Rushkoff, you describe yourself in your latest book, survival of the richest as a humanist who writes about the impacts of digital technologies, but not a futurist. Whats the difference between the two . Well, a futurist is usually someone they come to to tell you whats going to happen in the future, and ive been right about that a lot so they call me a futurist, but really what i am is a presentist. Im more interested in looking at looking at and describing accurately what it happening right now and thats usually an easier way to know whats going to happen in the future, but i dont usually talk about it. I just most futurists they seem more like propagandists and they want to see their company in the best place or positioning them as a consultant in the most needed place and you get people interested in the future about scaring them, this is going to happen or thats going to happen about you but if youre a presentist, kind after cultural anthropologist or culturist, what is, you end up freed to talk about things in ways that other people dont. For me, when i realized i was a presentist was when aol was buying time warner. I dont know if you remember that, back in 1999. And everyone was all excited that aol, the first big Digital Company is now going to buy time warner, that the old Media Company and this meant the new synergy of old media, new media was coming and how great it was and the New York Times called me to write the piece on what was happening, the oped. So i wrote this piece saying as i look at it and as i understand it, it looks to me like aol is cashing in its chips, steve case the founder of aol, grew it as much as he could, the subscriber rate is peaking and using his inflated stock to buy a real company like time warner that has amusement parks and cable and movie libraries and all that and it probably means we are now at the peak of the dotcom bubble. And they called me and they said we cant publish this. Everybody says this is the greatest thing and it means that all of this stuff is coming, and a new age is coming. I said im not a futurist. Im looking at what is. What is, it looks to me like the end of the video game, you either level up or cash out and i think hes cashing out. Of course, they didnt publish it, but i turned out to be right, but not because im a futurist, right . Thats sort of the difference. Its predictive, but its more predictive by looking at what is, rather than trying to guess whats out there. So, presentist, not futurist, but when it comes to the impact of emerging digital technologies, would you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist . Neither. Again, an optimist or pessimist is funny, the construction is interesting. Im optimistic how this is going to work out or pessimistic about how this is going to work out. I would say that im frustrated, right . Im hopeful, but frustrated. Im always hopeful that human beings are going to find a way out of the messes that theyre in, but im frustrated that were using technology on people, right . Were using tech on people instead of giving technologies to people with some faith in their ability to use them. That were surrendering this digital renaissance to really to the needs of the market. When i look at the people running the Biggest Media Companies today, it says if they think of themselves as these demigods who should be in charge of everything from, you know, covid and farming, to society, and education, and politics, and its like, wait a minute, to what end . You know . What are your values . What ethics and economics and anthropology questions did you take in college, if any, before you dropped out in freshman year . So i kind of look at it that way. Douglas rushkoff is our guest in depth to talk about his books, some 20 books over the past 30 years. And take us back to the early 1990s to siberia. What were your expectation on this emerging net and it was known . It was interesting. I saw the internet. The emerging internet and this is before the internet. The emerging Computer Networks as part of a larger cultural phenomena. We had just been through, you know we just had cb radio, even, which was kind of the first sort of citizens Media Movement at least in my lifetime, you know, since ham radio, i guess. The cb radio had happened, fax machines, the beginning of interactivity, and the Television Screens which had been a passive monitor. We had joy sticks to move things around and fax machines to start to send each other messages and people were Walking Around with these phones rather than to have to be home to get a call, mobile phones. There were new physics and chaos math and understandings how the world works. There was electronic music and kids throwing raves with nobody on the stage, just sort of entertainment out in the middle of a field. There was a psychedelics revival people were looking at kind of reengineering their own cognitive apparatus willfully by themselves and it seemed to me that all of these things and the internet were part of a new culture. A new, yeah, west coast kind of west coast psychedelic cyber punk diy, whole earth kind of culture that might shake things up. So and me, i mean, i was an east coast educated theater director. I was an artsy person, but at the time i was fed up how elitist and expensive theater had become, how predictable the plays were. Everything had a beginning, a middle and an end. Felt really stifled and this independent thing was surprising, you know . Im sure like you, i was raised in a world who people Like Computers were like little geek people with pocket protectors and high school and the kids who turned in the hallways at little right angles, there was a certain type and by the late 80s, i was kinding out that my weirdest, artsiest, psychedelic friends from college were going out to Silicon Valley to work for apple, sun, intel. It was confusing, why were the weird people working with computers so i went out there and started covering it, really, as a journalist and i saw this very different computer story. A very Different Technology story, those folks would be working at intel or Northrup Grummond during the day and going home to oakland and scraping the bugs off pay peote cactuses and grateful dead on the weekends. And Something Different was happening and the first book i wrote about this, siberia life in the trenches of hyper space was looking at all of the different threads of culture as part of this same new cultural assertion that we could redesign reality, and, all of these Different Things, whether it was fantasy role playing games where kids were i know people were scared it wassatanist. And it was hyper text reality that no one was use today yet. The idea that you could read a story and text on a computer and click on a word and choose where that takes you . You know, with are you could, you know, open the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway. That was very new and to many of us, it seemed to be an omen or a precursor to the idea that we were going to move into a much more deliberate and interesting society, one that was much less passive and much more of a choose your own adventure in spirituality, in politics, in government, in education, in arts, in all forms of human activity. So how did we get from that culture, that cyber punk, psychedelic culture, that moment that you describe to survival of the richest, the escape fantasies of tech billionaires . Its funny, the last couple of pages of my book siberia, i know these are book people, siberia, my book, was canceled by bantom doubleday, bell 1992 they thought the internet would be over in 1993 when the book would come out. Ive got the letter from the editor, we think thats a passing fad and youre too late. Is that framed somewhere . No, its in a drawing with the rejections of the book. Thats funny. By the time i was putting it together. It was three, four years in the a making rather than one or two. By the time i was putting the finishing touches on the last draft for harper who was publishing it. Wired magazine Just Launched and wire magazine came along and told a very different story what was happening on the internet. What wired was saying, yes, this is a whole big thing, but what this thing actually is is good for business. That the internet is going to create more surface area on the market, that thanks to the internet, the Nasdaq Stock Exchange would be able to grow exponentially, uninterrupted forever, right . And then i understand what they were saying. They looked at Digital Technology as like the ultimate derivative. The way finance works, really, is by kind of going meta. Moving one level above whats actually happening, so theres a transaction between people and then you can buy stock in that. So youre one level removed. Now, thanks to computers, you dont just have to buy the stock, you can buy the driven derivative, one level beyond that, so on, so on. You can look at colonialism only so much area on the planet, thanks to the internet infinite real estate and websites so the markets can expand onto new surface, new territory, virtual territory and wired come in, its interesting whats happening, but what is happening is actually a financial phenomenon, a business phenomenon. And once Business People came in, and this was my fear at the end of that book, i said, you know, theres a window of opportunity for us to seize this cultural phenomenon as what it is, as a new experiment in the collective human imagination and a new kind of commons of ideas and unfolding of human culture, but theres some folks who want to re who want to enclose this commons as a business phenomenon and turn it into Something Else, and to make it more about profit and exponential growth and im not quite sure what that will do to the culture. And it turns out, what it did was kind of killed the culture because if you can look at the early internet, it was about kind of exploring the infinite possibility of a connected culture. What does the connected human imagination do . You know, what can we do when were connected by the machines that we cant do when were totally alone . What happens when we share these processing cycles and these giant collective projects . We flipped that. Once youre betting on the internet as a stock, youre not looking for how do you increase possibility. Youre looking how do you increase probability. Think of it. Once youve bet on something, what do you want, the highest probability that your bet will come true. Do you bet on aol. You bet on compuserve, on the web, whatever you bet on. You want that to have the highest probability of working. Instead of using technology to increase creative possibility, we started using technology on people to increase their probability and this you could see it 1993, 94, 95, what we started to use on the web were words like stickiness, the idea the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky. Meaning people would get to your website about you couldnt leave and they had an ad for one of the companies that helps you make your website sticky that showed users stuck on a piece of fly paper as if they were flies, you know, a fly strip, as if thats the happy user, right, because theyre stuck on what youre doing. We used a metric called eyeball hours. And that eyeball hours was a number of hours that a human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor. Wired announced that we were living in what they called the attention economy and people who werent paying attention were the enemies. Its interesting, after they accumulate up with the term attention economy is when we started to see all the diagnoses of attention Deficit Disorder and all the prescriptions for getting people to pay better attention to these websites where i started to write about how, well, i wonder if a shortened Attention Span might be a defense mechanism against a world where theyre creating sticky websites and using every tool at their disposal. Behavioral finance, the slot machine algorithms. Theres a division at stanford called captology. How do you capture human attention online. Thats the term, especially when people in the Technology Industry began to think of their users more the way a heroin dealer thinks of the users. How do we addict them and how do we control them . So what is the mindset . Well, the mindset is the idea. I mean, its a few things. The easiest way that i can describe the mindset is this idea that you can earn enough money to insulate yourself from the damage youre creating by earning money in that way. Or you can develop enough technology to correct for all the problems you created with the technology that you use that you just made. So the mindset is a Silicon Valley belief that with more tech and more money, they can solve for anything. Its kind of a techno solutionist understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. So they tend to be libertarian. They understand human relationships as purely a market phenomenon. There tend to be afraid of women and nature and black people and indigenous people. They tend to want to own everything. The object of the game is to see ones own contributions as unique. Your own ip. Its without precedence. Its an urge to kind of neutralize the unknown by dominating it and deand mating it. Its when you hear them talk about, you know, selfsovereignty and progress and increasing choice and somehow starting over. You know, theres a its funny, theres a place near in california where a bunch of the tech bros want to build a new perfect city theyre going to live in, its renewable and uses the best energy and has computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic and autonomous vehicles. Its the perfect thing. But its like going to mars or going to the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. They need to do it, you know, the latin word would be exnelo. From scratch. Colonizers urge to get to a new territory. Pretend there are no humans there and start over completely and when you talk to these guys. Whether its, you know, zuckerberg or musk or thiel or bezos, they share the same understandings of human beings as the masses, as low and them as sort of within level above. You know, Mark Zuckerberg wants to go to the metaverse. Elon musk wants to go to mars. Peter thiel talks about going zero to one, living one level, with unorder of magnitude above everybody else and thats really, thats the mindset. It really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called effective altruiusm where they believe that its okay to be kind of an awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. Its a kind of a weird, you know, Jeremy Benson utilitarianism on psychedelic steroids. They believe this is how far the mindset goes, its this tech worship, this hatred of the human, of the body, of everything earthly that they think that in the future there will be, you know, hundreds of trillions of post human Artificial Intelligences spread throughout the galaxy that will launch these things. Maybe part biology, part digital, part silicon, whatever they are, post human entities all over the universe. Because theres so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the eight billion kind of larva human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now and thats a very dangerous way to look, that the lives of the people today matter less than this future of trillions of little robot consciousnesses and thats part of why im not a futurist. You can use math and logic and eugenics and a certain kind of scientific rigor to say, thats true, they do matter more, therefore, lets invest in bitcoin, let the people die, get the rockets to the next planet, but its ignoring the presence. But i have much more faith in the reality of presence, eight billion people alive today who actually matter and then we would make very different decisions if we thought the people who are alive today are what matter rather than the robots in the fantasy future. For much more on the mind set the book. Survival of the richest, its Douglas Rushkoff books, over 20 years, fiction, nonfiction, and were asking you to ask questions, the own lines are open. For Eastern Central 2027488201. In the mountain or pacific, time zones, if you want to send a text 2027488903. And send your name and where youre from at social media and on book tv and social media platforms. Start calling in, as folks are calling in, mr. Rushkoff. So you talk about the mindset. What is team human . I dont mean the podcast or the book, what is the concept of team human . The concept of team human actually came up when i was its a long time ago, i wan i was on a panel with a brilliant guy, one of the chief scientists at google. He was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. So information like the atom, and then the molecule, and then the onecelled organization and then the real organization, and then human culture, but as computers become more complex, capable of handling more complexity than humans and humans culture, then information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. And once that happens, human beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots, to the Artificial Intelligences and accept our own inevitable replacement and extinction and i was so upset by that. I said, i dont know, i think human beings have some qualities that Artificial Intelligences and things raised on binary logic may never have. Human beings can live in that in between space, between the yes and the no. A human being can sustain paradox over time without the need to resolve is, to one sort of answer, or another. We can look at a problem as something to sustain, rather than something to solve. I remember i said, a human being can watch a david lynch movie, not understand what it means and still experience that as pleasure, right . What is that . The human beings are special and we deserve a place in the Digital Future and he said