How to be Team Human in the digital future Douglas Rushkoff
I got invited to an exclusive resort
to deliver a talk about the digital future
to what I assumed would be
a couple of hundred tech executives.
And I was there in the green room,
waiting to go on,
and instead of bringing me to the stage,
they brought five men into the green room
who sat around this little table with me.
They were tech billionaires.
And they started peppering me
with these really binary questions,
like: Bitcoin or Etherium?
Virtual reality or augmented reality?
I don’t know if they were
taking bets or what.
And as they got more comfortable with me,
they edged towards
their real question of concern.
Alaska or New Zealand?
That’s right.
These tech billionaires
were asking a media theorist for advice
on where to put their doomsday bunkers.
We spent the rest of the hour
on the single question:
“How do I maintain control
of my security staff
after the event?”
By “the event” they mean
the thermonuclear war
or climate catastrophe or social unrest
that ends the world as we know it,
and more importantly,
makes their money obsolete.
And I couldn’t help but think:
these are the wealthiest,
most powerful men in the world,
yet they see themselves as utterly
powerless to influence the future.
The best they can do is hang on
for the inevitable catastrophe
and then use their technology and money
to get away from the rest of us.
And these are the winners
of the digital economy.
(Laughter)
The digital renaissance
was about the unbridled potential
of the collective human imagination.
It spanned everything
from chaos math and quantum physics
to fantasy role-playing
and the Gaia hypothesis, right?
We believed that human beings connected
could create any future we could imagine.
And then came the dot com boom.
And the digital future
became stock futures.
And we used all that energy
of the digital age
to pump steroids into the already dying
NASDAQ stock exchange.
The tech magazines told us
a tsunami was coming.
And only the investors who hired
the best scenario-planners and futurists
would be able to survive the wave.
And so the future changed from this thing
we create together in the present
to something we bet on
in some kind of a zero-sum
winner-takes-all competition.
And when things get that competitive
about the future,
humans are no longer valued
for our creativity.
No, now we’re just valued for our data.
Because they can use the data
to make predictions.
Creativity, if anything,
that creates noise.
That makes it harder to predict.
So we ended up with a digital landscape
that really repressed creativity,
repressed novelty,
it repressed what makes us most human.
We ended up with social media.
Does social media really connect people
in new, interesting ways?
No, social media is about using our data
to predict our future behavior.
Or when necessary,
to influence our future behavior
so that we act more in accordance
with our statistical profiles.
The digital economy –
does it like people?
No, if you have a business plan,
what are you supposed to do?
Get rid of all the people.
Human beings, they want health care,
they want money, they want meaning.
You can’t scale with people.
(Laughter)
Even our digital apps –
they don’t help us
form any rapport or solidarity.
I mean, where’s the button
on the ride hailing app
for the drivers to talk to one another
about their working conditions
or to unionize?
Even our videoconferencing tools,
they don’t allow us
to establish real rapport.
However good the resolution of the video,
you still can’t see if somebody’s irises
are opening to really take you in.
All of the things that we’ve done
to establish rapport
that we’ve developed over hundreds
of thousands of years of evolution,
they don’t work,
you can’t see if someone’s breath
is syncing up with yours.
So the mirror neurons never fire,
the oxytocin never goes through your body,
you never have that experience
of bonding with the other human being.
And instead, you’re left like,
“Well, they agreed with me,
but did they really,
did they really get me?”
And we don’t blame the technology
for that lack of fidelity.
We blame the other person.
You know, even the technologies
and the digital initiatives that we have
to promote humans,
are intensely anti-human at the core.
Think about the blockchain.
The blockchain is here to help us
have a great humanized economy? No.
The blockchain does not engender
trust between users,
the blockchain simply
substitutes for trust in a new,
even less transparent way.
Or the code movement.
I mean, education is great,
we love education,
and it’s a wonderful idea
that we want kids to be able
to get jobs in the digital future,
so we’ll teach them code now.
But since when is education
about getting jobs?
Education wasn’t about getting jobs.
Education was compensation
for a job well done.
The idea of public education
was for coal miners,
who would work in the coal mines all day,
then they’d come home
and they should have the dignity
to be able to read a novel
and understand it.
Or the intelligence to be able
to participate in democracy.
When we make it an extension of the job,
what are we really doing?
We’re just letting corporations really
externalize the cost
of training their workers.
And the worst of all really
is the humane technology movement.
I mean, I love these guys,
the former guys who used to take
the algorithms from
Las Vegas slot machines
and put them in our social media feed
so that we get addicted.
Now they’ve seen the error of their ways
and they want to make
technology more humane.
But when I hear the expression
“humane technology,”
I think about cage-free
chickens or something.
We’re going to be as humane
as possible to them,
until we take them to the slaughter.
So now they’re going to let these
technologies be as humane as possible,
as long as they extract enough data
and extract enough money from us
to please their shareholders.
Meanwhile, the shareholders,
for their part, they’re just thinking,
“I need to earn enough money now,
so I can insulate myself
from the world I’m creating
by earning money in this way.”
(Laughter)
No matter how many VR goggles
they slap on their faces
and whatever fantasy world they go into,
they can’t externalize the slavery
and pollution that was caused
through the manufacture
of the very device.
It reminds me of
Thomas Jefferson’s dumbwaiter.
Now, we like to think
that he made the dumbwaiter
in order to spare his slaves
all that labor of carrying the food
up to the dining room
for the people to eat.
That’s not what it was for,
it wasn’t for the slaves,
it was for Thomas Jefferson
and his dinner guests,
so they didn’t have to see the slave
bringing the food up.
The food just arrived magically,
like it was coming out
of a “Start Trek” replicator.
It’s part of an ethos that says,
human beings are the problem
and technology is the solution.
We can’t think that way anymore.
We have to stop using technology
to optimize human beings for the market
and start optimizing technology
for the human future.
But that’s a really hard argument
to make these days,
because humans are not popular beings.
I talked about this in front
of an environmentalist just the other day,
and she said, “Why are you
defending humans?
Humans destroyed the planet.
They deserve to go extinct.”
(Laughter)
Even our popular media hates humans.
Watch television,
all the sci-fi shows are about how robots
are better and nicer than people.
Even zombie shows –
what is every zombie show about?
Some person, looking at the horizon
at some zombie going by,
and they zoom in on the person
and you see the person’s face,
and you know what they’re thinking:
“What’s really the difference
between that zombie and me?
He walks, I walk.
He eats, I eat.
He kills, I kill.”
But he’s a zombie.
At least you’re aware of it.
If we are actually having trouble
distinguishing ourselves from zombies,
we have a pretty big problem going on.
(Laughter)
And don’t even get me started
on the transhumanists.
I was on a panel with a transhumanist,
and he’s going on about the singularity.
“Oh, the day is going to come really soon
when computers are smarter than people.
And the only option
for people at that point
is to pass the evolutionary torch
to our successor
and fade into the background.
Maybe at best, upload
your consciousness to a silicon chip.
And accept your extinction.”
(Laughter)
And I said, “No, human beings are special.
We can embrace ambiguity,
we understand paradox,
we’re conscious,
we’re weird, we’re quirky.
There should be a place for humans
in the digital future.”
And he said, “Oh, Rushkoff,
you’re just saying that
because you’re a human.”
(Laughter)
As if it’s hubris.
OK, I’m on “Team Human.”
That was the original insight
of the digital age.
That being human is a team sport,
evolution’s a collaborative act.
Even the trees in the forest,
they’re not all in competition
with each other,
they’re connected with the vast
network of roots and mushrooms
that let them communicate with one another
and pass nutrients back and forth.
If human beings
are the most evolved species,
it’s because we have the most evolved
ways of collaborating and communicating.
We have language.
We have technology.
It’s funny, I used to be the guy
who talked about the digital future
for people who hadn’t yet
experienced anything digital.
And now I feel like I’m the last guy
who remembers what life was like
before digital technology.
It’s not a matter of rejecting the digital
or rejecting the technological.
It’s a matter of retrieving the values
that we’re in danger of leaving behind
and then embedding them in the digital
infrastructure for the future.
And that’s not rocket science.
It’s as simple as making a social network
that instead of teaching us
to see people as adversaries,
it teaches us to see
our adversaries as people.
It means creating an economy
that doesn’t favor a platform monopoly
that wants to extract all the value
out of people and places,
but one that promotes the circulation
of value through a community
and allows us to establish
platform cooperatives
that distribute ownership
as wide as possible.
It means building platforms
that don’t repress our creativity
and novelty in the name of prediction
but actually promote
creativity and novelty,
so that we can come up
with some of the solutions
to actually get ourselves
out of the mess that we’re in.
No, instead of trying to earn
enough money to insulate ourselves
from the world we’re creating,
why don’t we spend that time and energy
making the world a place
that we don’t feel
the need to escape from.
There is no escape,
there is only one thing going on here.
Please, don’t leave.
Join us.
We may not be perfect,
but whatever happens,
at least you won’t be alone.
Join “Team Human.”
Find the others.
Together, let’s make the future
that we always wanted.
Oh, and those tech billionaires
who wanted to know
how to maintain control of their
security force after the apocalypse,
you know what I told them?
“Start treating those people
with love and respect right now.
Maybe you won’t have
an apocalypse to worry about.”
Thank you.
(Applause)