RUSHKOFF

Playing for Team Human today is Jason Van Anden. Jason is an artist, inventor, and software developer who builds apps to promote social justice. In 2011, Van Anden invented I’m Getting Arrested, software that enabled Occupy Wall Street demonstrators to alert friends and family in the event they were arrested. In 2012 Van Anden developed Stop and Frisk Watch , a tool used to monitor the New York City Police Department’s controversial practice. Van Anden has since has gone on to head Quadrant 2, developers of Mobile Justice, a police video taping app and part of the Bystanders Rule! platform. Quadrant 2 is also currently developing Workit, designed to offer networked support for 1.3 million non-unionized Walmart employees.
In this episode, Van Anden and Rushkoff talk about flipping handheld digital technology toward human ends. How can technology be re-centered to effect real world change? How might technology promote proactive, activist efforts on the ground? Van Anden and Rushkoff, look at these questions and more.
In today’s monologue, Rushkoff looks at the spectacle on display at this year's Academy Awards.

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Playing for Team Human today is data-visualization humanist Danne Woo. Woo is going to share with us how he uses data to provoke critical thinking, humor, and even human connection with his creative design. Woo is the creator of Data Visual  a user-friendly web-based design interface that empowers individuals to create their own shareable data-driven graphics. We'll learn why the Trump presidency has inspired Woo to design "a chart a day" and to "make tweets trump again". 
Dannewoo.com is where you can find a link to Woo’s work. Check out the politically inspired projects like “Make Tweets Trump Again” and Woo’s Chrome extension “Don’t Support Trump Supporters” driven by data from the #grabyourwallet campaign. Woo’s site also features creative works including Woo’s large format multiplayer game Splat! and his generative font project,Type Galapagos, plus the fantastically quirky music projects AC Symphony and Light Hum.
Design your own data visualizations using Woo’s web-based data design toolkit, Data Visual which can be found at www.datavisu.al  There’s a free version there too, so anyone can get started creating unique data-driven graphics. Check out the Data Visual Twitter feed @datavisualinfo or Instagram @datavisualcharts for a stream of daily charts and data designs. 
In today’s opening monologue, Rushkoff considers the challenge of reclaiming coherency and a path forward. 

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Playing for Team Human today is Brian Fitzgerald, co-founder of Tinkergarten. Tinkergarten began as the passion project of Brian and his wife, Meghan, a long-time educator. As new parents, Brian and Meghan were looking for hands-on, outdoor learning experiences for their daughter. Unable to find any, they started Tinkergarten. Today, Tinkergarten is a growing community focused on bringing memorable, tactile, and outdoor educational play opportunities to children and parents. Brian shares how his background in technology and education led him to build networking tools that help get kids off of screens and out into the physical world. You can become a Tinkergarten leader, find your own local Tinkergarten, or even download free DIY Tinkergarten lesson plans at tinkergarten.com.

Today’s episode kicks off with Douglas Rushkoff answering a question he has received more and more since launching Team Human: “Are you anti-digital?”

 

 

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Playing for Team Human today is Silvia Zuur. In 2012, Zuur founded Chalkle to reignite adult education in New Zealand. Today, Zuur serves as a director at Enspiral, a social impact network that builds community driven solutions for a diverse set of issues including education, funding, and cooperative organizing. Enspiral is famously home to Loomio, a cooperative founded 2012 to create more effective tools for collaborative decision-making. Zuur joins Douglas Rushkoff to talk about the value of open, people-focused organizing strategies and her efforts to facilitate sustainable solutions for positive social change.

Enspiral offers a number of resources from accounting strategies, metrics, apps, volunteer resources, and decision making tools on their ventures page.

Visit handbook.enspiral.com for a model on how Enspiral has structured their business. Enspiral also relates the details of both their successes and struggles on their blog, blog.enspiral.com.

 

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This week’s Team Human is part 2 of a fascinating conversation between longtime friends Zach Leary and Douglas Rushkoff. Check out part 1 over on Zach’s show, It’s All Happening. Rushkoff and Zach take a winding path through the “psychedelic substrate” of digital technology, looking back at the strange trips that birthed the modern web and virtual space of the internet. Most importantly, Leary and Rushkoff retrieve those human connections; the compassion, vision, and care for others that still just might save us in the digital age.

Rushkoff begins today’s show with a thought provoking monologue. Is resistance futile in a digital society? Tune in to find out more!

 

Episode page photo credit: Flickr User Joi Ito

 

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Playing for Team Human today is L.A. Kauffman. Douglas met with Kauffman on the eve of the release of her new book, Direct Action, Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, published by Verso press. Direct Action charts a history of renewal and reinvention in activist movements since the 1960s with a focus on how we might learn from both the successes and failures of our radical past.

In today’s episode, L.A. offers an invigorating commitment to protest, grassroots organizing, and the fight for justice. Douglas and L.A. spoke just days before Women’s March on Washington. They discuss what direct action means by connecting the dots from Mayday action of 1971 and ACT UP in the 1980s and 90s, all the way up to the mobilization happening this month in Washington and across the country.

Links:

From Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2331-direct-action :

“Propelled by more than 100 candid interviews conducted over a span of decades, this elegant and lively history showcases the voices of key players in an array of movements – environmentalist, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-globalization, racial-justice, anti-war, and more – across an era when American politics shifted to the right, and issue- and identity-based organizing eclipsed the traditional ideologies of the left.”

Read an excerpt from Direct Action here:

https://longreads.com/2017/01/20/in-1971-the-people-didnt-just-march-on-washington-they-shut-it-down/

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Playing for Team Human is Jonathan Larsen. Larsen is a journalist, comedy writer, and TV producer who has worked on the Daily Show w/ Jon Stewart, Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Larsen recently launched TheFingNews.com, a news digest that brings context, analysis, and humor to the daily news.

Jonathan joins Douglas Rushkoff to talk about the Fucking News and the new Indivertible Guide. In a wide-ranging conversation, Larsen and Rushkoff look behind the scenes of reporting and discuss propaganda, fake news, and strategies for resisting the reality TV show era of the Trump presidency.

From the Indivertible Guide:

“We believe that the next four—Jesus H. Christ—years depend on citizens across the country standing indivertible against the mainstream media bullshit agenda. Our premise is that even evil Trump supporters and craven TV news people are good at heart. We believe that buying into TV news’ false crises and speculative narratives will only further empower Trump to victimize our fellow citizens or, even worse, us (the specific, actual humans writing this). We hope that this guide will provide those who share these beliefs with useful tools to transform TV news.”

Photo credit: Vin Crosbie via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-ND

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Playing for Team Human is Brian Hughes. Brian is a recent graduate of the Media Studies Graduate Program at CUNY Queens College, home to Team Human and the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. Hughes’s work explores media origins and portrayals of extremism. On today’s episode, Hughes begins by sharing his research on Arab Nationalism as related to media technologies from global broadcast to networked communications. Using his recent MA thesis as the springboard, Hughes and Rushkoff take a deep look at nationalist and extremist affinities that have surfaced both at home and abroad. How do hypertext, memes, and even magick fit into this story? Tune in to find out.

Read Brian Hughes’s MA thesis linked in the abstract below and at queenscollege.media:

“The 20th Century witnessed several opportunities to unify the Arab peoples as a political and identitarian bloc. None of these attempts, however, resulted in a lasting pan-Arab nationalism. Brian Hughes‘s thesis, Communications Technologies and the End of Arab Nationalism, argues that the nationalist paradigm was at odds with those communications technologies available to spread the 20th Century Arab nationalist message. This mismatch has had dire and lasting consequences into the new millennium, including the rise of violent jihadist ideologies such as those of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

More of Brian’s work can be found at the following links:

http://qc-cuny.academia.edu/BrianHughes

On CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/16/opinions/how-to-fix-the-fake-news-problem-hughes/

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/24/opinions/social-media-false-narratives-hughes/

 

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Playing for Team Human Today is Ari Wallach. In a conversation that spans politics, technology, history, and even biology, Wallach and Rushkoff look at the threat of short-term thinking in times of crisis. This freewheeling discussion tackles deep assumptions of both the Left and the Right, while striving toward a long-term strategy for rebuilding solidarity and progress in society.

Visit Ari’s website AriWallach.com to learn more about his work.

 

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Playing for Team Human today, all the way from Sweden, is local food facilitator Viktor Zaunders. Zaunders is working to organize sustainable, regenerative, and collaborative local food systems. In this episode, Zaunders and Douglas talk about permaculture and the lessons that can be applied to social systems at large.

Visit Viktor’s website zaunders.net to learn more about the variety of projects he is working on.

In this interview, Zaunders mentions Open Source Ecology. They provide a wealth of resources that encourage collaborative and innovative ecodesign. Visit their site opensourceecology.org

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