RUSHKOFF

Playing for team human today is author, occult scholar, and wizard Jason Louv. 

Jason will be helping us see how the intentions we bring into the world of artificial intelligence could set something in motion from which it is hard to return. Jason’s latest book John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of Empire digs deep into the untold and often ignored occult history of Western thinking and empire. On today’s show Jason and Douglas bridge the gap from the Elizabethan esoteric imaginary to the modern day alchemical thinking driving our technologies.

Visit this John Dee mini site for a unique preview of Louv’s latest book.  https://www.johndee007.com

And https://jasonlouv.com/ for more on Jason as well as links to his books, the Ultraculture blog, and his Magick School.

Rushkoff kicks off the show on the heels of a week of Blockchain events here in New York. What values are retrieved in blockchain thinking? And is blockchain the right tool to turn money into a verb instead of a noun? 

Correction: The first Team Human Live event at the Alchemist’s Kitchen is on Thursday, June 21st. Links to tickets coming soon! Check the homepage at Teamhuman.fm for details.

On today’s show you heard intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord records. You also heard Psychic TV (Purchase here). If you enjoyed this episode check out Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Episode 66 with Occult Historian Mitch Horowitz. You also heard a sample from Episode 31 guest R.U. Sirius

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

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes. Visit the link in the header for more trading cards!

Playing for Team Human today is Juho Makkonen, co-founder of Sharetribe.

Juho is working on a vision of the “sharing economy” where people share value with one another instead of seeing it get syphoned off by companies like Uber and Airbnb. His company Sharetribe creates tools for individuals and local communities to decentralize and ultimately democratize ownership of the sharing economy. In this conversation, Douglas and Juho discuss platform cooperatives and the slow patient work of building a business focused on sustainability rather than the “unicorn ambition” of growth and profit. 

Check out Sharetribe.com as well as this link to Juho's latest book https://theleanmarketplace.com/ .

Douglas opens the show with a monologue that questions the imposition of new mythologies as we make sense of social change. Is it time to dispense with mythology altogether?

On today’s show you heard intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord records. In the intro you also heard Mike Watt’s Hyphenated Man. Mid show you heard Josh Citron and the Team Human band playing “Growth Trap.”

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

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes. Visit the link in the header for more trading cards!

Stay tuned for tickets and announcements on our first Team Human live show in New York, June 21st at the Alchemist's Kitchen.

Playing for Team Human today is technology and society researcher Molly Sauter. Molly will be helping us see how stupid some “smart city” visions really are. Molly and Douglas discuss the extractive, “mining ethos” of the tech investment swarm, and how this mentality does harm to communities from Silicon Valley to Toronto, Canada. Is your city the next VC Guinea pig in the technocratic experiment to grow cities and extract their value?

Check out Molly’s fantastic book on another type of “swarm”: The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Swarm-Hacktivism-Disobedience-Internet/dp/1623564565

Plus their most recent writing referenced on today’s show: 

Why is Anyone Listening to Tim O”Reilly? 

And Google’s Guinea-Pig City 

Support Molly’s work at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oddletters

Douglas opens the show with a monologue on the perils of futurist thinking and its inherent linear conception of progress. Is it time to retrieve a circular, more presentist understanding of the world? 

Stay tuned for tickets and announcements on our first Team Human live show in New York, June 21st at Alchemist Kitchen.

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

This show features intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. Mid-way you heard music clips from TH friends and guests R.U. Sirius and Stacco Troncoso

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes. Visit teamhuman.fm for more!

Playing for Team Human today, the economy’s equivalent of an outsider artist, Of Two Minds blogger and author of Money and Work Unchained, Charles Hugh Smith.

Charles will be talking to us about the market, Universal Basic Income, and distributed prosperity.

You can learn more about Charles at his website and blog Of Two Minds: https://www.oftwominds.com/.

Opening the show, Douglas considers the "Art of the Deal." Perhaps a truly artful deal is one that engages us in relationships of collaboration rather than self-interest.

Producer's note: The audio in this show is less than ideal due to a poor VoIP connection. It has been processed for intelligibility, but you still may notice drop outs and distortions. Apologies.

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

This show features intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. Mid-way you heard Throbbing Gristle. See Ep. 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes.

Playing for Team Human today is designer, technology historian, and author of the new book Architectural Intelligence, Professor Molly Wright Steenson. Molly and Douglas share a wide-ranging conversation that begins by looking at the “weirdness” of AI. How do design metaphors such as “awesome mouth feel” and “uncanny valley” provoke deeper questions of human imagination, play, and meaning. Molly’s background in architecture and history offers listeners a unique grounding of digital in the physical. Check out Molly’s new book Architectural Intelligence and her longstanding website girlwonder.com. Molly also discusses her oft-cited essay, What is Burning Man, working with Howard Rheingold (TH 76) at Electric Minds, building the Netscape search page, and launching the influential feminist webzine Maxi.

Opening the show, Douglas comments on educating robots versus educating humans. Is there something more, something ambiguous and sacred even to be retrieved from a well-rounded liberal arts education?

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

This show features intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. Mid-way you heard Throbbing Gristle’s United. See Ep. 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes.

“Everyone wants to be a cowboy, but no one wants to ride the range.” A dream of unraveling the mystery of the birth of universe led astrophysicist and author Brian Keating to "saddle up" and head to a frozen ocean of snow at the bottom of the world. Keating joins Rushkoff to talk about science, religion, questions that lead to more questions, and the "background noise” of the cosmos that may just be the key to understanding how this all began.

Rushkoff begins today's show commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we suffering the effects of HAL computer-like programming on Facebook? "I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do." HAL 9000 or Mark Zuckerberg?

Learn more about our guest, Brian Keating:

Professor Brian Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S.Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP". Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor, selected as one ofAmazon.com’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Month.

This show features music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records as well as a sample of Throbbing Gristle by TH 68 guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

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

Playing for Team Human today is Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct. Lent’s expansive research looks at the variety of ways cultures throughout history have patterned meaning into the cosmos. In excavating these patterns, Lent shares how humans might retrieve those metaphors that amplify altruism and shared intentionality. Together, Rushkoff and Lent explore the question of what makes humans unique and how we might leverage our patterning instinct to foster a future characterized by deeper connection rather than alienation. 

Douglas begins today’s show with a monologue on cultural immunity. He questions the impulse to solve the problems of democracy by simply building better tech. How might we build resilience in people rather than just in our gadgets and algorithms?

This show features intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. Mid-way you heard our friend R.U. Sirius featured in episode 31 https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-31-r-u-Sirius/

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

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards. Follow Team Human on Twitter where we will be posting more trading cards, going back to the earliest episodes.

What can artists, musicians, magical thinkers and "weirdos" bring to machine learning and neural networks? What do we need to make the right kind of AI? Exploring these questions and more is Kenric McDowell, leader of Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program. In this conversation with Douglas, Kenric explains how his unique role at Google enables him to bring the artistic spirit into the very heart of technology development. Moving beyond the hype of AI, Kenric shares strategies for leading technology with human imagination rather than the other way around.

Douglas opens today’s show addressing the myth of social media; the notion that you matter. Facebook doesn’t care about you, and it’s time to leave it behind. Every minute spent off Facebook is a minute you can spend with the others! Go find them.

Our intro and outro music is thanks to Dischord Records and Fugazi. A special thanks to Kenric for sharing his own original music featured at the mid-roll. Visit http://thebiggestphone.com to hear more. Kenric also provided us with the audio clip from a forthcoming documentary on the Word Car project. Read about it here!

Stay tuned for Team Human live events in New York and beyond. Become a subscriber at Patreon for special access and the latest news.

Playing for Team Human today is Suzanne Slomin, founder of Green Rabbit a small solar powered bakery located in the Mad River Valley of Vermont specializing in naturally leavened breads. 

Suzanne will share with us what it’s like being a “Real Person Doing Real Things” – an actual baker, farmer, employer and global citizen trying to operate as sustainably and humanly as possible across all the dimensions of her work. 

In this episode, we meet Suzanne having just “fed” her sourdough starter, a living culture of yeast and bacteria that is the essential element for her delicious and healthful breads. Instantly, the conversation is grounded to the hands-on daily work that makes Green Rabbit so special. Is it possible for the small farmer and local baker to maintain integrity and stewardship of the community in an increasingly extractive economy? Find out how Suzanne does it...

Plus, in stark contrast to "Real People Doing Real Things," Rushkoff opens the show with a monologue on the idealism of bitcoin. Are cryptocurrencies soon to be just another instrument of the financial services industry?

This show features music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records as well as a sample of Throbbing Gristle by TH 68 guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

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

Thanks to teammate and listener Bobby Campbell for his amazing Team Human trading cards.

Images of Green Rabbit come courtesy of Suzanne Slomin.

Today on Team Human we conclude our series of live shows recorded at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in the historic Mission district of San Francisco. Picking up where we left off last week and joining Douglas on stage are teammates Erik Davis and Josette Melchor. Erik Davis is the author of Techgnosis, Nomad Codes and host of The Expanding Mind podcast. Erik and Douglas start with the big question, “What the fuck is going on here?” What begins with a few laughs quickly digs into a mind-expanding conversation about those gray areas between religion, technology, and psychedelics. Erik and Douglas look for coherence and connection in these fractious times. Making this message concrete is Gray Area’s founder Josette Melchor. Josette resurrects our show segment “Real People Doing Real Things.” She offers both practical and profound lessons on building a safe space for community, creativity, and artistic exploration.

As we conclude this series, we’d like to thank our teammates at Gray Area; Josette Melchor, Seabrook Gubbins, Alric Burns, our guests for both nights Annalee Newitz, Howard Rheingold, Lauren McCarthy, Erik Davis, and (again!) Josette Melchor. Thank you to the San Francisco community who came out to support and participate in the show. And sincere gratitude to our Patreon members who’s sustaining subscriptions made travel and recording possible.

Sign up at Patreon. There you’ll find the complete, uncut San Francisco Live shows, plus other rewards and ways to Find the Others.

During this live performance we featured Intro music from Fugazi, plus excerpts from Throbbing Gristle (Listen to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge with Douglas on Episode 67). Mid-show you heard music by Mike Watt.

This week's playing cards (thanks to Bobby Campell)