organizes on a variety of media education and outreach programs for communities marginalized by traditional media.

Jenny and I talk about digital justice, inequality, media landscapes (or should we call them ecologies?), the relationship between offline and online community, narratives, and the myth of individualism. You will hear echoes of systems thinking that has appeared in Frances Whitehead, Wes Jackson, and David Korten.  Speaking of Korten, he appears directly when we discuss narratives. Gabriel Stempinski's ideas are present but offstage, especially when we discuss whether the internet can foster meaningful physical communities.

As you will soon learn, Frances Whitehead is a remarkably difficult person to put a label on. Artist, designer (designist?), planner, environmental thinker, dot-connector, collaborator... the list could go on. Our conversation spanned two recording sessions, totaling 7.5 hours and producing 5.5 hours of tape. I have edited this down to 36 minutes and, of course, sacrificed an immense amount of content and nuance. So view this as a fast and condensed introduction to Frances' thought.

And what themes come up, you ask? Complexity is a unifying theme, tying together the prospect of an environmental crisis with the new role of art and artists. We also talk about how excess irony can cripple change, the difference between intentionality and morality, and the necessity of creating new knowledge on the borders of specialties.