RUSHKOFF

Playing for Team Human today; technologist, futurist, inventor and mage Mark Pesce.

In this conversation with Douglas, part two of a live Team Human show at Civic Hall, Pesce offers a thought-provoking frame through which we might better understand our relationship to algorithms and artificial intelligence:

What might you call a creature that feeds on your energy, knows your weaknesses, and can tamper with your emotional state in ways that compel you to act beyond your best interest? Centuries ago we might call this a demon. As algorithms are programmed to exploit humans in order to do their bidding, perhaps it's time to interrogate the Faustian bargains we make each time we sign up, log in, and click thru.

It’s a fascinating and sinuous conversation that exemplifies the creative ways humans, together in a room, can think about technology and reassert power over the devils lurking in the details.

If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Mark's podcast https://nextbillionseconds.com/

This episode features an Audience Q&A with both guests; Penny Abeywardena and Mark Pesce

Today’s show is sponsored by the advertisements we have planted in your dreams…

But you can also support us by purchasing the new manifesto, Team Human and becoming a patron on Patreon.

Check out Rushkoff's regular columns on Medium.

On this episode you heard Herkimer Diamonds in the preroll, plus Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro. We also played Team Human Episode 31 guest R.U. Sirius in the transition and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man.

Playing for Team Human today: Penny Abeywardena.

In part one of a two-part live Team Human show, Douglas is joined by New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs, Penny Abeywardena. Penny’s work looks at the synergies between local and global issues. Guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Penny is helping make New York City a significant player in global efforts to solve humanity’s most pressing issues of immigration, poverty, climate change, injustice, and inequality. 

In an era of virulent nationalism, racism at the border, and national disfunction; can cities like New York lead the way in solving global crises? Penny shares her insights and experiences, recorded live at the Civic Hall in Manhattan.

Learn more the Mayor's Office of International Affairs here as well as programs discussed on the show; Global Vision | Urban Action and OneNYC. 

Douglas opens the evening with a monologue questioning the very concept of the nation state. Rushkoff asserts that community, rooted in solidarity – not borders or ethnicity – must be the organizing principle to enact social change. 

Join us next week for part two which includes technology philosopher and mage Mark Pesce, plus a conversation and audience Q&A with Penny, Mark, and Douglas.

Team Human the manifesto is hot off the press! Order yours here. 

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” and Herkimer Diamonds in the intro, plus original music thanks to listener Josh Sitron and the Team Human Band. We also played Team Human Episode 31 guest R.U. Sirius in the transition and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man. 

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium where you can read monologues like the one you heard on today's show.

Team Human is listener supported. To subscribe via Patreon go to teamhuman.fm/support. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it’s not as simple as just “going offline.” How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology? 

Today’s show reaches back to the origins of what became known as “tactical media” — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.

Team Human the manifesto is hot off the press! Order yours here. Ships in January. 

We've come to the end of the Team Human year! We are grateful for an amazing season of shows and live events, all made possible thanks to the support of our dedicated listeners. You can support Team Human on Patreon and propel us into next year and next season. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

Happy holidays and we’ll see you on book tour and back on the podcast waves in January!

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro, fading into a track from Team Human Episode 31 guest R.U. Sirius. Mid-show transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man. 

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium.

Playing for Team Human today: media and technology scholar Jamie Cohen. Jamie will be helping us understand the commodity of authenticity. His work looks at the ways authenticity is quantized and codified on media platforms such as YouTube. It’s a process through which trust and connection become instrumentalized as tools for the monetization and manipulation of audience attention. Jamie warns how, coupled with powerful algorithms, the gaming of authenticity threatens serious social consequences. Jamie joins Douglas to discuss his research, including his case studies of famous YouTubers like Tyler Oakley and Casey Neistat. Together they dig into the promise and peril of "populist" digital technologies; blogging, VR, and beyond. 

Jamie Cohen Is a professor at Molloy College where he started the New Media Program. He researches social media, memes, digital culture, and virtual reality. Learn more about Jamie’s work at http://www.jamesncohen.com/

Douglas opens with a monologue on how we all became Russia's "useful idiots."

Selected works cited for today’s show:

 Open TV by Aymar Jean Christian

Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction

Zeynep Tufekci “We’re Building A Dystopia Just To Make People Click On Ads”

Douglas Rushkoff’s 2004 PBS FRONTLINE documentary The Persuaders

and his 2014 documentary Generation Like

Music Credits: Opening the show, we’re trying out a new Team Human original, recorded and performed by TH producer Stephen Bartolomei fading into a track from Team Human Episode 31 guest R.U. Sirius. Mid-show transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man.

Support Team Human by visiting teamhuman.fm/support

Pre-Order Team Human 

Versions of Douglas’s monologues as well as streams of this podcast can be found on Medium

Photos by Josh Chapdelaine

Playing for Team Human today: business reformer and the author of Reboot: A Blueprint for Happy Human Business in the Digital Age, Jason Stockwood. Jason will be showing us how to minimize the negative externalities of big business. It all comes down to the bizarre idea of providing goods and services that people actually need. Could such a radical business concept catch on today? Jason is striving to use business and technology to be part of the solution, rather than an extractive, negative force. Is there still room in capitalism to embed social justice?

Rushkoff opens the show thinking about algorithms. What if we thought of algorithms as a kind of distorted biofeedback? What can we learn about humans from the ways in which algorithms fail?

Music Credits: Opening the show, we're trying out a new Team Human original, recorded and performed by TH producer Stephen Bartolomei. Mid-show transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man.

Support Team Human by visiting teamhuman.fm/support

Pre-Order Team Human 

Versions of Douglas’s monologues as well as streams of this podcast can be found on Medium

Reboot Screen photo by Andrew Mason

Playing for Team Human today: activist, professor, podcast producer, journalist, and musician Chenjerai Kumanyika. Chenjerai joins Douglas in the basement Media Squat at CUNY Queens College for a conversation about why studying history matters more than ever as we fight for a just future. Chenjerai also shares a bit of his own unique personal history; how he went from working in an emergency room to a touring as an international hip hop artist, to his most recent work as an activist/journalist and now, college professor at Rutgers University. Drawing from these diverse contexts, Chenjerai helps us understand media and activism in a time of renewed racism and repression. A spirit of deep conviction and empathy animates Chenjerai’s work and shines through in this conversation with Douglas.

Check out Chenjerai’s Peabody Award winning podcast, Uncivil, from Gimlet

Listen to Things I've Seen featured in today’s show, from Chenjerai’s group The Spooks.

"You won't believe the things I've seen

Far beyond your wildest dreams

I've seen chaos and order reign supreme

I've seen the beauty of the universe so peaceful and serene

In seconds turn to violence and screams"

A clip from Chenjerai's recent lecture at Penn State is featured in this episode. Find this and more here: https://www.soc119.org/2018/10/25/class-18-being-an-activist-w-dr-chenjerai-kumanyika/

This week's TH Music Credits: Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man in the intro and outro, segue music by R.U. Sirius: President Mussolini Makes The Planes Run On Time, and Herkimer Diamonds in the Midroll.

Support Team Human by visiting teamhuman.fm/support

Versions of Douglas's monologues as well as streams of this podcast can be found on Medium

Playing for Team Human today: Susan Basterfield and Anthony Cabraal. Susan and Anthony share the open secrets of bottom-up collaboration as we celebrate the publication of Enspiral’s book, Better Work Together. It's a conversation about the power of working together, building on ideas “good enough to try,” and creating a space where it’s “safe to fail.”

Looking for collaborative and participatory ways to create social change? Enspiral has collected and opened up its learnings for all to replicate.

Douglas opens with a monologue about moving beyond “master plan” interventions. What does democracy look like on a human scale?

If you enjoy this episode, check out Episode 23 with Enspiral teammate Silvia Zuur:

https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-23-silvia-zuur/

And Episode 41 with Richard Bartlett:

https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-41-richard-d-bartlett-there-is-no-enemy-team/

You can find Team Human episodes and more from Douglas at Medium.com/@Rushkoff

Music Credits: Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man , Herkimer Diamonds , and closing music by R.U. Sirius: President Mussolini Makes The Planes Run On Time

Playing for Team Human today: Jason Schmitt. Jason looks at the big business of for-profit academic publishing in his new documentary Paywall:The Business of Scholarship. Should the the world's research be locked behind closed doors? Jason makes the case for open access on today's Team Human.

Opening the show, Rushkoff offers a monologue on the state of democracy. While our politicians and their propagandists have lost faith in our ability to vote purposefully, Team Human knows better. There has never been a more crucial time to get involved, not only at the polls next week but in civic life and community action beyond.

Versions of Douglas's monologues can be found at https://medium.com/@rushkoff. We'll also be posting the entire back catalog in a new Team Human Collection at Medium.

Visit Teamhuman.fm for complete access to the shows and patreon.com/teamhuman to sustain this show.

Today we opened with intro music thanks to Mike Watt. The midroll featured Team Human Ep.31 Human Guest and friend R.U. Sirius. The show concluded with a track by Herkimer Diamonds.

Playing for Team Human today is playwright, actor, director, writer and teacher Jessica Blank. Jessica shares her insights into the process of building empathy through story. Through works such as her documentary plays the Exonerated and Aftermath, Jessica’s characters stare their audience directly in the eye, reach out to their heart, and open a pathway for transformation. This, Jessica explains, is the magic of being in shared space with people embodying real, human stories.

Learn about her creative process, how she finds that opening for empathy, and how we might retrieve those human scale stories that are charged with the empathic power to bring about social change.

Douglas opens the show with a monologue asking, "Is the nationalist, xenophobic, inward-turned America we’ve been projecting to the world as of late the real US?"

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro, Herkhimer Diamonds “Xmas Underwater” midway through, and our closing music is thanks to Mike Watt.

Team Human is listener supported. To subscribe via Patreon or Drip, go to TeamHuman.fm/support . You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

Check out Douglas's new regular column on Medium.

Playing for Team Human today is Fred Turner, professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Fred will be helping us recover the countercultural roots of digital media, while also imploring us to look toward the mundane, existing ways of staking our claim to authority over the world in which we live.

Turner has done extensive research into the countercultural and even psychedelic roots of cyberculture, culminating in his extended biography of Stewart Brand titled From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. 

Turner’s writing and research reaches even further back into the history of cyberculture with The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties where he explores and exposes the deepest origins of our touchscreen society. 

In this conversation, Fred and Douglas use these works as a jumping off point to a wide range of topics including a provocative discussion on the ways those early utopian visions of technology were subsumed into an ideology of individualism and ultimately, consumerism.

Is it time to re-embrace the boring? In our quest to be our “authentic selves” at all times, have we forgotten the necessary, and sometimes mundane civic work that is required for concrete change both in our local and global communities? This and much more! 

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro, Herkhimer Diamonds “Xmas Underwater” and our closing music is thanks to Mike Watt.

Team Human is listener supported. To subscribe via Patreon or Drip, go to TeamHuman.fm/support . You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.