Joining Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

"Just being completely offline is great fun. Baseline reality is so cool. I treasure it like it’s sacred."

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist who has been critiquing and architecting the digital age since the mid 90s, has followed in the footsteps of great thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson and Marshall McLuhan. His unique perspective on the digital medial landscape has profoundly influenced our generation. His work showcases the importance of individual agency and resisting corporate surveillance, urging all of us to fight against the complacency and monotony of big tech. He’s also an eclectic cyberpunk author.

Consistently advocating for the well-being of all humanity, regardless of economic background or social status, Rushkoff’s dedication to freedom of thought and expression is evident in all of his work. When he agreed to this interview with me at The Cultural Futurist, I was delighted to speak with an elder who had influenced so many of my own projects.

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Rachel Haywire:

Hey there! It’s been a while since we’ve last talked. I’m so happy to see that you’re still at it. Can you tell me more about your Team Human podcast? What inspired you to start it and what are your goals for it?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Team Human was inspired - or maybe anti-inspired - by a panel I was on with Ray Kurzweil a long time ago. He was talking about the inevitability of intelligent machines and conscious robots, and explaining how human beings need to pass the torch to our evolutionary successors. Something about how all species eventually go extinct, and once machines can process more data than humans, our time is up. We should stay around long enough to keep the lights on for the robots, and when they don’t need us anymore, recede into non-existence. 

And I started arguing that human beings are special. We can embrace paradox, we don’t have to resolve everything to a one or a zero, we can sustain and even enjoy ambiguity. I said something about how computers only understand the ticks of the clock, but we humans exist in the duration between the ticks. I posed that human beings deserve a place in the digital future. And he said, “Oh Rushkoff, you’re just saying that because you’re a human.” Like it was hubris. 

I said “Fine. Guilty. I’m on Team Human.” And over the next few years, the idea of “team human” really stuck with me. Both because it’s an assertion of human weirdness in the face of digital predictability and probability - the idea that we humans don’t always revert to the mean, the way our AI’s do. We are not perfectly auto-tuned, and that’s a good thing.

And the other part of the phrase started to make sense to me, too: the team part of it. Being human is a team sport. We are social. We are not individuals at all. Evolution is not a competition but a collaboration. I started the podcast as a way of putting a flag in the sand and affirming the collective nature of our species. I wanted to create a way for people to “find the others,” and give as many excuses for people to build rapport and forge solidarity as possible. Then I ended up writing a book - actually a brief manifesto - called Team Human. To get the main ideas in one place. To make the argument, inspire people to rise to the occasion of our existence. 

RH:

I first came across your work as a teenager when I read The Ecstasy Club and Cyberia. I view these as cyberpunk classics that were overlooked during their time of release. Do you think that they influenced the wider culture?

DR:

I’m not sure they were so ignored - at least not in comparison with the books I write today. I mean, I’m more “important” now than I was when I was 30 and writing those books. But those books sold like 40,000 copies out of the gate in the US, and then more in the UK. Ecstasy Club was a bestseller in the UK. It was easier to make a splash with a book back then. I think a whole lot fewer were published, and there were book review sections in most papers. 

Now, every venture capitalist has a self-published book on some aspect of the internet or investing. And every well-meaning activist or social change maker has a book about how capitalism screwed us up and how to get back to basics. I mean, it’s nice that people are writing books, but it’s way more crowded. Both Cyberia and Ecstasy Club were well-received. I did book tours and TV appearances and everything.

Where you’re right, I think, is that the mainstream media took a very different message from these books than the counterculture. For the mainstream, Cyberia was a book about the crazy people who believed we would all be using computers someday. I remember Larry King laughing at me when I said that we’d all be spending time in “cyberspace” someday. That we would be sending messages to each other with our word processors. 

But to the counterculture? Cyberia was a rallying cry. An operating manual for the cyberdelic future. I remember going to raves as far away as Australia and South Africa and seeing copies of Cyberia in the DJ booth or promoter’s apartment. It was like a Boy Scout manual for how to throw a rave. It was also the first book - the first journalism, really - that linked the digital movement with the psychedelic movement. I documented how the leading Silicon Valley firms were seeking out psychedelics users to work for them. The crossover was undeniable. 

Ecstasy Club was, in some ways, an effort to take the piss out of the culture I had celebrated in Cyberia. I don’t like criticizing people by name. Unless they’re an evil dictator or something, I don’t like to attack people. So Ecstasy Club gave me the opportunity to show what might happen if rave culture remained too solipsistic. What would happen if the movement forgot that it had political and social roots. What if it just thought it was about EDM and sold out? 

Alas, that’s kind of what happened. Rave has become Calvin Harris earning over a million bucks a night to do a residency in Las Vegas. I think the counterculture readers of Ecstasy Club understood the warnings in there - what I was really saying. And even if that was only a few thousand people, it’s still a few thousand people. We’re still a pretty small tribe, and that’s okay. 

RH:

In Program or Be Programmed, you’ve laid out what I have come to see as a manual for how to survive in the 21st century. Have people taken your advice? Have things gotten worse? Better? A combination of both?

DR:

Let’s say a combination of both, so I don’t get depressed. I think the ideas in Program or Be Programmed eventually caught on. Shoshana Zuboff wrote about them ten years later in Surveillance Capitalism. And they showed up again, in a more sensationalist way, in the Social Dilemma on Netflix. But the most important idea, that if you don’t understand the program then chances are you are the one being programmed? I’m not sure people quite get that, yet. 

Most people still live on the content level, if that makes sense. It’s hard to maintain an awareness of the context, the frame, or the landscape in which the content exists or is being transmitted. Like, it doesn't matter what you Tweet. If you are Tweeting, then you are succumbing to a particular way of processing and expressing thought. And you’re doing it in a technofeudal empire. 

As far as my advice, I think people took it - but maybe too literally. By “Program or Be Programmed” I didn’t mean literally learning to code so much as learning programming as a liberal art. I wanted people to look at the systems to which they submit and ask themselves “What is this system programmed to do? How much agency do I have? How does this make me feel?” And I want people to feel empowered to choose whether it’s an experience to which they want to submit. 

The book is getting it’s new 15th anniversary edition this October. I added a bunch about AI, as well. It was already about AI, but I wrote an epilogue making that explicit. Without saying “I told you so!” 

RH:

Speaking of AI, do you think that it has any creative potential? Is it going to turn us all into slaves? I’m imagining artists in hackerspaces throwing AI concerts and producing multimedia exhibits with AI art. Is this just an idealistic fantasy?

DR:

It’s an idealistic fantasy, but it’s not just an idealistic fantasy. It’s also a way of reclaiming these industrial tools for human creativity. There are still people like us out there trying to turn these swords into plowshares. What was rave but the reclamation of computers for art and culture? These kids and artists can try the same with AI. Maybe the lessons we learned when we surrendered our technologies to the libertarians won’t be lost on them. 

AI definitely has creative potentials. But they may look different than people think. I’m not interested in people using AI to write a movie or make a painting. The artifacts themselves are boring. They are the most average things possible. By design. That’s how AI works. It looks at everything out there and generates the most typical response. I don’t want to see anyone’s Midjourney picture. 

I know making and iterating the Midjourney picture is really rewarding for the user. That’s the best part. All those uncanny experiences, all those weird responses from the AI that seem so lifelike and challenge the user? Those a valuable and interesting moments. But they have nothing to do with the final image, which is about as interesting as those airbrushed paintings people used to put on the side of their vans back in the 70s. Looking at someone’s Midjourney picture is kind of like listening to them tell you about an acid trip. It was great for them, but it loses a lot in the translation. 

RH:

What are some things that you like doing for fun these days that are completely offline?

DR: 

I like almost anything I do that is completely offline. Just being completely offline is great fun. Baseline reality is so cool. I treasure it like it’s sacred. Existence. Breathing. 

Sexuality and sensuality are my favorite things. Then yoga, massage, looking at nature, playing with dogs. I saw stars the other night. I was far from the city, and it was night, and I looked up and the sky looked the way it did when I was a kid. And it gave me a really social feeling. Like this is the same sky we all have over our heads. Very different from media, which is more like a private telescope. (Now, more than ever, because we all watch our own shows asynchronously.) 

So I guess my online experience is very lonely. Not a social medium at all (it turns out I originated that phrase - “social media” - I just found out from an academic. Ha. 1993.) But it’s not social. 

I’m starting to play music again. Right now, for a reunion of Psychic TV that we’re doing as a tribute to Genesis P-Orridge. And it’s really rewarding to be making music with people. Nothing like it. 

Another thing I like to do is walk around, especially in the city, and look for other people who are not on their phones. Just making eye contact with strangers is really fun. Like a conspiracy. 

RH:

With the fragmentation of the internet into fediverses, people now feel a deep sense of loneliness and lack of community. Do you think that Substack can help bridge the gap between the offline and online worlds and make us feel more connected to one another?

DR:

Well, I feel like the fediverses are more social and more connected and social than the generic internet. A good Discord is like a family. Like a “conference” on The Well, one of the early online discussion communities. Having some boundaries makes something more social. I mean, is Twitter social or bonding? Not for me. 

Substack is interesting, for sure. I started writing on it because Medium closed their magazines and stopped paying me. I don’t think I’m an elitist or anything, but I am a professional writer, and have always felt like the social writing spaces shouldn’t be colonized by professionals. That’s why I didn’t want to do a blog or anything. But now that the professional writing spaces are almost all gone, I guess this is the way to publish things. Something about it feels wrong, though. I miss editors and magazines.

I am interested in some of the different kinds of feeds on this platform, though. I’m not completely sure what they’re all for, but I do like that they’ve integrated some messaging and feeds. Substack is being relaxed about it, which is nice. Just put out the tools and see what people do, rather than try to presume certain behaviors. 

But again, part of what makes it work are the boundaries. You can’t be everything to everyone or you get the muddiness and angry chaos of Twitter. Boundaries create communities, circularity, and dependencies.

RH:

I’ve always viewed you as the Marshall McLuhan of the digital era, yet I know a lot of other theorists are overlooked and undiscovered. Who are some obscure media theorists you’re reading these days that you’d recommend?

DR:

I like being the Marshall McLuhan of the digital era. :) Combine that with some Robert Anton Wilson and maybe a dash of Neil Postman, and I’m good. 

I wonder if labeling my favorite, maybe less-known media theorists as “obscure” will piss them off. Obviously, I can’t name people like Cory Doctorow or Paris Marx because they’re already bestselling authors and probably have bigger followings than I do, myself. 

But there’s some folks off the popular radar who deserve our attention. My friend Roy Christopher is really smart and has a book coming out pretty soon. Joanne McNeil has a great novel out called Wrong Way that definitely counts as tech criticism. Molly White writes really great stuff about crypto and and Web3. Sue Thomas writes some really interesting stuff about life, nature and technology under the frame of “technobiophilia.” Émile P. Torres is writing about what he calls TESCREAL, which is his term for “the Mindset” I identified in Survival of the Richest. My friend, indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta may not appear to be a media theorist at first, but he is. 

RH:

For that matter, who were your biggest influences?

DR:

Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht.

Leary, RAW, RU Sirius.

Lynch, Kubrick, Mackendrick.

Fosse, Sondheim, Liza.

Harraway, Starhawk, Margulis.

Mumford, McLuhan, Postman.

Miss Fewkes (high school Spanish teacher). 

RH: Do you have any current or future projects in the works that you’d like to share with readers of The Cultural Futurist?

DR:

Well, I guess the things I’d love people to go out and get would be my last book, Survival of the Richest, which looks at the tech bro “escape” mindset and how we have internalized a lot of it ourselves. It’s a funny book - non-fiction, but as much of a black comedy as Ecstasy Club. And probably Team Human, the book. It’s really a life-changing, life-affirming experience to read it. 

My book Program or Be Programmed is getting re-released in October. It’s so short but so true to the moment. I was just 15 years early. I think they have a pre-order page already. 

Right now, I’m working on a graphic novel. A protopian look at some tech bros who wake up in a mushroom future. You’ll have to read it for it to make sense. It’s a bit like my earlier stuff. If you want something in the meantime, go back and read Testament, the collected series I did for Vertigo. I think that may be my best work. 

I’m also hoping to do some talks again. Get back on the road post-Covid. I enjoy speaking live a whole lot more than writing. And right now I’m finding live interactions bring out new, weirder stuff than sitting alone. If anyone out there has a company or conference or school, gimme a shout. 

RH: Thank you for doing this interview with me! As a Cultural Futurist, it has been quite the honor to speak with you. I hope our interaction motivates my readers to check out your work and that your ideas end up resonating with them. You are a force of nature in this increasingly plasticized era, and I believe that it isn’t over for Team Human. Perhaps we have only just begun.

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