The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Douglas Rushkoff is obsessed with technology and how it impacts our lives. In this interview, he offers insight into how we shape and are shaped by technology, what’s happening with mainstream media, and some tips on remaining sane online.   Rushkoff is an author, professor, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, culture, and institutions create, share and influence each other's values. He is the author of 17 books including the 2019 release Team Human, and he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens.   -- Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We contaminated Twitter. The internet. We contaminated the internet. These were play spaces. They built the internet. Yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and took a network where every note is going, hello, who are you? Let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And my advice to the regular listener, reader person, the person, the person, person like me is, honestly, go to real media for your information. Go to social media for your play. Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best what other people have already figured out so you can unlock your potential. We interview world-class doers and thinkers

so you can better analyze problems, seize opportunities, and master decision-making. Every episode is packed with lessons and insights that never expire. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content,

you can join at fs.comlog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Douglas Rushkoff is here today. Dr. Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways that people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He's the professor of media theory and digital economics at CUNY, Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. Rushkoff was named one of the 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT.

I wanted to talk to him because I wanted to explore some of the ways that we are shaped by technology and also the ways that we're shaping technology. As you can imagine, we talk about media, culture, misinformation, and technology. I don't always agree with him, but we have a pretty good conversation. It's time to listen and learn. Well, first, I want to start with, what are you obsessed with right now? I'm obsessed with what feels like a totalizing, polarizing fascistic environment, right? Politics aside, whatever people's views, I feel like they're getting so bizarrely entrenched.

Everyone's everyone, you know, has this sort of, almost this might makes right enforcement of values. in ideologies. There's a stiffness to everybody's approaches and whether it's their business plans or their social agendas or I used to think, oh, you know, when I'm kind of on this side of things, I look at, oh, look at that other side. They're being all stiff. Or if I'm on that side, then I look at this side and go, oh, they're being all stiff. Then when I get kind of more McLuhan-esque about it, you know, McClellan used to write a lot about media environments that we kind of live, Postman did too, the idea that culture is like the medium on which the bacteria grows, that somehow we're in an atmosphere of this kind of extremism and polarization.

And then I'm obsessed with how do we engender a more human, softer, more flexible, empathetic approach to living when we're in an environment that's this rigid? and whether or not we'll be able to do that or whether humanity itself is just going to succumb to this to this kind of bizarre operating system talk to me about that extreme polarization like is technology creating that or is it amplifying something already within us or how is that happening you know it's hard to know whether the the media and technologies that emerge emerge and are successful because of a pre-existing cultural affordance for that thing or whether the new technology or medium comes and then makes us all like that.

So you could say the printing press and the book led to all the sorts of individual perspectives and individualism that then characterize the Renaissance. Or you could say people were kind of. getting into the idea of being individuals, and they made things like the book and the printing press and perspective painting popular because that's what they were ready for. Or you could say television was a global medium and brought everyone together, and that's why we got that kind of Oprah Winfrey-like hands across the world crashing of the Berlin Wall. Or today, you could say digital technology is a one-zero, yes, no, right, wrong, uh, uh, choose,

one of the above cookie cutter medium, so people's lives and politics and approaches end up getting that way. Or were we already kind of in a technocratic, scientific culture that had killed God since Nietzsche? And the computer comes along. And of course, there we are. There's the realization of that worldview. So I would say it's like both kind of affect each other. But what you have to do then is like, so you get, we get what we asked for, right? We got our post-God Nietzschean computer automated soul-killing, auto-tuning technology. And now we, okay, how do we mitigate some of that? How do we retrieve that, which is being left behind in this new environment? Talk to me a little bit about that. How do we do that? How do we use these tools to not only have autonomy, but also

create a better empathetic understanding of alternative points of views and an interdependency with other people. Well, I would say first by not insisting that we find the answer to these tools in these tools. Every conference I go to now is about how are we going to kind of retrofit the blockchain to solve the problems of the internet? Or what wellness apps can we create to help people manage their screen time. And it might be that technologies, digital technologies are not the solution for digital technologies. It may really be as simple as Sabbath, you know, having having a day when you're not plugged in, not to be anti-tech, but we can bring our technologies along with us in certain ways, but not in other things. I was just watching, you know, my daughter got home from this party

and all people were doing at the party was, you know, typing into their phones and taking Instagram pictures and all that. And it used to be you'd go to a party. I mean, in the old days, even a big, important party. And there might be some press there or a photographer there. And that was like, they were working. They were working the party. They had to cover the party for their medium, you know, because Madonna showed up or, you know, whoever. Some person, so they're there, you know. But now I look and I say, wow, all these kids are working journalists in their life. They're reporting. And I get it. And then you go to your device because you want to know what's happening, I guess. But you're not in touch with what's happening. You're reading reports from amateur journalists on their day on what's going on. It's this, I'm talking about obsession, this obsession with recording everything. But they're not even, and I wrote about this, you're not even living in the present. So I'm really looking forward to a day when people start appreciating their experiences for their own sake again and realizing that if you're reporting on the party, you're not at the

party. If you're reading about the party, you're not wherever you really are. That there's this, and no one thinks of it this way, but it's like everyone's become a journalist. Either when they're in an experience, they're writing about it as a journalist, and when they're not somewhere, they're reading the journalism, the diaries of everybody else. And it's fine. I mean, spend an hour reading people's diaries. But then, you know, what do you want to do? I want to go to that comment you made on journalism and everybody sort of being a journalist and how that relates to the information we're consuming about misinformation and facts and our perception into the world. Like if we're consuming information by amateur journalists or people who believe that they're

journalists. And they're all reporting something. And they're reporting through their lens, you know, without sort of any training and obviously bias. And we're existing in this world of sort of, I would say, misinformation, which is intentionally possibly misleading. But there's also all of this information out there that is sort of generally irrelevant or high noise to signal. How do we filter that? How do we think through that? One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own expression. I remember when Blogger came out, and Blogger was like the first, one of the first web blogging platforms. Evan Williams later of Twitter did it. And I was at a conference talking to Evan about it. It was just a baby platform. And he was like, oh, are you going to use this?

And I was like, well, I don't think I should use it. I'm already a journalist. I've got, you know, I'm on the New York Times syndicate. It wouldn't be fair for me to go in there. This is a place space. You know, it's for, it's for, you know, amateurs in the best sense of the word, for them to do it and talk. It's a social network. It's not for some professional journalist to be, you know, I have a platform. It's not right. And he was like, no, no, it's for everybody. It's for everybody. You could use it the way you use it. And, you know, I played around with it some, and I mean, I ended up with a blog somewhere on my, on my website, I guess. But what I started to feel like was, yes, it's great for everyone to be able to type what they're feeling and stuff. But

Just because you can type doesn't mean you can write, right? And just because you can write doesn't mean you should write. It was like in the old days, the old days of the late 80s, early 90s, the only people who could write a book were the people who were willing to sit and type a whole book, you know, when it was hard, when you couldn't just cut and paste things and it was a whole big thing. Or even on a Commodore 64, it was still a whole big thing. And it's like the tools made it really easy for people to type lots of words, but that didn't necessarily make them writers any more than, you know, Adobe Photoshop make somebody into a graphic designer. Yeah, you know, an amateur can now do some cool effects. But when you look at something is really done by a real artist, you can see, oh, that's design. When you read something by a real writer, you can go, oh, well, that person knows how to write. The same thing is true of journalism. There's this stuff that you learn. either in a journalism class or in journalism school about sourcing and what does it mean to have

two sources for everything and what is it, what is off the record, what is on the record? How does all that work? And I remember in the early days of the net, I would go and talk at high schools and colleges and the question I would always get was, you know, what makes your journalism any better than my journalism? Why should you have all these readers and I don't? And I'm like, because you're a fucking sophomore in college, just spouting off. You know what I mean? And I've worked at this. You know, I didn't answer it like that, but that's the real thing.

And the tools create the illusion that what we say matters or that because our text can look all like it's in a substack, that means it has equal value to everything else that's up there. And it just doesn't. reading playing learning stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision they slow down the progression of myopia so your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes light the path to a brighter future with stellus lenses for myopia control learn more at sloor.com and ask your family eye care professional for sallor stellus lenses at your child's next visit um the the thing that's going to happen, I guess, is as deep fakes and other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish between what is being said and what is not. We're going to, again, just as we did before any video existed, we're going to rely on the integrity of a journalist and the integrity of a publication to measure the reality level of something. And we're not there

yet. We're still just looking for the opinion that makes us feel the most delightfully angry than we are, whatever the hard truth might be. Well, it used to be that we held up organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as arbiters of sort of fact from fiction. And that seems to becoming increasingly hard as the media landscape for how we tell stories and the attention culture sort of pervades. How do you think about that? I mean, As someone who's been traditionally progressive, I get really upset when I see the way MSNBC or CNN will even slightly slant or misrepresent a story in order to get the most impact. Because once they or the Times are doing it, then where are you supposed to turn? You know, so when I see a piece in the New York Times that, you know, the headline and the first few paragraphs are arguing that, oh, you know, when Israel opened up its schools, its elementary schools, COVID rates went up.

And then you finally read all the way down and you go to the links and find the studies. And it's like, okay, when Israel opened, it's bars, its restaurants, its theaters, and its public schools, COVID rates went up. Because they're playing into the schools, open, schools, clothes, schools masks, schools not. That's a bigger headline. It gets more clicks. But you've ended up for whatever reason, whether it's your politics or your need to get clicks, you've misrepresented a story. And once you do that once, how do I trust them? No, does it mean that I'm going to go to, you know, Rand Paul or whoever's his, you know, or Alex Jones site about, you know, and I can read about there's one website that was talking about these doctors.

We're talking about how the COVID vaccines have these eggs in them that hatch aluminum parasites that replicate. And they held up a model of what the aluminum parasite looks like and how it swims. And it's not really alive, but it's kind of alive. It was like, man. And people, you know, there's people are sending me this. They're like, like, look, look, oh my God, you've got to talk to them on your podcast. This is really important. You know, don't get the vaccine.

it's hard to then have, actually, you should be reading this instead. So now it's like I'm telling people to watch News Hour with Judy Woodruff. They're pretty normal. You know, NPR stays kind of as centrist as it can right now. You know, there's some places. BBC is pretty straightforward. But, you know, if I'm telling people, I don't look at the Times. That's a scary moment. So what's the argument on behalf of the times? Like, we have to exist as a business in a changing environment. And in order to compete, we have to be more sensationalized than we used to be and maybe sort of like take positions or slants that we never had to. Otherwise, we'll go out of business. I don't know that that's, I think their argument, the only valid argument is,

look, we got really big and we're throwing so many articles into the fire in order to keep this going. that the New York Times used to be able to write one paper a day. And now we're writing the equivalent of like five papers a day because of how much we have to update the site in order to get stuff, that we have less adequate monitoring and control over stuff. And just like anybody, our journalists get whipped up into a frenzy by COVID denialism and vaccine rumors that they end up trying to promote whatever it is, the CDC is trying to say. And the CDC has its own problems because the CDC is not thinking

in terms of giving the public accurate information. The CDC is like our doctor trying to tell us the things that they need to tell us to get us to take our medicine. And that's different than journalism. You know, when I look at Fauci, he's looking for patient compliance. So that's what he's saying. He's not a journalist. Go deeper on that about the CDC and sort of like their sort of maybe institutional bias in terms of how they're communicating. And they were wrong at the start, right? Like they were quick and wrong. Well, they were right. What they were right about was they look. So the CDC's job is to reduce the transmission of a virus through a community by whatever means necessary. They looked at the situation at the early moments of COVID and

thought, you know, masks may or may not be of some minimal help in the general population who may or may not be even coming into contact with any COVID. There's like, you know, 300 cases or 1,000 cases in the whole country where, meanwhile, there are health care workers who can't get the equipment that they need. So if health workers are exposed, they have a higher likelihood of getting the thing. If they get the thing, then our hospitals are crippled and can't take care of people and the virus becomes more rampant. What we have to do is let people know, look, the general public right now, you don't need masks. Who does need masks right now are these health care providers. So don't use masks. You should be okay. And these people will use masks.

They're managing the disease. It is true. If you're well, If you're Steve Jobs and you've got all the money in the world and you can live an ideal life, wear a mask, of course, right now. You know, because who are you coming into context? But how do you, as an average citizen, how do you trust them to give you proper information based on what you just said? I don't disagree with you. It was proper.

It was a proper information. What they should have said was right now we're in a mask triage situation. And just like you're running to the store for toilet paper, you could be running to the hardware store and taking all the masks. But that would be a really bad thing to do. That would be really bad for the community. You've got to right now think of this disease and the whole country rather than this disease and you right now. We want you to have resilience and have water in your house and food and be able to live for a week or two. but we really need these masks.

If you've got them, get them to the hospitals. We're going to produce more. And hopefully, by the time this disease is rampant in the country, if it gets that way, we'll have up the production on masks. So then you can have them when you need them. And what do you think would have happened if they did that? Do you think everyone would have panicked and run out and bought the masks? Of course.

So what are they looking at? So then they have to think, all right, we have to manage this disease. It goes all the way back to the first public relations people. It was like Walter Lipman and Ed Bernays and those folks around World War I. And when they came up with the idea of public relations, basically of in some ways manufacturing consent for certain things, using whatever means and stories you have, what they believed was, you know, their ideal government was there would be this kind of council of. experts and scientists who would be in a big building next to the White House somewhere. And they would figure out, what is it that we need America to do? And they would say, okay, the scientists go, look, we've only got 30,000 masks and we've got

30 million people. We've got to make Americans give the masks to the hospitals, because that's, and we know, that's what's right right now. How do we do that? Then they hire Bernays or lip men or public relations people to come up with what's the very best way to do that. The CDC didn't have the very best people, right? They were thinking like a doctor. How does the doctor talk to the patient? What do we have to say? And, you know, what do you do if you miss a dose?

And why do you have to take this? Why do you have to take all the antibiotic and all those things that doctors tell you? And they try to treat the American population as the patient, you know, that you can kind of not lie to, but but do what you have to to to manufacture their, their compliance. And, you know, in this environment, when you have a political faction whose strength and power is based on delegitimizing anything to do with, with organized government, that's a really difficult environment in which to play fast and loose with facts. Keep going down that path in terms of delegitimizing when you have one party sort of interested in that perhaps, but you also have organizations that are, you know, arguably making that a bit

easier too with what you just talked about, right? Not giving accurate information because you're trying to create a behavior. so maybe you're withholding some information that you shouldn't be withholding, which feeds into this sort of like delegitimization. Right. I mean, the question is, does fake news genuinely derive more traction from each error made by government or major news media? In other words, when there are real gotchas, does it work? Or would they still, I mean, would it still be that the COVID vaccine put something in you that then 5G towers activates. And that's why you can't see it when you look in the vaccine. But once it's in you and they put a spoon on your head and everything's

going to get magnetic. To stop paying attention basically to the right. Once they're doing that, does that story gain more power because the New York Times has slightly misrepresented the real takeaway of an Israel COVID study, ultimately, yes. Once you start playing that game, you're going to lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly. You know, if you're going to be on the side of supposedly factual evidence-based reality, you've got to stick with that. And it doesn't mean you can't believe in the soul and astrology and everything else that you want to. You know what I mean?

I'm not saying you've got to be a staunch atheist, scientific extremist. But, you know, you're reporting, you know, it has to be news that's fit to print. You know, if you're the paper of record and you want to stay the paper of record, you've got to be careful about that. You know, shit happens, right? The Gulf War and bad reporting or whatever name was that said the wrong things about the Gulf War and got to say, that happens.

But you want that to happen. happen, you know, once a decade, not, you know, not daily. And if you, if you're going to play that game on cable news, if MSNBC and CNN and whatever are going to put on, you know, newscasters who are opining throughout these, you know, broadcasts, then they're going to be seen as an opinion, opinion news. What's the, like, how do we get out of this? I don't, I don't see a legitimate path to sort of like how we return to. to a more centrist, fact-based, you know, not left or right-leaning in any sort of way, let alone in the extremes.

How do we... Oh, well, 99% of us really don't need to know about any of this stuff, honestly. You know, the... I don't consume the news. I got to be honest. Like, I don't follow a lot of it. I don't need... I mean, a lot of people were asking me a few weeks ago, you know, what I was thinking

about Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal strategy, right? So for people who don't know, the U.S. had been in a war in Afghanistan for like decades. And then Biden said, enough. We're just going to just take them out. And basically, and left. And then everything went nuts. And everybody was running to the airport. And it was this whole big, horrible scene with, you know, Taliban and and the people who helped America and all that. It was just awful. And it's like, I don't know. I honestly, I've got so. I've got very little training in Middle East withdrawal strategies, whether you bring planes or boats. Do you tell the enemy you're going to do it? Do you not? Do you bring generals? And I just don't know

about that. Not only do I not know about that, but I don't even know whose story about what is happening there is true. And I don't even know where they get their information from. It's like something happens, right? Something happens in Israel, say. Some bomb happens and then some other bomb happens. And then Netanyahu says this and then Biden says that. And it's like, it could be anything. I don't mean like false flag, crazy attacks or whatever, but it could be that, you know, Netanyahu says, whoever's in charge there now, says they want to go and bulldoze the West Bank. But they don't really want to. They're saying that so they get votes and support of some horrible faction in the Knesset that wants to do that. And they've already called Biden before they announced that. And they say, look, I'm going to say this. I want you to say we're not allowed

to do it or you'll pull support. Okay. All right. We'll do that. You know, so they set this thing up and then you report on it. And then I read about it in the times, oh, look, Netanyahu's really bad. Thank God we've got Biden holding him down. It may be that. It may not be that. I'm not there. I don't know. And frankly, what I think about this does not matter. It doesn't matter. Instead, if I took all that time that I'm spending trying to understand these giant issues that are operating at a scale and behind closed doors that I have no access to, if I rolled up my sleeves and helped my neighbor, figured out how the old lady's going to get her food now that she broke her frigging hip and no one else is going down there to deal with it, or the people who just moved in who's got a differently abled child who needs community. support, you know, all of these things that we could be doing for each other in our communities with all that time. We want to spend screaming about shit on Twitter. If we spent that time helping other people in our communities, it would relieve the central governments and the state

governments of so much stress. You know, you don't need as much welfare. You don't need as much planning. You don't mean as many programs when you have neighbors taking care of neighbors. You don't need as much climate change remediation. If people are doing less crazy, stuff. If they're sharing lawnmowers rather than everyone buying their own lawnmower, if they're playing with each other and doing local entertainment rather than flying around the world to do all sorts of crazy stuff, it's like if you engage locally with the people around you and actually help real people, which I got to do now, we got flooded terribly in the last hurricane Ida. When you do that, you don't need as much FEMA. You know,

it's like federal emergency management money. You don't need as much of that stuff. You don't need as much of that stuff and it's easy become less dependent on central government central news national stories and all that and and and more more self-sufficient that's it's more sustainable it's more resilient it's less brittle and it makes you less enemies i'm side by side with trumpies digging people out of the mud having a discussion where i'm saying this is what's going to to start happening a lot. They're saying, don't be crazy. This happens once every 10,000 years. I mean, let's see. But we're actually talking about it arm in arm, handing buckets to each other rather than through Twitter. There's sort of three thoughts I have out of that. One is a question,

I guess, about why we think, what we think about foreign policy matters. Is it just because we have access to platforms now? I think we always cared about these foreign matters, but But we weren't as immersed in them, and we weren't expected to have something to say about them. At least Walter Cronkite was like, he was this journalist guy. He went all the way over there and saw the war and talked to the soldiers, and they had people talking to the generals. And then this whole sort of news agency kind of went, ah, this is really awful. And their approach to it did seep out to America. But there were others.

There was NBC News. There was ABC News. There was, you know, the New York Times. There was a lot. But yeah, the Kronkite might have had influence. But yes, it was a different media environment. But one in which we weren't being trained to respond in a moment-to-moment way to every ebb and flow in the news, to everything that was. happening. That's not just the internet. I remember I wrote this piece back when, when,

remember Britney Spears? I mean, there's the current story with her now, but I remember there was this moment when she had some kind of a breakdown and like shaved her head and they took her to the hospital and all. And all the news channels had it. Everyone had it. Even the tiny little TMZ kind of news channels, whatever they were. But I saw this picture from far of her mansion. And And I counted, and this is just in what I could count, there were 20 different satellite dishes around her house, 20 satellite dishes, beaming the thing, you know, those vans that the news people use. And I was thinking, could that story have been covered with just three satellite dishes, with three live satellite feeds of the ambulance outside Brittany's house be enough to somehow feed? the news that global news media and then what if we took the other 17 of them and like put one in Rwanda maybe you know one in Iraq you know places where there's actual stuff places where there's

800,000 people dying in a genocide you know in Rwanda I mean the answer to that though is like people generally I mean despite what we would state as our preferences when it comes down to We care a lot more about what Brittany Spears is doing than what's happening in Rwanda. Yes, but we can still see it with just three satellite dishes. It would still have worked. Even if it was the most popular story in the world, it was still a misapplication of precious technology resources. I mean, and this happened, you know, really in the 90s, we shifted news from, in the United

States anyway. News was a requirement to have an FCC television or radio license. You had to do a certain number of hours of news as part of your public affairs obligation. When we took that away, then news was no longer a mandatory obligation. And it turned into if you're going to keep any news, it's for money. It's for profit. That's when you start hearing all the music and all the coverage. That's when news became so much more sensationalist because now it was part of the, the

competitive enterprise rather than the public service mission of these companies. Going back, just to orienting people, I said I sort of had three follow-ups. The second one was around, how would we teach someone to sort out what's relevant from irrelevant? Like, how would you go about teaching somebody how to sort out essential from non-essential information? Honestly, I would say only go on social media to socialize and think of it as socializing. if you really like it, make it part of your entertainment day, you know, and look at it for that. I mean, it's so funny. People used to joke that on Twitter, ugh, you know, they go on Twitter and someone tell me, you don't know what they just ate for breakfast or where their favorite pecan pie

is located. That's what Twitter is for. Sorry, that's what Twitter is for. It's not for the president of the United States to communicate policy to the American people. That's not where you do it. Wait, why? Why? Go deeper on that. Why is that not the form for? Because the president of the United States has access to real media, like television and newspapers and press conferences and real things. But that's saying Twitter's not real media. Is that? No, we contaminated Twitter. The internet. We contaminated the internet. We shouldn't have put banking on the internet either. These were fun places. These were social media. These were play spaces. This is where a guy could pretend he's a girl and a, A girl could pretend she's a robot and these were play spaces.

They built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and telling what we used to call blonde jokes and like people did with fax machines. It was not, and it's not even secure for business. That's why all these companies are getting hacked and frozen and ransomware and all that. He took a network where every note is. going, hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural

explosion. And sure, so you've got blogger and Twitter and Facebook. Oh, look at grandma. Grandma wants to look at the pictures of baby Norman. Oh, we want to play a game. Oh, let's do a survey. Who likes astrology? I like astrology. Now it's in that same space. Who really has authority over the West Bank? What are you doing? And now everyone, Cousin Louie and this and that and going to argue on an international platform about who has an ownership of the West Bank? Now let's have our senators and our presidents and prime ministers go down into that bizarre, random public square and delegitimize themselves and the authority they have as our representatives in Washington by going into a generic. No, you want to, you go to your district, go home to your

district and talk to the people there. You do that live. You know, that's, you know, it's not a three-day carriage ride away from DC anymore you can get hop on a plane and go back and talk to people go on your local PBS channel um go on your your cable go on C-SPAN you know you have the platform the the social media are for people without the platform you know so my my advice to the regular listener reader person the person like me is honestly go to real media for your information go to social media for your play. Doesn't social media in a way allow us to filter out people who know what they're talking about from people who don't as well? Because now it gives credible people a platform that they can sort of put their ideas out there and then get feedback on them in a way that was difficult before without running for office or being an elected official or sort of working your way up through the bureaucracy.

I don't see it. I mean, doesn't it act as a check and balance in a way? Or is that the promise of technology that doesn't fully meet itself? You can. If you're really tough-skinned, you can post something to the public knowing there are hundreds of thousands of people and bots on there who are going to use your inquiry to hurt you. That's their intent, right? To make you feel bad about yourself, to undermine your sense of authority, to get you to join something that's terrible, to militarize you, to make you more cynical, as long as you understand that, right, that the vast majority of people replying to you and looking at you and using the information you're putting out are using it to hurt you, to reduce your autonomy, to make you feel bad about yourself, to create mental illnesses, to distort your perception of reality. And as long as you know that, then sure.

So, you know, I got invited this week to be on Steve Bannon's podcast. Well, everyone, even the publicist who sent it to me, said, just look at this for a laugh. Of course, you won't do it. Part of me was thinking, well, my whole thing, my whole team, human motto, everything is find the others, right? And here's one of the others asking me to engage, right? So there was a pros and cons.

Of course, I'm going on his podcast, adds legitimacy to Marjorie Taylor Green and everybody else going there. And I'm not going to have control. And he could edit me to say anything he wants. and, you know, is the fact that I went on it going to outweigh anything good that comes about, you know, from, am I really going to take him down in like a John Stewart way to when John Stewart went on Fox and, you know, exposed what they are? Can I maybe turn him and help him see how some of what he sees about the Catholic Church and subsidiarity and distributism is good, but his approach is too, is too violent and destructive. Can I, can I get through to him? You know, and so I was debating it in my head and I thought, maybe I should. tweet, should I go, I just got invited to go on Steve Van's podcast. Should I do it? And then I realized, going and me tweeting that would just create bad. It would just not, because it's not, there's, there's so, such a small percentage of people would engage with that in good faith, that it would be too,

it's not the forum to have that argument. Luckily, I have friends. I have students. I have faculty. I have a world of people I do trust that I could ask about that, that I do not need to ask that question. The only reason to ask that question on Twitter would be to show off. Hey, everybody, I got invited on Steve Ben, and that means I've arrived. I'm not going to do it. So this way, I can still leverage the fame value of having gotten invited without taking any of the risk of actually going on. Or what? Or I want to socially signal that I'm too SJW to go on those bad people's show and look at me. I get some, what does that call signaling? I get some of that social signaling value from it. Now these ones are going to love me

instead of hate me. And it's like it's all a fucking game on there. So it's like, no, I don't use it. All I use Twitter for is I post links to my articles. That's it. Figuring that people who do follow me on there. I don't want to get in conversations on there. It's just when that people say they're really mean things or when something is intentionally misconstrued and then people start piling on without even reading the article that they think they hate because someone has said something totally wrong about it, it feels bad in my body. It makes me not sleep as well. It makes me not right as well. It's not good for my metabolism, my system, my psyche, my soul. There's definitely a ton of signaling on social media from all.

all sorts of people. I want to sort of go to the third point that I had as we were talking, and you were talking about sandbags and sort of being beside your fellow humans in a way. And I think one of the things that we miss with technology is that we get so pigeonholed in a way to get reinforced with what we think that we don't get exposed to the community in the way that we used to get exposed. And I think part of living a meaningful life is actually that exposure. And that exposure to other people being a sense of something,

larger than yourselves that is a community or a tribe of people that you may or may not agree with, but you're a part of a bigger tribe than just your particular view of the world is what we're missing. And I think that that's one of the ways that we learn to empathize with other people and learn to see their view. I'm curious as to your take on that. I remember when AOL was just emerging and it had these various kinds of groups so that you could find your tribe, people and be in conversations with them in chat rooms and things like that, they divided it all up into what looked to me like consumer categories. Like, are you a, what's your, are you a car lover? Are you a book reader? Are you a this? Are you with that? And I got worried and people

kept calling these, oh, those are my online communities. And I was always careful to say, that's not your online community. It's your online affinity group. Right. And there's a real, there's a difference, You know, and of course, the internet is going to want me engaging with other middle-aged mini-cooper driving people, because if the mini-cooper is what we have in common, that could be monetized as opposed to people who like sunny days or something. You know, that's like, wait a minute, how do we advertise to them? You know, it's like everything falls into those kind of categories. And the technology is really good. Obviously, it's a database technology, the whole internet. So it's really good at breaking us, it's optimized for breaking us down that way. And it's not optimized for the heterogeneous community thing that you're talking about. The heterogeneous community really only works in real life where you have a broad enough bandwidth to engage with people who are really different from you. Online, it works really better to go

find that group of people that you can't find in real life. So I live in Hastings on Hudson, New York, where there's really only two people I would consider legitimate manga anime fans here. Right. Right. And I could talk to the two of them, but if I want to really engage with the manga anime, who knows my kind of manga and anime, the real shit, I got to go online and find the, you know, Make a Gundam Evangelian subgroup, subreddit, you know, and find that. There's my others. There's my. That's what the Internet is really good at.

Or if I've got a rare disease, I mean, people always use that example. You know, if I've got a rare disease or a rare handicap or something that there's not other people in my community that really get it, I could engage with those people and they understand what I'm going through in a way that other people don't. But it's not good, as we see on Twitter. it's not good for creating communities of people with diverse perspectives. In order to engage with people that have diverse or diametrically opposed perspectives, you have to be live next to them. When I'm next to the volunteer fireman from my town who voted for Trump

and believes that this won't happen again for another thousand years. And it became funny. He looked at me like, oh, my God, you really think the world is ending, don't you, Doug? And I'm like, oh my God, you really think it's not. You know, and it was just, but we drink together. We lift, like you say, we carry sandbags together. I think at the end of the day, like if you get down to a level where you can see humanity, we all have more in common than we think, right?

We all want to be loved. A mentor of mine told me this. We all want to be loved. We all want to be respected. We all want to be listened to. We all want to contribute to something larger than ourselves. And that avoids sort of political issues. And there's nobody that can really disagree with that.

We all want those things. And so if we can offer them to other people, it's a way to connect to them. You would think, you know, you would think. And then you look at if they didn't believe in stuff, churches and synagogues and stuff would be such, for me, such great places to go. I just like believing things and worshiping and stuff. Talk to me a little bit about that. What do you think the role of really? religion and culture has been in sort of curbing human behavior?

I mean, it depends. I feel like most religions have these, it's almost like most bands. They have this period after their emergence, shortly after their emergence, where they're trying to really do the right thing. I mean, I know Judaism better than most of the others, But, you know, Judaism really emerged as a system of thought and behavior for the recovering cult addicts of the Egyptian death cults. But they come out in the desert, they're like, oh, shoot, that didn't work. What do we do? And say, okay, let's not worry about so much about believing in God and having an idol and all that. Let's focus on community and law and labor and have a Sabbath.

And let's try that. you know, and it kind of worked for a while and then, you know, eventually, you know, they get persecuted, they get a piece of land and they're fighting for survival and they go, okay, you know, and it all deteriorates and then people become, you know, worshiping at a wall and one, one God and one God alone and God gave us this piece of land and we're special, uh, and all this stuff happens. And it's like, oh, no, you became a religion too, you know, and it wasn't, it wasn't Judaism until way late in its career. And I feel like, you know, And Christianity had that, too, this sort of insight of, all right, there's all these laws and you're getting ever more granular, trying to code reality, trying to optimize reality with all this law.

And it's like, you're getting so granular. You're never going to get there. In the end, the law is just kind of training wheels for something more internal. You just got to be nice. Just be fucking nice. You know, and the law can support you in that. And again, then that loses itself too. And it becomes about this, you know, Messiah God.

and and and becomes this other religion and it keeps him. I'm a tried. Everybody keeps trying, Buddha even, even that, that many sex of it became, uh, this thing. And that's partly because people have this, uh, longing to believe in something that, you know, mommy and daddy failed me and, and this new mommy daddy thing is going to be the thing, you know, it's going to be what mommy and daddy really couldn't be. They couldn't anticipate my needs. They couldn't see inside my soul.

And right now, oddly enough, I feel like our technologists, they're looking at technology to be that. You know, I had this great experience with Timothy Leary when he had just read, he had just read Media Lab by Stuart Brand. It was the book about Nicholas Negroponte's lab. It just opened at MIT. And he, you know, we used to just sit and read together. And then he had been reading this book for like two days and circling things and felt dip pen. And then I thought, oh, my God, he must love this thing. You know, Stuart must have written a great book.

And he closes it at the end and he flings it across the room, like, at horror. And he said, only 3% of the people in the index are women. That goes to show you something. And I'm like, what? What does this show? He says, these are all men trying to use technology to recreate the womb. You know, their mothers couldn't anticipate their every little desire. So now they want to build technologies that are going to bring them, you know, whatever it is,

to create a little bubble around themselves. and bring them everything they want and before they even know they want it. And he was really right on a certain level. That's what, you know, with anticipatory algorithms and all that. But it struck me as so sad, too, that I get it. The world is scary and wet and dark and female and unknown and unpredictable and all that. But you don't want to compensate for that with more with predictability and insolidly. What you want to do is enhance your resilience and your wonder and your ability to tolerate and metabolize a wealth of novel experiences, which is what that makes life.

It's so much more fun. You know, it's fun and alive. But technology became, all I mean here is technology became that other religion, you know, oh, the blockchain that will solve for, you know, as I went to this conference. It said they were building a blockchain. They're calling it Project Liberty. And it's going to solve for multi-racial liquid democracy. You know, good luck with that. Good luck with that.

In an email to me before this, you said you were sort of in an anti-business, anti-self-optimization mood these days. Why? Because I feel like we're trying to auto-tune ourselves. You know, we're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. You know, it's either here or there. You're on this node or that node. And our value system accordingly is to get people either, you know, up to the C or down

to the B, but not in that weird, squishy place in between. You know, fuzzy logic is about reducing. It's not about maintaining the fuzziness. You know, it's about you're here or you're there. And you need more granularity. Okay, we'll give you a half step. You're here, here, here, or here, here, here, or here. All right, you don't like that. We'll give you six. We'll give you eights. But you're still always on the mark. And what we do by doing that is, is we make a judgment as to what is signal and what is noise. You know, if you're going to auto tune James Brown, right? James Brown reaching up for the note or coming down in over the note. No, no, you're going to auto tune him. He's not reaching. He's on the note. On the note. What have you done? You filed off the soul, the signal in a James Brown recording, the actual signal.

is his soul reaching up for that note. That's why they call it soul. It's that reaching that we're hearing. That's what makes his interpretation of the song different than Britney's, different than Ariane's. We auto-tune everybody in our music. We're tending toward auto-tuning everybody in their lives. You know, the metric, and this is all, the metric you put on the wall is the metric

that you're going to get. You know, and it may not be an ideal single focus for more than just some provisional fun experiment. I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you some more personal questions. This was pretty personal. When do you feel the greatest sense of peace in your life? Honestly, on a daily basis, when my wife and daughter have gone to bed. And it's like, ah, that's like on a daily basis, that's sort of my moment of peace.

Peace is particular, though, I guess. You know, I feel then or when anything's been put to bed, you know, like an article or a book is finally approved. Ah, it's done. Now, there, there, no more comments, no more, no more drafts. It's in, it's to the press, you know, because I'm writing. I miss what I do. I'm writing all the time. So it's like, oh, shoot, is there another email coming back from that editor on that thing? That for me is, is, is peaceful, you know, or after after the talk or the panel or the thing, you know, especially if it was a risky one or in front of a new kind of audience. When do you tend to get emotional?

I get most emotional now at small acts of kindness, the smallest things. I saw this Broadway show. It must have been over a year ago now because it was pre-pandemic called Come From Away. It's about the Canadian island where a lot of the planes had a land for 9-11. and it's about this town that then sort of takes in. Yeah, they take in all those people who are on the planes and whatever. How Canadian of us. Very.

Peace order, good government. I love you guys. You know, and there's all these very touching scenes and all that and people crying or whatever. And I'm watching it. And then this woman's like, oh, we've got to find, we're going to have to find sanitary napkins and pamper's for these. people. And I started crying from that. So what's, how does that make you cry? It's the small

considerations when people do, when they, when they do that, it's the little, it's the littlest things that move me the most, the person who will get up in the subway for someone else to sit down. The, the neighbor who knows, you know, that my wife went in for a surgery and comes, can I bring you a chicken or something? It's that, it's that very human. scaled, you know, acts of kindness, particularly in the face of adversity, you know, that brings it out. What habits are you trying to break right now? I'm trying to break email, which is a hard habit.

Because I get like a thousand of these things a day. And what am I supposed to do? You know, and I'm, I feel really guilty if I don't answer them all. And I feel like some kind of an asshole that it's like, oh, I get a thousand. So I don't have to. because they're real human beings who read maybe read something or spent time and and um on the other hand a lot of the emails will be like oh i'm in high school and they assigned me your book team human uh for a book report please tell me what is your book about i'm like oh fuck

you kid you know no you don't you don't get that um i did i've decided i'm entitled to food drink before email you know i'm aware and i'm not you know all tim ferrisi about stuff but i know that like when someone says something bad or there's more stress in an email i know it's activating hormones and endocrine systems and all that that need calories and and food and water and buffers there's probably not enough oxygen or hydrogen or molybdenum or whatever it is than i need in my bloodstream to absorb all that so i'm i'm i'm trying to limit that emails emails my my bad thing i have no problem with the social media you know i mean it's not like oh i got to check my my thing i don't have those kind of um those kind of habits so it's

it's that and then sort of deeper deeper uh uh overdetermined sense of responsibility for others i have a habit of not establishing any boundaries at all which served me well as an unpopular person before the internet, but doesn't work well as a slightly popular writer in an internet world. You know, people will not, if you don't put up boundaries, people aren't going to put them up for you. Talk to me about those boundaries that you've put up. Well, I haven't. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

The boundary, it's going to have to come from, I'm going to have to develop an underlying assumption that I don't necessarily owe everything to everybody all the time. You know, and right now I kind of feel I do. I feel, I don't know, I kind of feel like I arrived here in this dimension, like with a deficit that I've got to somehow pay back. I don't know if there's other people walking around like that, but it's like, oh, like I didn't pay the price of admission or something. And certainly to the extent which like people have bought my book, and paid attention, now I owe them, I owe the world a payback for all that, you know, as if, oh, you read my book. So now I owe you the equivalent hours of time that you just spent

with my book. And that's tricky because if like a thousand people read a book and that took them four hours each, just four thousand hours I have to find somewhere. And that's, you know, 10 hours a day for more than a year. When you're stressed, what's the most important thing for you to keep in mind. You know, I mean, this sounds so stupid, but it's new to me, so it's true. Breathing is like really important. If you don't breathe, you fall down and die really quickly. But I tend when there's a stressful thing. I've noticed I stop breathing. And then it gets worse and worse, the less air there is. And then I almost have to remember, oh, right. You breathe a little bit. at least my body feels like it's a little bit better. I feel a little bit armed. But yeah,

that's, that's, um, that's, um, that's my big one is learning is, is breathing and understanding that I don't have to react to everything, that that immediate reaction is not necessarily better than a considered response. What are you most optimistic about? Young people's ability to, pass through the fame-obsessed decades into things mattering to them on a local and felt level. You know, I think that there's, I mean, they still do it, obviously, but there's, I feel like there's growing dissatisfaction among them for this, this, you know, influencer culture, you know, that that living your life as some sort of an infomercial is not satisfying and that they're going to move on. And as they do, you know, like I was saying before, as they return to a locally

scaled level and start looking in their towns and cities for that, the stuff that excites them, it's going to take such a burden off, you know, this giant planetary brands and all that stuff. I'm optimistic when I see the ports failing in Los Angeles and the boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal of people saying, you know, is it really genuinely long-term cost effective to have slaves in China making all our stuff? you know we we fish for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico we transport those shrimp all the way to China and Vietnam where they get deshelled and then put them on other boats and ship them all the way back to us could that possibly be better in the big sense could it be or is it just some business hack you know yeah it's a business hack so I've got faith that these kinds of of scaled foolishness, these very non-commoncensical approaches to civilizational stewardship will become apparent. So I guess I have faith in a new era of common sense, shepherded by young people who get nauseous of everything being done to scale and more interested.

I sound like Bannon here, but in subsidiarity and distributism and the commons. and local, small local business. What do you know about decision making that most people miss? I took Est in the 70s. Remember Est? It was like Werner Earhart did this thing. They call it Landmark Forum now. It was one of the first kind of culty self-help things that came out of California.

And you do these long seminars and whatever. And like Tony Robbins kind of stuff. And what they said in it that stuck, it's the only thing that I remembered from it was they, distinguish between a decision and a choice. And I really that like a decision is the process of I have this decision to make. It's the unresolved thing. The decision is more like the question, the weighing for this decision.

But choice is what you autonomously choose to do. Without sort of an evaluation or rigorous process. Well, there can be. You can do the evaluation and then make a choice. But once I make the choice, what I've learned now is to stop, second guess, is to stop going back to decision. You know, what a, what a, coulda, shoulda. What about that one?

What about that? I chose this one. This is, what's what I chose. I chose the Froka Mapa Chippo Macanina from, you know, whatever the thing is at Starbucks. You know, I just choose black coffee. whatever. I chose that one. Oh, I could have got the decaf latte chop a chicken. Yeah, you coulda. You coulda. But this is, you're here now. This is your house. This is your car. This is your wife. This is your shirt. You know, that's it. And I feel like it benefits advertisers and certain companies to get people second

guessing all their choices. So put them back in decision mode so they buy more stuff. And it's like, you know, you really don't you don't need it you don't yeah it's it's really fine i think we're wasting a lot of time and energy re-chusing things that don't matter it really doesn't matter which shirt you're wearing it's which you know get out of the house already and final question that i i want to end with what do you want other people to say about you when you're gone really isn't it great that we live in the world that Rushkoff predicted where we got over all these tragedies and started just getting along with each other. I'm so much less concerned that they talk about me than that they talk at all. I much prefer to influence their bearing, their comportment than the content.

You know, whatever they're saying, I'd rather than be saying it in the way that I try to speak, you know, which is in a loving, open, engaged, responsible way. I want them to engage with each other, feeling responsible for one another. And whether or not they credit me with that, by name, it doesn't matter. Thank you so much for taking the time for this engaging conversation. Thank you, Shane. It's good to meet you. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast.

To get a transcript of this episode, go to FS. dot blog slash tribe or check out the show notes can you do me a small favor go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it thanks for listening and learning with us till next time