All Tech Is Human Library Podcast Series #2 | Douglas Rushkoff

In the second conversation of a sixteen-part All Tech is Human Library Podcast interview series, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Douglas Rushkoff joins David Ryan Polgar for a conversation about “The Mindset.” Why would billionaires rather prepare bunkers to prepare for The Event rather than contribute to a brighter future?

What are the underlying assumptions that contribute to this worldview? What are their hopes for our collective future? How is this expressed through our technologies and social media platforms?

Rushkoff discusses the context and histories that contribute to The Mindset — and what his vision for a brighter tech future looks like.

About Douglas Rushkoff
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the upcoming Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Quotes

“You get this modern tech fantasy of building a car that can drive fast enough to escape from its own exhaust and it doesn't work.”

“...But the mindset in the industrial age was about colonizing things. I wrote a lot about this [colonization] and enslaving people and extracting their resources in the digital age. Digital is not real territory. Digital is a symbol system.”

“…People can intuit the intensification of novelty and innovation. What we know is that in order to maintain an exponentially growing economy, you need to increase the rapidity of the frequency of world changing innovations.”

“...Web.3 is a container for an almost infinite acceleration of innovation. So it's a bucket and they're throwing in…everything. There's VR and there's crypto and…there's touch…there's gonna be sex and fortune telling and food and climate and governance and…because we sense that desperation and that density…there's a revulsion from humans. [We're] starting to feel like human existence is at the mercy of this digital balance sheet, and any choice to take a moment to sit, to breathe, to make eye contact, to make love, to play cards… You are an enemy of the natural necessary exponential growth of this, Civilization 3.0.”

“If everybody in America took one day a week without buying or selling, consuming, producing, it would throw the whole fucking world into a recession.”

Learn More About Douglas Rushkoff
Survival of the Richest | Website

Credits:
David Ryan Polgar - Moderator
Douglas Rushkoff - Interviewee
Unfinished Live - Producers