I just want to say to our guests that its a personal privilege for me and for my cofounder, who is floating around here somewhere, to be celebrating the publication of yet another book from the brilliant and prolific Douglas Rushkoff, who seems to have produced yet more works of brilliance every year. I dont know how you do it but fantastic that you keep doing it. As an author myself, i have to say that the publication of a book is a always a really special event. There is something about taking your words and putting them on paper between slightly thicker pieces of paper that make people look at you differently. Youre now an expert. Its more than that. Youve put them together in a way that takes us on a journey with you, reading a book Still Matters in this age of bitesized social media and tweets and likes and so on. And there is, i think, nobody who has traveled in that space since its very early days when he wrote a book called siberia which almost didnt get published because first publisher thought the internet was a fad and would go away. So no one belter to help us understand the crazy times were living in, when technology seems to be bringing us more amazing innovations every day, and yet for some reason, something about life doesnt seem right. So im really excited and thrilled to bring Douglas Rushkoff back. Georgia from the open technology institute, where she is the director of technology as part of new america, is a perfect interlock tour to bring douglas here so welcome them both and if youre interesting in learning more about civic hall, visit the web site and come join the community. [applause] this is my first time in this space so really exciting to be here. We were talking before hand and one thing you said to me is this book is different from your other books. Talk about why and how and who what your goal is. I dont know if it started out different but most of the books i write kind of end up meaning something to people about ten years after they come out. Which is cool in a way because it means i got foresight or prescient or something, but it sucks in a way because the conversation i want to have i cant have andthen ten years later when im done with that conversation, people want to talk about it. Im trying to dig up, what did that mean . This book, i started to i mean i was thinking about this book two or three books ago but didnt have an answer. I was getting increasingly concerned about why things werent working out quite like they could be or should be, why Digital Technology not yielding burning manlike rave that i had imagined society becoming in the early 90s. And i couldnt put my finger on exactly what it was. I understood that Young Developers were taking too much money too early, and then having to change their companies in order to deliver to their vc what they wanted, 100x returns, but killing the actual idea, and so i started writing about that. And decided when i would write this book, i understood what the problem was, but i didnt understand what the solution was. So i said, if i get a year or so to write other book, i will figure out not only what is wrong but how to fix it. I havent read the book. It came out today. Do you want to talk about what the problem what is your sound bite for people to understand the problem . Well, the main problem is that we in a nutshell this has to be unpacked, i guess. In a nutshell, what we have done is we have optimized the Digital Economy for the accumulation of capital instead of optimizing it for the velocity of money, and the latter, the velocity of money, is much more consummate with the distributed architecture of the internet and would lead a whole lot more happiness that what weve got. The easiest way of understanding the problem is theres all these Great Developers who are willing to disrupt one industry or another. Theyll disrupt publishing or music, but then as soon as theyve got their idea kind of down, they run to the equivalent of at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley and they surrender their disruptive idea to another operating system that they acted if it isnt even there. They assume that Venture Capital and ipo and acquisitions, stock market, and 100x returns, but that just this preexisting condition of nature. Thats the real system that we have to somehow succumb to, and so look at something when i saw these are friends of mine. We all have friend to you now who are billionaires, which is strange. Saw the founders of twitter on the cover of the wall street journal the day they had their ipo, and under each of their faces was the number of billion dollars that each of them were worth, and im think, i know two different people who are worth over 5 billion each, but i found myself feeling sorry for them because i realize these are the guys that disrupted visa and mastercard with paypal. They disrupted journalism with twitter, and now here they were surrendering what they had done and surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry on the block. They let you ring the bell at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and clap for you. Not because you have done something disruptive. It is because you have confirmed the premises of Corporate Capital to the whole scheme and you have enslaved yourself and your company now to pivoting towards 100x or 1,000x return and away from whatever it did. Now were here with twitter. One of hi favorite apps, 140 character app that makes 500 million a quarter and thats considered an abject failure by wall street. That a failure. And the company now has to go become, what, video advertising, blah blah, and where goes twitter . And so what i wanted to do is figure out what could they have done and what could we do to have a Development Path that leads to something other than just magnifying this growth imperative, which is driving us off the cliff anyway. So, ive been talking about this and you talk about what companies can do and what individuals can do. Theres a role for government to play in this as well, as a Public Policy person, how do we incentivize change . If the system is in place, how do we take down the system . Well, i hate to sound libertarian here but i will for a moment, because im not. But one thing the government can do is change the nature of their regulations. Im not saying deregulate the marketplace so that wall street can go crazy. Or deregulate so the rich can have rich. What im saying is dont right now, regulations arent really being made in the interest of people anyway. The people who write the regulations are the very largest players in the industry. So, when a simple nontech, example, would be there was a big lead paint scare in the toy industry a bunch of years doing, door a a toys had lead paint, outsourced from china. So well form a commission, get the leaders of industry together with the leaders of government and come up with regulations to prevent this from happening again, and the regulations was a Testing Process that required 40,000 per toy that youre going to release on the market. What a small toy manufacturers supposed to do with that . If you make handcrafted toy trains that you want to sell through a toy store, how do you participate in that . You cant. So, industry used their own mistake, their own problem of big industry, as an excuse to regulate the marketplace so that it would advantage them even more. So regulation right now favors the largest players on the block. Like the reason why uber can move into new york is because they have a warchest. The investment in uber is not paying for the app. Its paying to deregulate the marketplace in their favor. So that one elm the other biggie and its a simple tax shift is i mean, the simple way to say it is, right now in the way i sound like bernie here right now, our tax thats all right. Should people write you in . No, the simple problem with the tax code is Capital Gains are taxed much, much less than real earnings, than dividends. What is that sniff youre thinking of it as a Computer Program and now biasing is so that people who make money by simply having money dont have to pay taxes but people who make money by earning money have to pay taxes. What are you billing into the system . If you want to optimize your economy or the accumulation of capital, the distract of poker chips from the playing board, into the accounts of shareholders, then optimize it that way. If you want to optimize the economy for the circulation of capital through the society so that people can create and Exchange Value between each other, then you want to reverse that bias. You want to taxes on dividends and earnings to be really low and taxes on capital accumulation to be high. How do we make that happen some get people to change and what can people who are here do in daytoday choices or that theyre working on . I mean, the easy way to disempower the sitting bags of capital that are there is to try in some ways try to ignore them, which is hard to do. You create an application with two friends and you can build it pretty much on a laptop, and then use a scalable server, even go to amazon cloud. I dont care. Go to something scalable you. Dont need ten millions of dollars from y company to get to the next level. Once you bring those people in, now youre in a different game. Now youre no longer building a business for the prosperity of that business. Now youre building a business in order to sell it. So if your goal is to create a thriving, sustainable business, then think twice about selling it. Dont sell it. Hold on to it. Thats sort of number one. As individuals its really i mean as consumers you can make way better choices howl you buy things. Its as simple if someone buys my book from a local book seller instead of from amazon i mean theyre local book seller now there is money circulating in their community. And take that eve. They dont care about the books. They care about the monopoly. So its a very different thing. You can if youre organizing a company, consider how can your company make everybody who touches your company wealthy. The traditional corporate industrial tactic is to look at everybody else as a resource to distract value from them but if youre can extracting value from your customer base, they get too poor to be your customer. Thats the problem walmart is having now. The towns walmart has gone into is going bankrupt. Theyre losing customers so walmart is Closing Stores and the towns are trying to figure out how to rebuild a local infrastructure, how to create a drug store, and a book store and Everything Else that we need to replace this big vacuum that came to our community and wiped out our connective tissue. Companies can think about communicating with shareholds differently. So instead of beingbe holden to the growth of the share praise, tell your showerholders theyre going to earn real money for owning a portion of your company. Create companies as platform cooperatives where your workers are owners in the company. Theres a competitor to uber called june bow and its the same juneau and its the same idea except they pay the cabbies more and the drivers own 50 of the company. So when that company eventually pivots to mechanical cars driven by computers you havent done the research and development for the thing that will replace you. Youve done the research and development for the company you own. So now the drivers are going out, doing your work, your job has been replaced but your income hasnt been taken away because you own the thing. So these are really they sound theyre just the basic steps you have to think of things. Were in a digital age, you have to think of the mechanisms that youre using and that the instruments that youre putting into place, you have to think of them like programs. And you have to bias them towards circulation and towards making people wealthy. If you have a business making its customers wealthy, making its suppliers way. Y, making competitors wealthy, theyre going to keep you around but just not the way we think. Make other people wealthy . Yes so they can buy stuff from you. And its not its not Rocket Science to do that. To that point, that another policy projection, building in mechanisms for other types of businesses, because cooperative businesses of that model youre describing arent actually possible in a lot of places. So thats some right. Luckily theres things like b corps and alternative corporate structures that let you value things other than your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. Its from an economics perspective its understanding that when you take in capital, and you let a Venture Capitalist by in charge of your company, then the only contribution he is going to value is capital. But if you understand economics, you understand theres three main factors of collection. Capital is one of them, but land and labor are the other two. And this is back to adam smith and any economist, any lib be tarean will tell you, land, labor, capitol. To to val all the land and labor . By building it into the core of the company to understand there are three kind of contributions, and all three have to be rewarded by the company. You cant just look at a company as Venture Capital thats extracting value from land and labor or you end up with a world thats going to die and with people with no jobs. You mentioned earlier, people people are going for the funding. Thats a mentorship model. Theres the question, does everybody know how to do this . The answer is probably they dont. If theyre not needs to change is the advice theyre getting. How to build a better support system for changing the thinking around how business happens . Are there evangelists that exist that we can start to tell their stories more . Does it need to be a special different type of incubator . How can be change the Community Around let do it. Part of a civic hall. Part of wry i wrote this book to say heres a manual. To understand what went wrong and how to do it right. Theres people around traumatic to Trevor Schulte new school who is starting a whole organization. Platform cooperatives, talk to michelle bowlines at the peer to peer foundation, youll see tons of articles. Talk to robin hood in tipland, there are a lot of groups out there, a lot of them looking at block chaining, folks looking at how can we do authentication in a peertopeer way. Those efforts get sidetracked because people invest them and think, oh, bit coins. When you see the winkleboss brothers stale stay away. There are meant years out there but i feel like a lot of people know in their gut what theyre doing right. Its not Rocket Science. The young people that when theyre in their dorm room in stanford or columbia and come up with the idea issue feel like so many of them would be better off with 50,000 and no mentorship than 5 million and the mentorship theyre getting the mentorship theyre getting that, irnot dumb. Theyre smart people but theyre smart at doing a very particular thing which is bringing something to exit. Bringing something to an exit event. And, good, have friends in here right now with a product called ready just gotten away from Venture Capital and his like, we can just do this thing. It used be to called bootstrapping, but it used to justbe called building a business. Build a business, get some revenue, use some revenue to live and some to invest back into the company. Its a Slower Growth thing but when you grow slower so much easier to develop a product that your customers like because then you can see your custom reaction. You can use good Old Fashioned quarters and semi annual feedback and adjust and change. Youre not stuck on the clock of 18 months. Ive got 18 months to turn this thing around. Thats not fair to any business in the real world. How people in the room have heard of one of these initiatives . Thats about ten hands. Two. You have a decisionmaking tool. A lot of them you wont hear of. Just like the best candidates for president you never heard of. We heard of trump. So its like just because you dont know them, doesnt mean theyre not great. The fact is a lot of them are local. There is nothing wrong with creating a business that doesnt scale up. Not everything scales up. Scaling up is an artifact of the Industrial Age where you have to become the one, the winner, the king of the hill. You can actually be one of many in your business. That actually cool. Used to be guilds. There were many people who built bridges and made houses and shoes and they had guilds and shared technologies and innovations with each other, and they understood that if everyone gets better, were all doing better. They built a culture around what they did. Now its as if the economic term is the as if the number is the number that if its a sear row, it means everything is distributed everywhere and if it goes to one it means all the money has been scooped up by one player. Feels like the Digital Economy is strictured so there will be one big winner. Leak a poker game. One guy gets all the chips, who is going to get everything . And thats because theyre so addicted to scale, and even in our good lefty progressive world, i have so many kids want to create i want to create a platform that can aggregate all of the web sites that are aggregating the people who are doing social change. And everybody wants to do that because everybody wants to have the thing that frames the thing that frames the thing. Get that. Its not as much fun as just doing the thing locally. Its so hard in a world where we all want 20,000 twitter followers and we all want the recognition but the satisfaction you get in creating, like, greenlight book store, in green point, and having a community of people who love what you do, that youre supporting, becoming human scaled economies are local. And when theyre local, they necessarily respect land. When theyre local they necessarily respect labor because those are the people who are paying the taxes to put your kids to school so you need everybody to be participating. Its so much more enjoyable. So, sure, you can come up with mechanisms people can model in lots of different places but in terms of havi