Rev Left Radio - Team Human: Technology, Markets, and Alienation

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Mike Ruge joins Breht to discuss "Team Human" by Douglas Rushkoff. The text we used as the foundation for this discussion can be found here:  https://rushkoff.com/books/team-human-book/    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/

Technology is not driving itself. It doesn't want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology. An operating system beneath our various computer interfaces and platforms that is often unrecognized by the developers themselves. This operating system is called capitalism, and it drives the anti-human agenda in our society at least as much as any technology.

Commerce is not the problem. People and businesses can transact in ways that make everyone more prosperous. If anything, capitalism as it's currently being executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplaces and delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity. What we now think of as capitalism was born in the late Middle Ages, in the midst of a period of organic economic growth. Soldiers had just returned from the Crusades,

having opened up new trade routes and bringing back innovations from foreign lands, One of them, from the Moorish Bazaar, was the concept of quote-unquote market money. Until this point, European markets operated mostly through barter, the direct exchange of goods. Gold coins, like the Florin, were just too scarce and valuable to be spent on bread. Anyone who had gold, and most peasants did not, hoarded it. Market money let regular people sell their goods to one another. It was often issued in the morning, like chips at the beginning of a poker game, and then cashed out at the close of trading.

Each unit of currency might represent a loaf of bread or a head of lettuce and would be used as credit by the seller of those items as a way of priming the pump for the day's trade. So the baker could go out early and buy the things he needed, using coupons good for a loaf of bread. Those coupons would slowly make their way back to the baker who would exchange them for loaves of bread. The moors also invented grain receipts.

A farmer could bring 100 pounds of grain to the grain store and leave with the receipt. It would be perforated into 10-pound increments so that the farmer could tear off a portion and spend it to buy what he needed. The interesting thing about this form of money is that it lost value over time. The grain store had to be paid, and some grain was lost to spoilage, so the money itself was biased towards spending. Who would hold on to money that was going to be worth less next month? This was an economy geared for the velocity of money, not the hoarding of capital. It distributed wealth so well that many former peasants rose to become the new merchant middle class.

They worked for themselves, fewer days per week, with greater profits, and in better health than Europeans had ever enjoyed, or would enjoy again for many centuries. The aristocracy disliked this egalitarian development. As the peasants became self-sufficient, feudal lords lost their ability to extract value from them. These wealthy families hadn't created value in centuries, and so they needed to change the rules of business, to stem the rising tide of wealth as well as their own decline. They came up with two main innovations. The first, the chartered monopoly. It made it illegal for anyone to do business in a sector without an official charter from the king.

This meant that if you weren't the king's selected shoemaker or vinter, you had to close your business and become an employee of someone who was. The American Revolution was chiefly a response to such monopoly control by the British East India Company. Colonists were free to grow cotton, but forbidden from turning it into fabric or selling it to anyone but the company at exploitative prices. The company transported the cotton back to England, where it was made into fabric, then shipped it back to America and sold it to the colonists. The monopoly charter was the progenitor of the modern corporation. The other main innovation was central currency. Market money was declared illegal.

Its use was punishable by death. people who wanted to transact had to borrow money from the central treasury at interest. This was a way for the aristocracy who had money to make money simply by lending it. Money, which had been a utility to promote the exchange of goods, became instead a way of extracting value from commerce. The local markets collapsed. The only ones who continued to borrow were the large chartered monopolies. If companies had to pay back more money than they borrowed,

they had to get the additional funds somewhere. This meant that the economy had to grow. So the chartered corporations set out to conquer new lands, exploit their resources, and enslave their peoples. That growth mandate remains with us today. Corporations must grow in order to pay back their investors. The companies themselves are just the conduits through which the operating system of central currency can execute its extraction routines. With each new round of growth, more money and value is delivered up from the real world of people and resources to the those who have the monopoly on capital. That's why it's called capitalism. Under the pretense of

solving problems and making people's lives easier, most of our technological innovations just get people out of sight or out of the way. This is the true legacy of the industrial age. Consider Thomas Jefferson's famous invention, the dumbwaiter. We think of it as a convenience. Instead of carrying food and wine from the kitchen up to the dining room, the servants could place items into the small lift and convey it upstairs by pulling on ropes. Food and drink appeared as if by magic. But the purpose of the dumbwaiter had nothing to do with saving efforts. Its true purpose was to hide the grotesque crime of slavery. This may be less technology's fault than the way we've chosen to use it. The industrial age brought us many mechanical innovations, but in very few cases they actually make

production more efficient. They simply made human skill less important so that laborers could be paid less. Assembly line workers had to be taught only a single, simple task, such as nailing one tack into the sole of a shoe. Training took minutes instead of years, and if workers complained about their wages or conditions, they could be replaced the very next day. The industrialist's dream was to replace them entirely, with machines. The consumers of early factory goods loved the idea that no human hands were involved in their creation. They marveled at the seamless machined edges and perfectly spaced stitches of industrial age products. There was no trace of humans at all.

Even today, laborers in Asia, quote-unquote, finish smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints with a highly toxic solvent proven to shorten the workers' lifespans. That's how valuable it is for consumers to believe their devices have been assembled by magic rather than by the fingers of underpaid and poisoned children. Creating the illusion of no human involvement actually costs human lives. Of course, the mass production of goods require mass marketing, which is proven just as dehumanizing. While people once bought products from the people who made them, mass production separates the consumer from the producer and replaces this human relationship with

the brand. So where people used to purchase oats from the miller down the block, now consumers go to the store and buy a box shipped from a thousand miles away. The brand image, in this case a smiling Quaker, substitutes for the real human relationship and is carefully designed to appeal to us more than a living person could. To pull that off, producers turned again to technology. Mass production led to mass marketing, but mass marketing required mass media to reach the actual masses. We may like to think that radio and TV were invented so that entertainers could reach bigger audiences, but the proliferation of broadcast media was subsidized by America's new national brands, which gained access to consumers coast to coast.

Marketers of the period believed they were performing a patriotic duty, fostering allegiance to mass market brands that iconized American values and ingenuity, but the collateral damage was immense. Consumer culture was born, and media technologies became the main way to persuade people to desire possessions over relationships and social status over social connections. The less fruitful the relationships in a person's life, the better target that person was for synthetic ones. The social fabric was undone. Since at least the industrial age, technology has been used as a way to make humans less valued and essential to labor, business, and culture. This is the legacy that digital technology inherited. An excerpt from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we'll be talking with Mike Rugi about Douglas Rushkoff's book, Team Human. We'll be exploring concepts related to technology, market capitalism, socialism, alienation, and lots of other interesting topics. Before we get into the episode, I did want to give a shout out really quick to a band, who we were introduced to through the other podcast called On Mass. The band's name is Bring the War. home. And I've been talking with them trying to get an episode, maybe on our Marxism and a Mosh Pit Spinoff show. But in any case, I promised I would give them a shout out. Definitely go check them out. It's Bring the War Home and it's on band cap, especially if you like

punk, post-punk, hardcore stuff. This is definitely down your alley and is very explicitly revolutionary revolutionary. So, with that said, if you like what we do here on Revolutionary Left Radio, you can go to our website at Revolutionaryleftradio.com to find Patreon links, the Twitter links, our YouTube channel, and much more. And definitely you could support us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio if you are so inclined. Having said all that, let's jump into this episode with Mike Rugi on Douglas Rushkoff's book, Team Human. Hey, this is Mike Rugi, and I just like to read books. I'm very interested right now in technology and capitalism and how the two kind of play together.

and how it's shaping our world. Yeah, and me and Mike, we go way back. Before any of Rev Left happened, even before a lot of my organizing, I think you and I met each other in like a Facebook debate group, basically. It goes back years and years. And so it's really cool to finally be able to collab with you and work on something together because we've been friends for so long, and this is really exciting.

Yeah, that was mostly, I think, you and I talking to, Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Oh, what a wild time. Yeah, just dropping philosophy bombs. That's right. It was ages ago. It was, but I really appreciate you coming on, and I'm looking forward to this discussion. You've always been a really voracious reader, and recently you've talked to me about getting

into Douglas Rushkoff and some of his work, and he just released a new book called Team Human, which we're going to be sort of exploring today with Mike. Before we get into the questions, though, Mike, how do you identify politically? You know, I don't have a dogmatic flag. You know, I'm open to anything. You know, I'm very left-oriented, obviously. I enjoy Marx immensely.

And, yeah, I don't think I really have any commitment. admits to anything i i'm just basically you know constantly learning open to everything just really want to try and figure things out most of the time definitely but you're certainly a man of the left and i think that will be you know good going through this this conversation you don't you know you hold down any one tendency but you're very open-minded you're very knowledgeable and i think that will make for a really good discussion specifically with this book and its implications so let's go ahead and jump into it since we are using the book team human by douglas rush as a sort of jumping off point for this broader conversation.

Let's start by talking about the main themes of that book. So in Team Human, what is Douglas Rushkoff's arguing for? What is he arguing for? And why is it at all relevant to the left broadly? So basically, Rushkoff is trying to dispel any notion that technology is in any way at this point being optimized for humans or human flourishing. Instead, you know, this book is a lot about, you know, he shows quite convincingly that technology is actually being used to optimize humans for the market. I think this argument is relevant to the left, anyone who wants to understand better the interplay between technology and media theory and basically how capitalism interacts.

This is kind of a surprising book because it's a New York Times bestseller. As you're reading it, I don't know what page you get to, but about halfway through, you know, he sort of lifts the veil a little bit. I think you might be reading that section where he lets readers know sort of fundamentally what the problem is, and that problem basically is capitalism. Yeah, definitely. And he even gives a nice little historical breakdown of how capitalism actually came to be in some of the interest behind pushing, you know, the economy in that direction. Yeah, and that was read. I'll be reading that for the intro of this. So if you listen to this from the very beginning,

you'll hear me read that passage from the book, which I think is really interesting because you're right. He's this sort of mainstream academic author. He's on the New York Times bestselling list, but we'll get into this in a little bit, but I think in some interviews he's identified somewhat as an anarcho-sindicalist, and he does not pull any punches when it comes to pointing out capitalism and the free market economy as a sort of antagonist in this entire discussion,

which is interesting at least it's not totally novel i mean certainly it's happened before but uh but yeah it's interesting to see this becoming more and more a part of the mainstream discussion uh in our society which i think is important and uh we should pay attention to it when it comes up and that's what we're doing today so throughout the book rush cough refers to this concept of an anti-human agenda and he argues that it's built into our technology into our markets and into our major cultural institutions what does he mean by anti-human in this context? And can you maybe give us some examples to flesh out that understanding? Yeah. Again, you know, like you were just saying, it's, it's almost somewhat

cliche now to point out that the landscape that we live in is not made for us. We live in a corporate capitalist landscape that tilts the playing field in its own favor. And it reproduces itself everywhere, even in our own thoughts and language and values. Rushkoff says in one of his other book's Life Incorporated corporations and their mythologies direct human activity today. And he actually sees the invention of the corporation on par with the invention of an abstract God, which at first glance, you know, you're not really sure about when you first read that. But actually, you know, really corporations and the thought world that they produce certainly seem to play a much bigger role in our life today than any abstract God. And he does

make a distinction there also between the two, you know, monotheism, basically it disconnected us from nature. He writes about that a bit in some of his other books, but corporatism, which is basically corporate capitalism, actually disconnects us from each other and maybe even from our own soul. He's basically talking about alienation from others and ourselves. As far as examples, I mean, it's the water we live in. You know, why does the world look the way it does? You know, anywhere you go, you go outside, why are there parking lots? Why does everyone have to have their own car? Why does your phone track your every movement and try to distract you with trivial news or ads? It'd be hard to find an example of a pro-human agenda. You know, your

school, like does your school want to teach you how to think and be politically active and strive for a meaningful life? Or are the school directors on the phone with the CEO is asking how they should best train you for your future career in a cubicle, you know? Yeah. Yeah, so he calls it anti-human, but it's absolutely echoes the Marxist concept of alienation. Just, you know, the whole capitalist system is really, you know, in its own lane, like going after its own goals, and it's really not at all concerned about what is best for the most amount of humans or what's conducive to true human flourishing or self-actualization. And, of course, this is embedded in every part of our lives and leads to, among many other things, the sort of eruption in anxiety and depression. and other forms of neuroticism and mental illness

as we social beings are trying to exist in a world that is less and less social and less human or oriented towards what makes human life worth living more and more all the time. And that kind of leads well into this next question because early in the book, Rushkoff dedicates an entire chapter to exploring our evolutionary history to argue that we are primarily social animals.

And, you know, using nature to understand human beings, societies and to make normative claims about how we should structure our societies has often had a reactionary history. Some prominent examples definitely include like the concept of social Darwinism, even like recently Jordan Peterson's lobster hierarchy arguments, and what our friends over at Seriously Wrong in a recent episode called fascist naturalism, which is trying to look for things in nature that you can then transplant onto human society and use that to justify brutal hierarchies of domination and exploitation so it's fascist in that sense so with that in mind and with that history you know very much in mind what is rush cough arguing for in this chapter

and what are your sort of reflections and thoughts on it so i don't think he's trying to you know build a philosophy off of his concept of human nature i think he's trying to dispel those things a bit you know it's a bit like if you went to a chicken factory or something and you saw the chickens were, you know, just tearing each other to pieces. And if you were to say, okay, well, that's, you know, the life of a chicken is nasty, brutish, and short. But he's basically, he's making the argument that, you know, that's chickens in one environment. And when he's talking about humans, he's trying to make the case that humans are worth saving, basically. A lot of the the ideas that we have about human nature just in mainstream thought, you know, these are the

products of an ideology and environment that were enmeshed in. He has this kind of hilarious story in 2017. He was invited to speak at some future of technology event, and it paid really, really well, so he went ahead and went over there to do this talk, and I don't know if you heard about this before. I had not, no. So he shows up at this ultra-deluxe resort and expects to give a speech to a crowd and he's brought into this small room he thinks it's a green room you know before the show and it's just these five like hedge fund billionaires just sitting around and uh they start asking him questions they beat around the bush for a while but pretty soon they get to the reason that he's there and uh basically they want to know first of all where to build

their secret bunkers for when you know the shit hits the fan oh my god and then also how to control their guards after money is no longer an issue um Jesus yeah so you know this is this is the kind of these are the kind of things that he sees and that he deals with I actually have a a quote which is pretty great so when he's talking about this he says uh you know so this single question occupied us for the rest of the hour they knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs and how would they pay the guards once the money was worthless what would stop the guards from choosing their own leaders the billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew or making guards wear

disciplinary collars of some kind and return for their survival and they also wondered about building robots to serve as guards if that technology could be developed in time when he's talking about this human nature, it's not in a Jordan Peterson sense. He's not trying to derive an ought from it is, basically. But when they asked them this, his response, he suggested that their best bet would be to actually treat those people really, really well right now. And maybe they should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. Maybe they can expand their ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, wealth distribution, and maybe there'll be less

of a chance that the event will happen in the first place. They didn't buy it, you know. Yeah, of course. I would have paid money to be there, though, and hear Jordan Peterson's suggestions, you know. My God, yeah. It's like anything. Anything that we can do that doesn't involve, you know, treating human beings well or maybe restructuring societal institutions that are leading to us, leading us to have this paranoid, you know, fear, fantasy of dystopia and how we're going to handle our armed guards. I mean, Christ. That's hilarious, though. Yeah, yeah. He said, you know, the more we are committed to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings is the problem and technology as the solution, the very essence of what it means.

to be human is treated less as a feature than a bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. And, you know, again, that's sort of a, that would be more of a Jordan Peterson viewpoint, I think, that this stuff is just in us. And it doesn't really matter what we do. We're always going to be this way. You know, he would probably suggest putting rubber band. hands on their hands or something.

Yeah, but it's, I mean, and this is really getting at, I mean, probably his broad argument generally, which is this very idea is like, you know, technology in certain contexts could have a liberating effect, you know, could lead to what those on the left sort of tongue-in-cheek call post-scarcity, you know, gay luxury communism or whatever. And that's just to point to the possible future where automation and new technologies are not used simply to, you know, replace the worker in the factory or become literally robot guards for CEOs in a future dystopia, but could actually be used to, you know, provide the highest quality of life to as many human beings as possible. But that really doesn't even cross the

mind of those who have more or less bought in to capitalism and, you know, are ready to see barbarism before they can even think of entertaining the idea of socialism. Right. So, like, Let's go on and move on to this next part of the discussion, and it revolves around the concept of media revolutions. Rushkov goes on to assert that throughout human history, many media revolutions have occurred, but for the most part they've become co-opted by the powers that be, sort of like what we were just talking about, stripped of what is possibly revolutionary about them, and in the process are reduced to just mere instruments for a ruling class's agenda. So can you talk about what he means by media revolutions and how their revolutionary potential is so often? often lost? Yeah, so television, you know, the telegraph, the internet, all of these things

are media revolutions. They change everything. And his point is that whoever controls media controls society. Yeah, so he says here, each new media revolution appears to offer people a new opportunity to rest that control from an elite view and reestablish the social bonds that media has compromised. But so far anyway, the people, the masses have always remained one entire media revolution behind those who would dominate them. And then he, you know, he gives some examples on each one, you know, basically with the invention of text, you know, originally we might have become a literate culture, but at first, you know, text was just used merely to keep track of possessions and slaves. And then when writing was put in the service of religion, only the

priests could read the text and understand Hebrew and Greek. Basically, you know, the priest won the elite capability of literacy and then the printing press emerged in the Renaissance and people gained the ability to read but only the king and his allies had had the power to produce the text likewise with radio and television

they were controlled by corporations or repressive states you know people could only watch or listen so that's basically what he's talking about there yeah and that's really interesting because we just had a we just had a conversation on the the Sandinista revolution and in that conversation we talked about

how various socialist revolutions, especially in the global south, have resulted in these huge increases in literacy among the population. So this idea that these technologies are kept away from the quote-unquote rabble and used at the higher levels of society is not only something in the distant past,

but it's something that still operates today on a global level with regards to the globally privilege, the global ruling class, and many people in the global south who their entire lives are sort of living in this. context in which the global north is dominating and extracting value in resources from their regions against their own interest. And so literacy for a lot of these people with the revolution, I mean, the San Anista

Revolution was in 79. And there was a huge percentage of that population that couldn't even read. And we explored just what it means to be able to read, like what opens up for a human being when they can begin to read. And that was just a couple decades ago, a decade before I was even born. and there's still parts of this planet where people are, you know, illiterate. And, yeah, I mean, it's just horrifying. It's not something in our past.

It's something very much in our present. But going on to the next chapter, and this chapter is entitled economics, and Rushkoff says something interesting. And this is part of what I read in the intro to this episode, but I want to reiterate a part of it. Rushkoff says, quote, technology is not driving itself. It doesn't want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology. an operating system beneath our various computer interfaces and platforms that is often unrecognized by the developers themselves. This operating system is called capitalism, and it drives the anti-human agenda in our society at least as much as any technology, end quote.

So what are Rushkov's arguments about and against capitalism in this chapter, in this book, and more broadly in his work? what's driving like as an example like social media technology is is largely market forces in the attention and surveillance economy social media doesn't have to operate this way it doesn't have to apply slot machine casino logic to try and keep you hooked and spend longer on the platform it doesn't have to track everything you do so that your information can be sold to advertisers it doesn't have to try and manipulate you with content that targets your basest instincts at the expense of your sanity and well-being. Tristan Harris, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

He was a Google ethicist, but he's been very vocal about this sort of thing. He calls this technology's race to the bottom of the brainstem. The AI is programmed to hijack our attention and then use whatever it learns each time to upgrade itself. Meanwhile, you know, it's polarizing and outraging people and encouraging trolling and marginalization of people. And it's finding ways not just to predict people's next actions, but even influence them in ways that will make them more predictable. He puts it very well. He says essentially it upgrades itself by downgrading humans. Yeah, have you had any, like, so have you had to take social media breaks? Have you had any strain on your mental and emotional

well-being by being on these social media platforms personally oh yeah absolutely um the big wake-up call for me actually was reading a book called the shallows by nicholas car it's it's just absolutely amazing um i actually have a quote from that book he says what the net seems to be doing and he's talking about his own experience what it seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation uh whether i'm online or not my mind now expects to to take in information the way the net distributes it in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. And his argument overall was basically, you know, that the net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information,

expressing ourselves and conversing with others. it also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment. Marshall McLuhan is kind of the main media theorist guy. He describes a media, a new medium as an extension of man, but he says, you know, it's also an amputation. It will give you something, but it's going to take something away as well. And we see that pretty clearly when you try to compare, for instance, a very literate culture that reads a lot, which was back in, you know, the 1800s, you listen to presidential debates from that time where, you know, they debate for three, four hours, take a break together, and then go back and debate for another three hours. And then you compare that to, you know, a television culture, you know, 20 seconds. What do you got? You know, image is everything. absolutely yeah that's that's a really stark difference i think a lot of people like when they go back and maybe even they just like watch movies or read books from a previous time or find quotes and just be

like damn look how articulate people were how how enamored with words they were and it seems so lost today and you know that's part of the reason one thing that was a wake-up call for me or just one of many wake-up calls because i am very sensitive to this topic is like just the concept of like when i'm when i'm driving like around town or whatever and and you come across the red light, you have now a choice to make. Do you sit with yourself in silence? Like can you just, you know, be able to sit with your own thoughts for 15 seconds until that light turns green? Or do you feel the urge in your hand to reach into your pocket and pull up whatever app you can possibly click in the short amount of time you have and scroll through

stuff? You'll immediately forget and adds nothing to your day. But it feeds into this, this terrible human impulse of being afraid of sort of silence or being afraid of the present moment, being uncomfortable being with yourself and your own thoughts for a period of time. I know there's been studies that have shown that people would prefer, I mean, getting administered an electric shock rather than having to sit alone for 30 minutes in a quiet room, just with their own thoughts. So the sort of bad impulse to get away from our own silence and our own thoughts and ourselves is really just amplified exponentially by this, this really attention grabbing all these platforms and apps and everything like that.

And it really, really degrade your ability to focus on anything else in your life. One thing I try to do to offset it is meditate on a daily basis, right? Meditation works in the exact opposite way. It is you taking specific amounts of time every day, sitting along with your thoughts, in silence, watching how your mind and body sort of interact with its environment. and how thoughts are forming, you know, really taking a moment to sit there and get through that. This works in the exact opposite direction. And honestly kind of horrifies me when I see myself, you know, fall prey to it.

So I've been trying to take a lot more social media breaks and I think I'm about due for another one. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And Mark Fisher actually said the same thing about, you know, the internet used to be someplace that you would go. But now, you know, it's in your pocket. It's with you. Now every moment you have to make that choice. you have to opt out. And just making that choice in itself is very distracting.

Yeah, exactly, exactly right. And then there's a whole concept of what someone on the left called surveillance capitalism. And I think we've all had that experience of talking to your friends about something and then seeing on your phone advertisement for the very thing you were just talking about. You know, you didn't put it in. You didn't Google search it. It was nothing that was actually put into your phone. But, you know, it almost seems conspiratorial because you're like,

Like, how did this happen? Like, how did it actually hear me? But it happens so often to everybody that I know that it's like, it can't be a coincidence. There has to be something here that's picking up on keywords that are being discussed. I mean, your phone is basically always listening to you, you know? No, yeah, that's absolutely true. And yeah, I believe that's Google. They really do do that.

They do occasionally listen in one way or another. You know, one problem with the algorithms that do this kind of thing is they're kind of a black box. You can't really explain to anyone or no one can really even look into what it is they're doing half the time. But that is absolutely true. People have tested this in a couple of different ways. And what you're saying is absolutely true. They do listen from time to time and they do target ads based on what they hear you say. Vindicated.

So you're not a conspiracy theorist. It's true. Okay. So one of the things that I thought was interesting is this concept of mechanomorphism. He brings it up in this book, Team Human. So what is mechanomorphism and what role does it play in Rushkoff's broader argument in this text? I'm already worried that in order to explain mechanomorphism, I'm going to have to say a word that's very hard for me to say, which is anthropomorphism. Beautiful. He nailed it.

I've been practicing it all day. there's actually an old insight from Marx here that technologies create the ways in in which people perceive reality one thing he says you know as an individuals express their life so they are he's basically saying the same thing as Marshall McLuhan when Marshall McLuhan said you know we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us so anthropomorphism is when you project human qualities onto a machine like you know you look at a jeep's headlights and grill and you think, you know, it looks like a cute human face or something or you slap your computer so that, you know, let it know that you want it to move faster or something. But mechanomorphism

is when you project machine values onto people. And this is actually very important. And you'll know what I mean if you're processing the information that I'm sending to you. Basically, what he's saying is you begin seeing yourself and others and everything in terms of the dominant technology. So, you know, when Mark says technology discloses man's mode of dealing with nature and creates the conditions of intercourse by which they relate to each other or by which we relate to each other, that's another way of saying basically the medium is the message, but from Marshall McLuhan. Just to hit that, again, I feel like I didn't explain it too well. When you live in a digital age and you use language like processing information or multitasking or any

of these things, it's important to remember how important language is to our way of thinking. You know, we think in metaphors. And if the metaphors we use are a product of our dominant inventions, then we need to pay very close attention. You know, Wittgenstein always talked about language is not merely a vehicle of thought, but also the driver. And, uh, His big quote, I think, was the limits of my language are the limits of my world. But really, you know, this is such an important point, really the point in media theory, and its point that Rushkoff is conversing with in this book, and he's adding to it basically the way material conditions interact with various media, but Neil Postman actually said it,

I think, the most clearly, each medium-like language itself makes possible a unique mode discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility. And to go back to the medium is the message. If you haven't read McLuhan, it's a very confusing thing. But Postman kind of clears it up a little bit. He agrees that it's confusing because a message is like a specific concrete statement about the world. But the mediums, the forms of our media, they don't make statements. They're more like the metaphors. mediate the statements. To go back again, to Mark Fisher, who you had that show about, which I really enjoyed. He once mentioned that he was being mediated by Twitter to the world.

He said, you know, what is Twitter, if not a comment box on the world? And he seemed very concerned that, you know, life outside Twitter was just becoming fodder for Twitter is what he said. So sad. Yeah. And, you know, what he found really pernicious. about it was that nobody is forcing him to use it. You know, he enjoys using Twitter. This is largely what Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death book is about. It's a wildly interesting book. It's an absolute must-read for anyone, but basically in a beginning, he sets up two popular dystopias that we're all familiar with. There's George Orwell's 1984, and then

there's Huxley's Brave New World. You know, in 1980, in 1984, Orwell warns us that will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's Brave New World, no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy. As Huxley saw it, people will come to love their oppression and to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think. Postman really drives a point home by saying, Orwell, you know, Orwell, basically, he feared those who had banned books, Whereas Huxley feared there'd be no reason to ban a book since nobody would want to read one. And the next point is probably even more prescient that Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. But Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Yeah. I mean, the truth is, I think it's somewhere like a combination of both, right? It's absolutely a combination. Yeah, you're right. certainly the brave new world aspects are very much in play and our social media is one example of how that works and just that the general sort of malaise and complacency of people in the imperial core broadly speaks to that truth but we all know that you know if you go beyond that and many of us can and have and try to organize in the real world or confront the state confront the capitalist economic system in any real meaningful way that then that that 1984 sort of totalitarian ism comes to the fore. And this is very good for maintaining power over a long period of time. It takes a lot of people off the board already by the sort of brave new world aspects. And then only when some people cross that line and start to actually challenge hegemony, then do you need

to bring out the totalitarian force. But it's always very quickly ushered back into this false state of status quo calm, where people just are tossed back into the brave new world aspect of things. And I think as climate change gets worse, as the center falls out of politics more and more as capitalism enters another crisis, I mean, most economists are predicting that there's going to be another recession in the next couple years, you know, then the mask comes off more and more and more. And I think we're going to have to deal with more and more repression by the state explicitly, and that will often be, you know, channeled through these very mediums, you know, the very Internet and social media that has become a part of our daily part of our law. lives will be then be weaponized in certain context to act as the mechanisms of repression by the state as things get worse and worse. Yeah, that's absolutely true. On the Huxley point, you know, where he said, you know, he feared there'd be no reason to ban a book since nobody would want to read one. One of the things that you kind of get when you read something like the shallows by

Nicholas Carr, you start to wonder if people will even be able to read one, you know, once you get so used to the way the sheer amount of information and the type of information that you get used to receiving on the internet it becomes very hard to sit still and read a book and think and think deeply about really anything for more than you know maybe 30 seconds but yeah I feel like there was there was a time especially when I was reading that book probably where I was really buying the Huxley argument but but then you you read the news and you read about you know Amazon is got a billion dollar contract, I think, to develop facial recognition technology for ice. And, you know, you start to see the incredible, you know, the combination of facial recognition

technology and drones. And you start to think, well, yeah, maybe that's the bigger, clearly they're both big fears. But, yeah, I definitely agree with you that Orwell was on to something as well. Yeah, we're definitely being ushered into some sort of dystopia, and we're only seeing the vague outlines of it becoming bolder and bolder every day. But certainly that inability to think deeply, to reflect and to concentrate on a concept or issue for long periods of time as being whittled away. And, you know, that serves the status quo as well. If people have an attention span that is more and more like a goldfish is every day, you know, it becomes very hard to do the necessary intellectual work. that it really requires to understand this system, right,

to bridge the gap between the surface of things and the actual deep structures of things and how they actually operate. So it sort of serves a multi-pronged purpose in that regard and it's sort of horrifying. And I try to force myself to not only the meditation thing, but to read like novels and stuff. It's very hard to find the time these days,

but like right now I'm reading Carl Nostgard's My Struggle, the Norwegian author. and he has this six volume, you know, it's supposed to be amazing or whatever, but it's really like every single volume is like hundreds and hundreds of pages and you work through some of the mundane details of his life at different points in his life. And, you know, I kind of use that,

I'm using that currently to sort of offset this attention span destruction that I undergo every day on social media and the internet broadly. Do you have any things that you go towards to try to increase your attention span and work against this current in our, society? Oh yeah, absolutely. Just like you. That book sounds very up my alley. I'm actually writing that down so I can pick that one up later. Yeah, you would love it. Yeah, I recently read Black Boy by Richard Wright, and it was absolutely amazing. But yeah, reading is really phenomenal

for this kind of thing. Usually I'll have sort of a heavy book that I try to take on, and then I have like three different grades of the book, basically. You know, once my mind is exhausted by something, you know, almost incomprehensible, then I have something a little more palatable, and then I'll have a novel kind of for fun. But it is important for people to realize it was Patricia Greenfield that concluded that every medium developed some cognitive skills at the expense of others, and that our growing use of the net and other screen-based technologies has led to the widespread and sophisticated development of visual spatial skills. We can rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to, but our new strengths in visual spatial intelligence go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of deep processing that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.

that's really interesting there's actually a benefit in the form of better visual spatial understanding and intelligence that's i never really thought of that is that just a product of the sort of interfaces that so much of this internet and social media use that we are able to do that yeah i mean i suppose so i mean you know one of i think the starkest difference is when they can look at like MRIs and things is they look at gamers and uh you know the the neural pathways of a gamer, someone who plays video games a lot is, I think, quite different. You know, I don't know how some people play video games regularly and also read big books. You know, I know a few people like that. And I have no idea how they do it because, you know, if I let myself play some video

games, you know, I'm done for. I can't play a mobile phone game and then jump right into a book. I can't switch gears that fast. And I'm amazed by people who, can yeah exactly i you know i sort of feel like if i want to get good meditation or reading done i have to do it in the beginning of the day because as the day goes on all this shit sort of piles up on top of itself and becomes much much harder by the end of the night to to maintain an attention span you know i find it much easier to do these things uh in in the early part of the day because just the just the sort of ambience of just living in this society uh is a burden you know that piles up hour by hour.

And so I can't have the level of concentration and reflective ability in the later part of the day that I can in the earlier part of the day. And it's just like, fuck, even our days are being sort of broken down into these structures. It sucks. Yeah, absolutely. And it's hard to get a full grasp of the interplay between, you know, because sometimes it's culture telling you something and sometimes it's technology telling you something. and actually one person I think who really tired with this well and explained many of the things

that we're seeing today very well was actually David Foster Wallace. I forget when the interview was maybe 2003. It was kind of early on, but he was talking about sort of the culture aspect of it. He was talking about how U.S. kids get exposed early to an idea that you are the most important and your job in life is to gratify your desires, you know, because the economy thrives on this ideology. You know, he called America one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement. He was basically saying that that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire, that's not happiness, though. You know, people need to realize, you know,

that's that's something that we see in children you know it it's it seemed to him to be a strange kind of slavery but he would say you know that nobody talks about it you know as a strange kind of slavery you know they they talk about it as freedom of choice you know yeah exactly right yeah and david foster wallis you know he's pretty influential in my my life i definitely i think you you and i both read infinite jest is that is that correct did you read it did you get through oh yeah yeah now that's a book if you want to really your concentration skills it's a thousand pages and it just goes into all these different ways but it's really a work of mastery i think uh and it's really beautiful but it's worth noting that both

david foster wallace and mark fisher and they both they both you know killed themselves they both died by suicide it's kind of like heartbreaking because they were dealing with these issues they had a very clear understanding of these issues and yet they themselves couldn't quite or at least seemingly surmount those problems and find solutions to them. All they could do is just point out with greater and greater clarity the problems in hopes that maybe some of us can start to find answers and solutions that they might not have been able to find in their own personal lives. So zooming in towards the end of this discussion, and I was mentioning this a little earlier in the interview, but in previous interviews, Douglas Rushkoff has said that

he is sympathetic to or even identifies with anarcho-syndicalism. I think he mentions being at a German debate and somebody accused him of being an anarcho-sindicalist and he didn't know what it meant and he went back to his hotel room afterwards and looked it up and like, yeah, this is me actually, which I thought was kind of adorable. But in his work, he does a good job of unearthing the ways in which capitalism really does reduce and distort and destroy otherwise promising technological innovations. He also has an entire chapter in this book urging people to organize, which is something he really don't see coming out of academia and the New York bestsellers list, even those who do criticize capitalism. You don't see like this urge to

organize at the end of their books. So what do you think Rushkov's politics ultimately are? And speaking of organizing, what are his solutions to the problems he discusses throughout this book? I mean, I think that Douglas Rushkoff would greatly like to see people doing more of the kinds of things that you're doing. He's definitely very interested first and foremost, you know, in getting people to even just start questioning, you know, the media they consume. And if people would, you know, question the media they consume and start to analyze it, you know, they might start asking themselves important questions, you know, when you're, when you're watching a show, he likes to use this as an example.

I think the show was called The Bachelorette or something. Yeah. Or Joe Millionaire. I think it's Joe Millionaire. But basically, you know, it's just these people embarrassing themselves. And, you know, but basically, you know, he's saying, you know, when you're watching this, you know, you should ask yourself, you know, what is this doing to you? What is this doing to your brain that you're just sitting here, you know, watching people embarrass themselves and enjoying it, you know, it's strange. But as far as organizing, you know, I think he's very into people actually getting together in real life. You know, he doesn't want to see people being politically active in the way. that, you know, they're crafting snarky memes and sharing them online. That's that sort of false activism. I always think of the analogy with with Xijek talking about climate change

and recycling, you know, when people go and recycle and they sort their little bottles in different ways, you know, and they get to pat themselves on the back and think that they're doing something. And in a way, being able to do that. is more harmful than if you weren't able to do something small and easy, and then pat yourself on the back and, you know, forget about it. Yeah, it's almost like a release valve for actual real political engagement. Right. And you also see, like, Zizek always talks about how, like, you know, corporations will build

it into their brands, like, you know, 1% of all profits goes to such and such. And so you can get your $7 Starbucks coffee in the morning and still feel like you're doing something good for the world. It's really insidious in that way. And I really think that, you know, the status quo, right, the powers that be benefit to the extent that our politics are online. Like certainly, obviously, there are huge advantages to be able to network across space and time that the internet offers us. But the downside of that is that so many people begin to think that their politics and their political activism, you know, should take place on these platforms. And then it's just about posting and it's about retweeting and it's about liking things and trying to get the

quote unquote word out. It's like, you know, just as impotent as the concept of like raising awareness for something. I just heard the other day like some rich asshole went to fucking Mount Everest and climbed it, you know, with these hundred people lines that you now see at Mount Everest for rich people. And he was doing it to raise awareness of climate change. And so he posted his selfie at the top of Everest on Instagram to raise awareness about. climate change and that that really encapsulates the sort of absurdity of that sort of quote-unquote activism what you really are is just the perfect neoliberal subject you know you you've been reduced to an image on a social media platform and your politics are nothing more than

bourgeois self-expression you know it's it's ridiculous right yeah there's in that overton window needs to shift but it's not easy to do because so much of this is so invisible you know that's why I think someone like Rushkoff is very important in making a lot of the invisible visible so people can start to realize exactly what you're saying that sometimes when you think that you are rebelling, you know, you're really just, you're just playing your part in the game. Exactly right. Yeah, and that demystifying process that Rushkoff does on the topic of technology and how it actually operates in our lives, you know, is important. And, you know, all we're trying to do all the time here is, like, demystify history, demystify your own

life and your own experiences. And so far as Rushkoff achieves that, he's doing something important, in my opinion. Last question here, before we get into recommendations, what lessons and what core lessons and core insights do you think leftists specifically should or could pull out of this work or Rushkov's broader work or just out of our discussion tonight? Like what are some key points you want to highlight before we close the main thing is is you know question the media that you're consuming question everything that's mediating uh your relationships to anything else you know it's just like when all you have is a hammer you know everything looks like a nail that's sort of an easy way to kind of think about it you know every technology that we use sort of um has within itself

certain convenient uses you know it has certain directions that it's going to pull you. And you just need to be aware. And also, we didn't discuss really too much. One thing that's going to be coming in the future, and this is something that you can hear very well. I think it's probably episode 74 of the Team Human podcast. That, I think, was kind of an eye-opener. They also have a very good one with Amy Herzog. on the Amazon cloud industry complex, whatever they call it. But these are very important things to watch out for, watch which way technology is going.

So one important thing is like algorithms setting bales, for instance. There's a certain way in which we naturally assume that these machines are going to be unbiased and unracist, But listening to these conversations with Douglas Rushkoff and others, you quickly learned that the way that these machines are actually learning is they're basically taking in data of the world as it is now and then producing results. So every bias that we currently have in our society is going to be embedded and then propagated. and it's going to have this illusion of sterility. It's going to look like, well, it couldn't be wrong. You know, it's a machine. It doesn't care, you know, the color of your skin.

But really, that's a very interesting thing to me because that's going to be the next, you know, back when you and I used to talk about, talk with anarcho-capitalists or something or libertarians, you know, they're always talking about how, you know, the market, you know, just this unbiased, it's basically like a god to them, you know, it's neutral, basically. Yep. It's sort of the idea, like, the whole concept of, like, the free thinkers. You find it a lot in, like, central liberalism and libertarianism where they want to pretend that the things that are chock full of biases and normative assumptions and premises are actually neutral, and their ideologies aren't based in, quote, unquote, emotion or, quote, unquote, ideology, but rather they're just based in a sort of dispassionate analysis of the facts. And

that very insidious strain of ideological thought in our society is being replicated through our technology where the technology that we create, you know, takes on board so much of the biases that human beings that create them have. But then because they are sort of machines and not human, they can be easily pitched to us and taken as sort of neutral arbiters of the truth and not ideologically loaded or not quote unquote emotional because that's what the libertarians used to love to argue, right? They used to say that, you know, us on the left, we're bringing emotions into it. They, they're the ones that are unblinking and unflinching in the face of reality or just telling the facts like they are, you know? And the facts don't care about

your feelings. Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. So is that, Is that what you're getting at with regards to relax? Yeah, that's exactly right, that people of certain ideologies that we're discussing don't see themselves as having an ideology. To them, it's just, you know, it's just nature. The big concern is going to be once algorithms are determining everything, there will be, you know, these same people saying these same things about how it's neutral, it's unbiased, you know, That's just the way it is all of these arguments. But the way that these things are being built is very important to understand because they're not neutral at all. Exactly.

Absolutely. And the only thing I would add to all of that as far as pulling things out of this discussion is the idea of taking seriously, you know, taking responsibility really for your own attention span and what goes in and out of your mind, whether that's meditation, whether that's just, you know, taking a social media break, whether that is making sure you get out into the woods once a week and just walk alone, these things that are replenishing, that get your eyes and ears off of these platforms. and gives you some breathing space to connect with reality, connect with nature, connect with yourself, and sort of try to overcome some of the alienating effects of this technology. I think is incredibly important, and it's becoming more and more all of our responsibilities, right? You now have this whole array of technology that you can use,

and that props up the responsibility of choosing when to use it and when not to use it. I think a lot of us could benefit from taking breaks of that sort, And I know I'm certainly going to take another one very soon after this discussion. But yeah, as Mike said, Team Human, the book that we're covering is also a podcast hosted by Douglas Rushkoff. So if you're interested in Rushkoff's work, if you're interested in the discussions that we've had tonight about this one book, those episodes, that podcast will really be down your alley and you'd find a lot of value in it. Before we let you go today, Mike, what recommendations would you offer for people who want to learn more about what we've discussed tonight? Where can listeners find you online if you want to be found? Building the brand.

That's right, baby. I would say that this book was quite good. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is quite good. He also has Technopoly, which is all of these books are actually wildly interesting. Marshall McLuhan, I think, is a little more. obscure a little more dense more cryptic I guess it would probably be the best word maybe steer clear that one unless you've got some time to sit and think but if you want if you want things and just you know if you want to understand mediums and how we

relate through Twitter to the world things like that I think Neil Postman is a great way to start. Douglas Rushkoff has many, many books. Many of them are very, very good. He has one corporatism, or actually, I think it's called Life Incorporated, but how corporatism basically took over, that book is very good. And yeah, I mean, I actually, I have like a million book suggestions. I think The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is a very important book if you want to understand how your own brain works and how to better control your thoughts and control your way of thinking helps you to understand what modes of thinking, different media and genders. Because, you know, an online life where you're just skating through hyperlinks and

reading blurbs and reading memes and social media feeds is going to make you a very different thinker than if you're sitting quietly in a room reading a book. Absolutely. And you mentioned David Foster Wallace earlier. There's a very simple, small little thing. You can find it online. You can find it at your local bookseller. It's called This Is Water. And it's, I think it's a graduation speech that he gave, but it sort of gets at some of these basic ideas and concepts. And then if you really want to take a huge dive into the deep end, you can always read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which Mike and I have read. We talked about when we were reading it together.

Fascinating. It's going to take you many months to get through it, but it's worth it, and it'll definitely make you have a better attention span. And Mike, you know, you have a little David Foster Wallace in your voice. I don't think we've talked very much audio-wise. We've always been, like, on chat rooms and stuff together, but you have that soft, gentle quality to your voice that DFW had, and I like it.

Oh, yeah, it's probably because I'm sick. normally I sound exactly like Ben Shapiro Well thank God you're sick then Yeah I'm actually feeling much better This has healed me Awesome Yes

Got that rev left healing power You know That's right Yeah if anyone wants to You know is interested in this kind of stuff And wants to talk about it I'm on Twitter I'm at Blind Cave Dweller

With the last E is missing A little Play-Doh reference for you philosophy nerds all right mike it's uh it's been an honor to talk to this is really cool that we were able to do this and if you want to like do this again like if there's a specific book that you want to tackle together uh around these issues or any other issues i would be more than willing to do it it's really fun to talk to you and uh i hope our listeners get something out of it so thank you so much for coming on man i really appreciate it hey thank you so much it was fun i've never done a podcast before i appreciate the opportunity and uh yeah i'll talk to you

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