Rev Left Radio - Alienation, Marxist Humanism, and the Digital Media Landscape w/ Douglas Rushkoff

Episode Date: August 10, 2019

Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. He joins Breht to discuss a myriad of topics including humanism, Marxist alienation, climate change, death, parenting, and much more!  Find and learn more about Rushkoff and his work here: www.rushkoff.com Outro Music: The Geeks Were Right by The Faint (a band from Omaha)  -------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/   SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on Douglas Rushkoff to talk about a myriad of different topics. Douglas Rushkoff is well-known, academic, intellectual, author, media theorist, etc. Doug, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe say a bit about your background for people who don't know who you are? Sure. I'm Douglas Rushkoff, and, you know, I write books. about media, technology, culture, and change. And I was actually a theater director back when. Then the internet happened and kind of blew open a lot of ideas about narrative and culture and stuff.

And it was just too big a story, too big a phenomenon to leave to itself. So I kind of left theater and got involved in that in the late 80s, early 90s. And that's really been the kind of the beat I've been covering since then. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about what you specialize in and what the primary focus of your more recent work is? I know it's a thread through all of your work, but especially recently what you've been thinking about and talking about. Well, I mean, it's funny. To me, it doesn't seem specific. It seems so general or so wide when I try to describe it. But what I'm really looking at is human autonomy. You know, how much awareness and agency do we have as we move through our lives. are the technologies that we're creating for ourselves? Are they increasing our facility and our ability to choose and actualize our intentions or they, you know, dictating to us how we should think about the world? And how do we even tell the difference? You know, sometimes we have something

we think, oh, look at how empowering this is and how this is expanding my imagination when actually it may be just another, you know, ever-tightening circle, you know, where you actually have less choice, even though you may have more to do. Yeah. So recently we had on my friend Mike Rugee, we talked about your book, Team Human, and we did sort of like two people reading it and talking about its ideas and going off it. And then you came across that somehow and you threw out some kind words on Twitter. And so I was like, you know what, let's make this happen where I can actually talk to Douglas himself.

And just for people that might not have heard that previous episode, can you just talk a little bit about your latest book, Team Human, sort of why you wrote it and what its core thesis is before we get in some more questions? Yeah, well, I mean, Team Human, I wrote it, I guess, where I came up with that little meme, you know, this Team Human meme, because I was on a panel with one of the singularity guys. And he was going off about how human beings have to accept that technology. is our evolutionary successor, and we should just fade into the background and pass the evolutionary torch, you know, to silicon chips and, you know, recede into the background and stick around as long as computers need us to keep the lights on, and after that, you know, humbly accept our inevitable extinction. And I argued that that's, you know, that's not good, and human beings are special and weird, and we have experience and thought, and we can, you know,

understand things that computers don't, and we can have experiences, and we can embrace ambiguity and sustain paradoxes over long periods of time without, you know, resolving everything to a one or a zero, and that humans deserve a place in this digital future. And he said, oh, Rushkoff, you're just saying that because you're human, right? Like it was hubris of some kind. And I said, fine, you know, guilty. I'm on team human. You know, and I kind of took the position at that point. that I refuse to apologize for my species that I'm going to be on the side of my species

as a member of the pantheon of species in nature and that we deserve a place here and that there's special things about humans and even if we are destroying the environment and we're mean to each other that's not everybody. That's some of us And I think the human project, human civilization and human consciousness may be special in some way and worth keeping around.

And that's what I really respect in your work, this sort of vibrant humanism that comes out of everything you write and talk about. And it's really appealing and endearing and important. And I think you're one of the most important voices of really pushing back against what you call this anti-human agenda, what Marxist might call this general sense of alienation, et cetera. but we're really sort of getting at the same thing and you've been on a lot of podcasts you've talked about your ideas in a lot of different places we are obviously a more left-wing podcast so we're really going to talk about capitalism and and political concepts in this discussion and I think one of the great ways to start that part of this discussion is for you to sort of retell this wonderful story about these billionaires basically hiring you to give them advice and we touched

on it a little bit in our last episode but I really want people to hear this full story from from your perspective. So can you talk about that? Yeah, it's funny. I get invited to do these talks about the future all the time. And this, uh, I was doing this really, I mean, nicely high paying talk. It flew me out to this resort to speak about, it was supposed to be about like the future of digital business or something like that. And I prepared this, you know, suitably leftist talk. I always treat these talks as like a stealth opportunity to go in there and, you know, tell the executives that your whole model is wrong and you can't be evil anymore and you know or you know teach them about the circular economy or means of production and teach them what adam smith really said

and all that which is always fun because you can sometimes make a few converts but i you know was waiting in the green room and then instead of uh bringing me out on stage to do a talk they brought these five guys into the green room with me and they just sat around the table and started peppering me with all these questions about really I thought about digital business like uh you know there are kind of binaries like uh you know uh do I invest in Ethereum or Bitcoin or alternate reality or virtual reality I mean all this kind of you know nonsense and then um you know finally they got around to their real you know question of concern which was you know they were billionaires and they wanted to know where to put their bunkers like

in Alaska or New Zealand, you know, or how to maintain control of their, you know, security staff after the event occurred because they knew their money would be worthless. So then why are their security guys going to listen to them? So it was like really sad that these are like the most, well, certainly the wealthiest, if not the most powerful people in the world, yet they feel, you know, utterly powerless to influence the future, right, that the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable collapse of society and figure out how to get away from the rest of us. And it's where I started talking about, you know, what I now call the insulation equation,

which is how most people look at work and money. It's like, how much money do I need to earn in order to insulate myself from the reality I'm creating by earning my money in this way, right? How can I build a car that drives fast enough to escape from its own exhaust? The problem is eventually you come back around on the other side of the world, right? And you just drive right back into your own exhaust. So what they're dealing with is, you know, what any good Marxists could have talked about for the last hundred years is what they're finally facing is the externalities of their businesses. What capitalism does is it can create low prices for the short term.

market, but really high costs for the long-term economy, you know, and the long-term or or long-term reality even. But even just economically, what they're doing is externalizing the real costs, the pollution, the disease and all that. And those externalities eventually, you know, carmically, it may have taken a few generations, but it's finally gotten back around to them and they realize, oh, my God, we've adopted a model that's going to kill us all. Where do we hide?

and what I want those people to understand is that what they're doing is not it's not so new this is an old you know an old issue that they're facing it's it's what marks wrote about what Adam Smith wrote about what Schumacher wrote about you know that what we're looking at is not that digital came around and dehumanized us but rather that digital came and accelerated or amplified the dehumanization that was already built into our economic system. You know, and you can go back, you know, to Faro time to see, you know, how pyramids work. But, you know, I mean, I generally in my history, I usually just go back, you know, to the end of the middle ages when we really transitioned from this kind of burning man peer-to-peer economy of the local market to this long-distance extractive. economy of chartered monopolies and central currencies that were always about removing people from

the equation and and you know shrinking the influence and and prosperity of the human beings who are creating value and increasing the power of these you know uh of of elites and corporations that extract value from real human beings so this this sort of anti-human agenda was built into kind of Western colonial culture from the beginning. It's just that right now we've finally gotten to the place where we kind of white Western men are seeing, oh my gosh, we're now colonizing ourselves. We're colonizing our own time, our own consciousness, our own jobs. And now, you know, we don't like it anymore because all of a sudden it's not some little

brown people somewhere, you know, far away. It's us and our own kids. And that's, you know, why even the billionaires are saying, well, wait a minute. rush cough what what what can we do to to uh defuse this thing yeah yeah that's that's just a fascinating little story how did they react to you sort of not answering their questions how they wanted you to answer them did they were they sort of friendly with the way you responded were they at all open to what you were suggesting well as long as i played the game with them they were all right with it i mean as long as i was kind of doing this uh i don't know what even we call it almost like

intellectual poker game this kind of walking dead scenario planning fantasy thing you know as long as i stayed in that they were pretty much okay you know what i finally said to them was look you know the way to make they they kept thinking that like is there a shock collar they can use is there like a robot guard that could guard the guards could they have a secret you know could they be the only one with the key or the combination to the to the to the food store you know they kept looking for these uh kind of using sort of the dominator exclusive exclusionary mindset to think about how are they going to maintain their authority and what i said was like maybe you know the way to make sure that the guard is nice to them after the apocalypse is to be like

really nice to them before you know the the the example i said i said what why don't you just like Pay for your guards, daughters, bat mitzvah. You know? It was sort of a gentle way of suggesting to them that their behavior now could enlist loyalty later on. But if you're depending on armed guards to maintain your position in a post-apocalyptic society, then you've got to read some history. You know, if the generals are the only ones keeping you in power, then it's not you that's in power. It's the general. that are in power, you're going to find out, you know, what that means, you know, pretty fast.

Yeah, fascinating, fascinating anecdote. I love when I hear that and I love more people hearing about that because it's just, it really is insight into the ultra wealthy ruling classes psychology at this point in humans' evolution and the sort of crossroads that we're at as a species. Right. But it's also, it also indicates the way that they've pushed forward with digital technology. you know those of us in the early internet days at least those weird kind of lefty psychedelic people in the early internet days we thought it was going to break everything open that it was going to you know unleash a new era of human creativity and it kind of did at the very beginning it was all about burning men and peer to peer and fantasy role playing and quantum physics and morphogenesis you know morphogenesis and the gaia hypothesis you know we really thought we were going to to link up humanity into this new networked organism.

And, you know, the problem was that, you know, Wired Magazine and other capitalists came along and said, no, no, no, the Internet is here to save the NASDAQ stock exchange. And, but once people are looking at the Internet as a way to make money, it becomes less about promoting creativity and more about creating predictability. You know, if you're betting on the future, you want the future. to be as certain as possible. So we started using digital technology to reduce human spontaneity, to reduce creativity, to make people more predictable.

And that's what if you look at, you know, Facebook or any social media algorithms, all that they're there for is to get people to behave more true to the statistical profile, to get the, you know, 80% and accuracy of these algorithms up to 90 or 100%. And they do that not by making the algorithm more accurate, but by making human beings more predictable, by getting us to conform to who they think we are. And that's sort of the dehuman, the anti-human ethos that's now driving digital society. Yeah. And, you know, talking about the anti-human sort of agenda, it really, you know, we're sitting here a couple days after multiple mass shootings in this country.

And now mass shootings are, you know, as regular as baseball games in America, it seems. And, you know, I really wanted to sort of poke and prod your brain about this specifically, especially with this idea of alienation and atomization and lack of community that you talk about in your works in the context of capitalism and our society. So on top of all of that alienation, there's also this, you know, insurgent rise of far right wing movements here in North America and across the Western world. So with all of that in mind, like, I just want to sort of ask what your thoughts are on the current state of our society and maybe how you personally deal or understand tragedies. of mass shootings in this context of capitalism and the technology that we have. Some of what we're seeing is the inevitable result of the collapse of community. You know, if people don't have other human beings in their lives, if they're not looking into other people's eyes and establishing rapport, you know, basic

rapport, then they very quickly lose sight of the value of other human beings. you know, you end up really alone. And, you know, especially, you know, those of us who are on the Internet for a lot of time, most of our interactions with other people are just, you know, with their words or their images and not who they are. And our bodies, our minds don't understand really how to do that. You know, we're not evolved to engage with photos. We didn't evolve to establish rapport, you know, overseas.

Skype. And when you don't get the feedback that you're expecting as a body, when your mirror neurons don't fire and the oxytocin doesn't get released into your blood, you leave that interaction feeling somehow cheated, that you feel like, well, the other person wasn't really honest. They didn't really connect with me. That's because they weren't really there. They couldn't connect with you. You were looking at a computer screen, but your body doesn't know from that. So it engender sort of distrust and alienation from others. And, you know, the kids I see who've been raised on this stuff, increasingly they're finding it difficult to make eye contact in real life.

The students they have in my college classroom, every year there's more and more of them who can't participate. I mean, can't participate to the point where they come to class on the first day with a note from their doctor saying, Johnny can't participate. Please don't call on him in class. Please don't make him do any presentations. And it's like, well, what are we doing in this room if he can't talk? You know, and why is that?

It's because he's got social anxiety because he doesn't have enough practice in engaging with other people. So it's concerning. But if you look at that, if I've got that in the classes of people who are coming to take a class, who are going to a college, you know, imagine how bad it is and people that aren't even getting out. You know, the people who are just sitting alone in their house playing. and, you know, playing Fortnite. Although I do like the way kids socialize on Fortnite. I mean, I watch them play, and they're all shouting at each other and having little teams.

There's something that seems a little, I don't know, it looked cozy to me. I couldn't play it. I tried to play it, and I, have you ever been in there? I've never been in there, no. I'm only vaguely aware of it. And I'm running around, and, you know, you've got little feet, and you can move. And it's kind of, you hear your footsteps. And then someone said, come, I'll, who are you?

And I said, oh, you know, I'm Douglas, I'm new, and I just want to wander around, you know, and see stuff before I get killed. And then the guy said, okay, it's all right. I'll come. I'll take you around. And I'll show you how things work. And he says, where are you? Where are you? And I started shouting and stuff so you know where I am.

And he came in, he just killed me right away. Just boom, like that. And I was like, damn. Damn, that wasn't nice at all. And it's like, if he had asked, I would have said, sure, I will sacrifice my life. but just walk me around for like 10 minutes or something. Before you do it, I'll be your friend. Or use me, you know, throw me at somebody to hurt them, whatever.

But I was just like, oh, that was a shame. But in general, it seems slightly positive. But when I look at, you know, what's happening in the world, and I mean, yeah, this is all about the misuse of technology from the, you know, from the AK-47s that are getting in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, to the way that things like 4chan and 8chan and these, it's not just that they're unmoderated conversations.

We can all have unmoderated conversations, but when you find like the 1,000 most fucked up people in the world and put them all in the same chat room, they wouldn't have been able to find each other otherwise. I mean, look how long it took two kids in Littleton to find each other to go, you know, shoot people on their high school. school when you take that kid from every high school and connect them with every other one and then get a guy like Trump egging them on um what do you think's going to happen so on a certain level

Trump is right that it is the media you know it is but it's the media that he is doing the media that he's enabling you know it's a it's this this faux reality TV social media insanity that people are just not equipped to engage with each other in these spaces. Yeah, and, you know, we talk about 8chan and 4chan and these obviously bad toxic communities that give rise to these mass shooters, but, you know, I also think there's a, there's a huge role that Fox News plays in going up to that point, you know, like people like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram really giving cover for these ideas that then get really fleshed out in their most extreme conclusions on these more fringe websites like 8chan, but like I think there's a whole pipeline from mainstream, you know,

conservative people on Fox News down to these horrific little online communities. And it doesn't, you know, we call them online communities, but a big part of your work is pointing out how these aren't really communities. These are sort of fake replacements faux communities of a sort because any sort of nurturing, loving social community would not consistently give rise to such toxic behavior like we see in some of these forums, you know. No, these are more like affinity groups, you know, there's different. So, you know, if you found a chat room of people who love, you know, Chinese throwing stars or nunchucks or something, you know, yeah, you could all talk about nunchucks, but that's not a community. That's an affinity group. And community

can emerge from affinity groups. See, I've seen that happen. Even in a, I was once on a Yahoo finance stock market message board for one particular Y2K stock back when we thought the Y2K bug was going to come because I was really interested in doing a story on Y2K and there were all these investors who were investing in the various companies and who got to recognize certain names and then this one woman got cancer and died who was in this group and the other there was a conversation about it there was a sense of of heart to it so I'm not a person who's going to say that community or emotion or emotional support can't happen online in text things.

I don't think the medium is biased against allowing people to connect about things. Like if you have a rare disease, you know, you're going to find the other people who have that disease because there's no one in your town or even in your state maybe that has that weird thing. But, you know, the 300 people that have it can find each other and really commiserate and support in ways, you know, that's a beautiful and important thing. So I don't want people to get the idea that we're thinking that all of this is bad. I still have tremendous hope for how the internet can connect people, you know, in real ways. But any group, you know, with a very thin population,

can find one another and amplify whatever their problem or their sickness or thing is. And you're right, that then when you get either reinforcement from what looks like mainstream media or these kind of almost apology from mainstream media, when, you know, Trump or Sean Hannity, when they won't say, yeah, this is white nationalism, which is this toxic thing. And there were these people called the Nazis who did this and the idea of when you're calling, you know, foreigners invade. and when you call Jews and people of different genealogy when you're using metaphors of insects and infestation for people, that that's a really dangerous direction to go in. The fact that they don't acknowledge that is weird. And I used to think, it shows how naive I am and how hopeful and optimistic and sick I am. I used to listen to Sean Hannity on the radio.

And I assumed that he was doing this cynically, that he didn't believe the things he said, but that he said them in order to, you know, make money or get someone to like him or something. You know, I had been in the early days, I was on the O'Reilly show, the O'Reilly Factor. He's off now from a Me Too thing he did. But I was on him like the first week that his show was on the air on Fox. And we had this long conversation. He was trying to pick on Gen Xers, because I was at the time, I was a Gen Xer, like, you know, 29 or something. And he was saying, you know, Gen Xers didn't know. They did some study, and they found out Gen Xers didn't know that the Supreme Court justices had to be approved by the Senate.

And he was picking on me, saying, look how stupid all you Gen Xers are, you don't know. And I said, yeah, that's interesting. I said, oh, and by the way, Bill. Is it a majority of the senator or is it two-thirds? And he didn't know. Yeah. And he went, uh, and then he said, let's go to commercial. Wow.

And he went to commercial, and I thought he's going to be pissed off at me. And as soon as we were off camera, he went, that was fantastic. You got me so good. You know, that's it. That's what I want this show. And he's, you know, yelling because it's the first week. And he's yelling at his producer saying, that's what I want on this show. That's what I want.

And I realized he was just, he just was an entertainer. He was a clown. You know, his politics really were no more real than Stephen Colbert's at that point. You know, maybe it changed over time. But when Fox was a parody of itself, it was almost not so bad when it was this kind of performative thing of here we're living in a kind of Clintonian universe, a neoliberal universe. So we're going to do this kind of weird, performative, fake newsy thing, you know, to give conservative American. some sense of hope you know so it's like we had o'reilly on one side and you have like the west wing with martin sheen on the other side and people watching the west wing know that that's not really

the white house either right that's an errand sort in one hour drama of people walking around in west wing hallways with you know an unrealistic number of other people crossing in front of them on these long walks you know it's like a like a style but that you know it was interesting and I wrote a piece about this. It's like fictional, you know, the Democrats or lefties kind of, they subscribe to the fictional media of the West Wing and Murphy Brown and all that. Whereas the right, you know, the fascist side went toward like American Idol and Survivor and The Apprentice and Reality TV won, you know, because reality TV has real footage. You know, reality TV is still tied on. on some kind of cop's level to reality.

That's fascinating, yeah. That's so funny to hear about Bill O'Reilly behind the scenes sort of thing. Because I do think, like, back in those days, it was very different than the sort of dark way that Fox News has gone in the age of Trump. And, you know, I do want to now switch over to talk about climate change a little bit because on an episode of your podcast, Team Human, you interviewed David Wallace Wells, who wrote The Uninhabitable Earth. And you talked about maybe you asked him a question about the likelihood. of whether or not climate change can be meaningfully addressed within the confines of capitalism. You know, he gave his opinion and you guys moved on and you didn't really get to flesh out your thoughts. So I'm just curious, what are your thoughts? Can climate change be addressed, especially on

the timescales required within the confines of the capitalist structure, in your opinion? You got a bunch of email about that moment in the podcast, interestingly enough, from people who wanted me to fight back against him. For that and for his sort of, he kind of had some technosolutionist stuff going on too like he was believing that oh don't worry about taking plane travel because we're going to have electric plane soon and those won't be as bad or you know it's sort of that argument of

you know yes we understand that a Tesla or a Prius actually has a larger carbon footprint than a gasoline car which most people don't know but the reason you're still supposed to buy Prius and Tesla is that you're paying for the research and development for

maybe some future battery powered car that will work you know, that won't need little African slaves to get the rare earth metals and you won't have a giant piece of lithium battery to dispose of, you know, safely or whatever it is. I would say, you know, in answer

you to your question, I would say, we are not inside capitalism. You know, I think that's the myth. You know, we're not inside capital. The capitalism is a system that is failing. So

can we leverage aspects of capitalism toward fighting climate change? Absolutely. We can leverage it. Can we do it from inside capitalism? No. Because if you're inside

capitalism, then you're basically inside a model that says colonize and extract. You know, colonize and extract. And the more you colonize and extract, the more you weaken and enslave the people in places from which you're

you're extracting. You know, if you understand capitalism the way that I do or the way that Adam Smith did for real, not the way he's talked about in The Economist and that one line and one book in one teeny part where it talks about the invisible hand, people think that's Adam Smith. No, Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. And what Adam Smith's capitalism is is basically saying that there are three factors of production. And they have equally important roles to play. One is land, which is the place. One is labor, which is the people. And the third is capital, which is the money. But the money isn't the

only one who gets a seat at the table. The money isn't the only voice in the running of the business. The land and the labor have to have voices, too. If you extract all the value out of the land, then you run out of water. You run out of stuff. You destroy your environment. If you alienate the worker, the labor from the value that they create, they get disenfranchised. They get poor. They die. They get angry. They can't provide anymore. So, you know, that's what we're living in now is not, you know, Adam Smith capitalism. We're living in some kind of capitalism with a, where capital is the only, we're in capitalism, you know, which is no longer, it's no longer about business. It's no longer, even, even, you know, mercantilism would be better than this version

of extraction that gives all the power to the numbers, to the money. But it makes sense when we realize, oh, we're living in a digital media environment. And digital is about infinitely scaling things. Digital is about feedback loops and things that just can be inputs and outputs. And digital is the most consonant with numbers it's like math people are not digital the land is not digital these are non-digital things so in some ways really what you want to ask is can this happen within the confines of a digital of an entirely digital media environment and I don't know if it can because the only thing that digital values are these these infinitely expanding metrics and humans and soil can't compete with that. Nothing in real life grows exponentially. And if that's what digital wants, it's going to have to kill us all. And, you know, one thing that I really think when it comes to, like, well-intentioned liberals

who are trying to sort of take a technocratic approach to climate change is I think there's a sort of delusion that many Americans have that we can continue to consume as much as we currently do and that, you know, these renewable energies and stuff will come on board just in time for us to not have to take any real account of the amount of consumption that Americans specifically go through. I mean, I heard the stat once that if every person on planet Earth consumed like the average American, we'd need six planets. And so sometimes I'm worried that these technocratic solutions are geared towards maintaining this level of consumption and never really questioning the underlying incentive structure of capitalism. And I think that's

a dead end and will ultimately hurt us worse than making a more radical change away from the way that we're doing things now. Yeah, I mean, of course, the problem is that, you know, we, we Americans and Western Europeans, you know, establish this, you know, unsustainable lifestyle, you know, on the backs and economies and resources of other people around the world. And now those people are saying, well, wait a minute, just when it's our turn to get to participate in some of these spoils, you're saying that now we can't have it because there's just not enough. you know well fuck you right right so you know and they and they they they have a point which is why i'm starting to think that the only way out of this conundrum is for us to start making media and stories and science fiction that sells the idea of a greatly reduced kind of footprint as the happiest life so what would that what would that look like you know so so like we had science

fiction of abundance where people have all this shit and then we get the science fiction like glyphi of everything falling apart so what about a science fiction of this kind of future natural world where we're all living in like community supported agriculture and you know having fun and in little cottage industries and you know what i mean like doing some kind of a fun world made by hand where, you know, we look at a small-scale natural lifestyle as a form of abundance rather than a form of renunciation. So it doesn't look like some, you know, like we're communists wearing chairman Mao blue outfits and only have one pair of clothes a day. But rather, you know, we're living in these little natural settings and having really good organic sex

all the time and you know eating salads that just tastes so real and bright and you know we we create that kind of picture of that's the future you want to get to not this future where you have so much stuff you need a storage unit and all this plastic and going to work and trying to make money and taxes and bills and you know this this hyper-industrial mess that we're in but you create this sort of the vision of this low-stress future world. Yeah, and that really, that might be the solution, you know, the vision that would get past this anti-human sort of context that we're living in now, like, yeah, we might not all have iPhones and personal cars and flat-screen TVs, but maybe we have a big, a much

broader sense of community. Maybe there's, you know, philosophy clubs and science clubs that pop up. And so our whole idea, our paradigm of what the good life is gets taken away from this post-war, consumerist idea and towards a more, you know, holistic understanding of what makes human beings thrive and flourish. And that's antithetical, I think, in a lot of ways, to the very incentive structure of capitalism. But, and I don't know how we're going to get there, but I totally agree that, that broadening the imagination through art is an essential part of it.

It seems to be, you know, and I hope I'm not just trying to justify living as an artist or getting to make cool things. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. There's so much standing in the way. I'm not sure exactly how things are going to go. What are like the sort of best case and worst case scenarios of our species, you know, by the end of this century? Where can you likely see where we're going? Well, likely. I hate to say things like likely. I mean, if we're going to play likely, we're witnessing the collapse of civilization. And what does that lead to? I don't know. I mean, I guess the likely outcome, is, you know, a few hundred million people survive and live in a vastly different form of society. You know, that's the most likely.

I mean, can we avert that? Yeah, I think we can avert that too. I don't tend to look at things quite as apocalyptic as humans tend to. You know, it's really easy at the end of cycles to assume that this is the end of the world, you know, that you want to stand up on your roof and wait for the chariot to come, you know, has happened so much in history. I would love to think that the science fact-based progressive community is having a collective hallucination about the thawing of the permafrost and green. land and the melting of the ice caps and that all that means is that we'll just have some more water or something or you know it'll be a little rainy but i i don't think so i feel like this this is um this is different than a prophesized story you know it's not like nostradamus just said oh you know the evil devil, the Malach, is going to come back and burn your planet.

There's too much evidence that things are happening. On the other hand, we don't really yet know how much life will work at that next level. If the planet's 130 degrees, then some amount of humans could live with solar-powered, air-conditioning, and stay inside all the time, but what do we lose? Or there are plants, or there's bacteria. You know, it's just like, it's just so, what we're moving into so vastly different that it's hard to, it's hard to make accurate predictions. It's just that the problem is that human life is less resilient than some other forms of

life, right? Like bacteria, they mutate really fast and you change their conditions and they figure out things you know yeah humans don't we don't evolve that quickly it's like nine months until a baby comes out and how much variation do you get with each generation not really enough to weather um extreme variations in climature in disease makeup and what bacteria are alive even in your bodies you know you screw up your gut floor that could kill you so i worry that that the human species is has a thin bandwidth of variation that it can kind of work in, even if we can do climate-controlled environments.

It just gets really tricky. I don't know how many acidophilus you can take to compensate for this, that, or the other. And, you know, what Lyme disease and, you know, Ebola are going to come out of the jungles. and it's just, it's really, it's tricky. Yeah, I share that sort of not knowing exactly where things are going to go and sort of, you know, it can really go either way. I do view this as like a real test for our species. Like if our species is sort of coming out of its adolescence, it's like do or die.

Like, you know, now that we have so much control over our natural environment, it's coming back to bite us in the ass. And this national level politic understanding that we've gotten by for the last several hundred years, is no longer sufficient to address this global crisis. And we're going to, to some degree, have to come together, not as a nation state, but as a species to address this problem. And that's like the prerequisite to get through this period of time for human evolution.

But one thing that you talk about a lot that I really respect is this, you have this belief in grassroots organization. And I think that that's going to put us in the right direction if we have any hope of really, you know, making things better. because I don't see voting, you know, as a real way to make the change necessary in the short amount of time period that we have. So, yeah, this idea of grassroots organizations and people increasingly getting fed up with the lack of progress on this front. What are your thoughts on that? Are you hopeful that people will rise up of their own accord and put pressure on these systems to do the right thing? Well, I do think it's possible that we could elect a leader who doesn't

actively prevent communities from organizing just to have a leader who did no harm would be better than where we've been and it's even possible

that we would get some kind of an Elizabeth Warren who tries to use government to the benefit of people you know which is I know it sounds so naive but that was the

the idea of government was that it's there to help solve the kinds of problems that we can't solve on our own, you know, or as businesses, that there's certain sort of collective issues like our health and our water and our education and that government could do. And I think that some of the people running on the Democratic side right now see that as possible, that government doesn't have to be the problem, that government can enable the solution but I think kind of most importantly we need to

relocalize and that's I mean it's hard for people to do in cities to some extent because they're so dependent on this giant chain of you know supply chain and all this you know movement of capital

and displacements of stuff but it's still they can still reconnect you know somewhat locally at least to their neighbors and in the value they create So I guess, you know, my hope, you know, it's sort of why I wrote Team Human, is that, you know, I think that basic human rapport is a prerequisite to solidarity, you know, that labor movements, they were able to establish rapport because they were working next to each other. You know, you looked into the eyes of the other person on the assembly line with you, and now people don't even see who they're working with, so it's really hard. So I was thinking, get people to spend time with each other in real spaces, get people to look at each other in the eye and have conversations with each other.

And then that would be the first step towards them, you know, reclaiming collective power and then organizing and then inviting the others to organize with them. You know, even the people they don't agree with because they do have common, we have common cause, you know. We all want clean air and water to drink and food for our children and, you know, basic creature comforts. And we want a voice and a role in our society. So those kinds of, I think, common values, except for, you know, I think even the craziest among us are hoping for that. You know, they just feel threatened by different things. Yeah. So, yeah.

So I do think that local organizations, it's certainly the easiest way for any of us to be involved. I mean, you can spend all day and all night watching presidential debates, but what are you really doing? You're watching TV, you know, and then you're making your impact felt in one second of voting. You know, and I think you can do so much more, you know, joining your community supporter to agriculture group, looking at land use in your town, join the school board, do all of those great local, local political participatory activities, the stuff that, you know, de Tocqueville marveled at when he, when he traveled through America and wrote democracy, you know, those institutions are still there. They're not populated, but they still exist.

And I still think there are kind of highest leverage point towards collective change. Yeah, I could not agree more. Here in Omaha with the people that we organize with, we really focus on food self-sufficiency, building big organic gardens that can supply food to us. in need like disaster relief flooding is a big problem here in the northern great plains we had like a one in a 500 year flood just this spring yeah you're going to get another one too you're going to get 500 year floods every couple of years right yeah and then also the last thing is as we have tenant organizations here where we you know come together and we fight on behalf of tenants against

slumlords and gentrifying development neighborhoods etc so i'm totally on board with with all that and i do think that's the that's the only way forward as opposed to well congratulations for doing that stuff. I mean, most people talk to talk, but very few actually do this stuff. And the beautiful thing about most of these activities is, you know, they're both great preparation for a potential collapse because you'll have more resilient to be connected with each other. But they're also the best way to prevent a big collapse. You know, the more resilient we are, then the less chance there is of real kind of apocalyptic breakdown. Yeah. All right, so we have about five minutes left. I've, you've been very generous with your time.

Mike Rugee, who was on our episode about your book, he texted me a few questions he wanted me to ask you on his behalf, because he's a huge fan of your work and I think he's read all of your books, or most of them at least. So I just have two sort of rapid-fire questions before we wrap up here from Mike Rugee. The first question is, what is your personal philosophy towards death? If immortality was somehow an option on the table, would you be interested or would you reject it? If immortality were an option on the table?

Yeah. Well, it kind of is, isn't it? I mean, I don't know if you do it. I mean, I don't know what happens when we died. So I don't mean to sound old-fashioned. And I'm not saying I'm suicidal or anything like that. But part of me is looking forward to death because it's like, that's like the all. ultimate polarity, like the ultimate, you know, I used to talk with Genesis Peoridge a lot about

this. He's this musician and thinker and poet. And, you know, he tried to break down various dualities, like class distinction and gender distinction. But the real one, the biggest baddest false duality of all is like life, death, like, if it is. I mean, it might be real. But What if it's not? What if, I don't know, what if we're not really here, right? What if we're like signal being beamed from somewhere? Like your body is just like a transceiver of some kind, you know, that there's this sort of other quantum dimension thing.

I mean, I'd hate to deny myself participation in the full on total quantum dance of reality by hanging on to my, you know, neural-y, you know, fueled sense of awareness longer than appropriate. So, no, I would. You know, might I buy some time? Yeah, if I could have vital time where I'm, like, still able to, like,

fuck and read and walk around and stuff. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I could take some more to that, probably. you know, especially because I feel like I missed out on various things for various reasons. I could kind of play catch-up. But if I'm just going to be like, you know, not able to move or chew, then maybe the next thing would be cool. Yeah.

Yeah, so interesting. I totally agree with this idea that not being depressed but still like sort of seeing death as like a nap at the end of a long day, sort of looking forward to it in a way. It's very interesting. I totally agree with your take on that. Well, I just don't know what it is. It's like, there's like people who like love doing DMT all the time. Yeah.

And I'm like, you know, yeah, it's cool. I'm glad you got to see it and all. But it's like you're going to get to do this later. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like, don't spoil the surprise. It's like, it's like I hate previews of like, I watch this show called Billions on like HBO or Showtime or something. And it's like right before the show comes on.

they do this teaser to try to get people to watch the episode that night. If you watch the teaser, there's no point to watch the episode. It's like movie trailers that tell the whole story of the movie, and you're like, well, fuck it. I don't need to see that movie now. Exactly. That just happens so much. And I feel like some of these experiences might be kind of spoilers.

For cool shit that's going to happen. I love that idea. Last question from Mike Rugi. what is something that you've learned that you think every parent should pay attention to, but few do? I think parents are expecting somehow because they're acting like human beings with their kids, that their kids will look at them just as human beings. But your kids will never look at you just like human beings. They are going to look at you like parents, you know, which is only,

almost a kind of a god you know and I'm not saying that it gives you great power or anything but it's that you're you're you're an archetype I mean especially if you're their mother you know and all you can do is fail them right because they're looking at you to be an archetype and you're just this flawed human right you're this flawed person but you got to realize that the reason your kids hate you is they don't hate you as a person they hate you for not being fucking Zeus, right? You as a parent

are your kid's first clue that we're all fucked up, you know? This whole system is flawed. Right. You know, that there's sort of human frailty and all. And they can't until way late,

they're not going to be able to forgive you for it. They can't forgive you for failing on some level as a human being. And you can't really, you can't plan. them for that that comes with the territory they came out of you you know they came out of your frigging legs especially if you're a mother you know they came out of you so you're not just a person

so realizing that and and weaving that into your parenting and how you talk to them and how you teach them might be an important role to play or try to try to also be the best you maybe as a parent knowing how much your kids look up to you yeah forgive them for hating you because they have to they have to because you're the embodiment of all of our existential kind of dissatisfaction with human existence well said all right douglas thank you so much for coming on before we let you go can you let listeners know where they can find you online and also maybe plug this upcoming event in omaha you're coming to to maha is that correct

if you're in omaha there's something called the maha festival which is this big cool fun music festival thing and on next Wednesday August 14th we're going to do a team human live for a really small little audience at a like a cafe place called Archetype on South 13th Street in Omaha and come on down and then the next day I guess on the 15th I'm doing a talk for for Maha itself that I guess that afternoon or something. than on the 15th, but I don't know how you get to go to that unless you get like a ticket for the whole Maha thing, which is cool. I mean, there's real bands. It's like the real deal. But if you're not at that, you just come to Team Human.

I'm pretty sure that's just free, and you can just come. And, yeah, and TeamHuman's a podcast I do at TeamHuman.fm or through all of your various pod things, you can get it. You love my Tech Talk. Get it to your pod things. And, yeah, I write books. So Team Human is a book, and it's fun. It's an audiobook or a regular book or an e-book or everything,

and it's short and sweet and cheap and enjoyable. So check that out. And I'm just around. Yeah, definitely. I love the book. I love the podcast, and I'm going to do my best to be there for that live recording of the Team Human podcast. I'm really looking forward to that.

Well, cool. And I'll get to meet you. Absolutely. All right, Douglas. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for caring about this stuff. Yeah, we've got to find each other and together.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. All right, be welcome. You too. Eyeballs float in wet green grass. I've got a chainsaw motor that's filled with rain. But when it sings, like the eyes all bulging when the peak, sun drops the eye that's cold while I'm in deep. Where I'm asleep or twilight, light so, I take a break. Elevada pressed fast forward I did you grind these teeth the people time if I can bring things back They feed back while I'll go in the way I saw the future The things were right

Hey, hey boys with thin white legs That got modified features and software brains But that's what the girls like The beaks were right When I saw the future The peaks were right Predator skills, chemical wars, plastic islands and sea Watch what the humans brewing

With machines Eyeballs float in wet green grass I'm in chains of quiet in dreams that then to let me cut the time and stretch out bark I make the drug eyes roll and wet eyes cross while I'm in deep brown sleep or twice by its songs a day Take the brake elevator press fast forward so I can run this deep and move through time If I can bring face back, they'd be back wild And when I saw the future