Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Playing for Team Human today, master of human connection and consensus, Loomio co-founder Richard Bartlett. Bartett, hailing from New Zealand, stopped by Douglas's home studio while on a community organizing workshop tour of the US. Bartlett and Rushkoff discuss the challenges of building consensus in an all too often top-down, winner-takes all society. Together we'll learn how Loomio, ins...

Playing for Team Human today is Daniel Berninger. Berninger is a communications technologist who brings his unique, behind-the-scenes insight to a discussion about what distinguishes human-centered technological advancement from today’s all too prevalent machine-focused visions for the future. Berninger, who played an instrumental role in the creation of VoIP, or voice over internet communications...

Just getting a thousand humans into a room together to sit and watch other humans act out something on stage is the miracle. Playwright J.T. Rogers understands why the very act of doing live theater is so hopeful, and applies this hope to intractable problems like the Middle East conflict - with surprising, and Tony-nominated results . Also, a monologue from Douglas Rushkoff on the Manchester bomb...

On this week’s Team Human, we discover one of the reasons why knowing history matters. William Hogeland , author of Autumn of the Black Snake , tells the story of how and why the US Army was created - not to defend our borders, but to wipe out indigenous nations. And all that, in an effort to satisfy the growth mandate embedded in our economy by heroes of the neoliberal left like Alexander Hamilto...

Playing for Team Human is Micah Sifry. Next month Micah will host the 2017 Personal Democracy Forum . On today’s show, Micah and Douglas discuss how the stakes are higher than ever for bringing people into an active civic life and engagement with democracy. Looking beyond the 2016 electoral postmortems and whodunits, Micah and Douglas talk about the power of humans breathing together–conspiring–in...

Playing for Team Human today is musician Tessa Lena . Tessa's music explores the tension between technology and human agency. In her songs and in this interview, Tessa playfully challenges robotic conceptions of humanity. Tessa offers a compelling argument for power of music to call us out of those automatic, quantified notions of self and society. Both Lena and Rushkoff pose essential questio...

Playing for Team Human today is Pia Mancini. Pia is a visionary democracy activist who co-founded the Net Party in Argentina and DemocracyOS . Today Pia joins Douglas to talk about her new project Open Collective .  Open Collective is platform that helps small, non-traditional organizations to collectivize, raise funds, and manage expenses in a networked and transparent fashion. Open Collective is...

Playing for Team Human today is author and Bloomberg Businessweek and New Yorker columnist David Sax. Sax’s latest book Revenge of the Analog, Real Things and Why They Matter explores the resurgence of the tactile, human-to-human, brick-and-mortar encounters that characterize the analog experience. How might our rekindled love of vinyl LPs, local book stores, and face-to-face interaction help regr...

Playing for Team Human today, memeticist and social change agent Laszlo Karafiath Ph. D. Laszlo, memetic engineer for Culture 2 , shares his analysis of the weaponized media now paralyzing so much of our thought, and tells us what we have to do - collectively - to build our immunity to thought viruses. Together Karafiath and Rushkoff look at the ways we might redeploy memetic power to foster posit...

A unique episode of Team Human, on today's show Douglas Rushkoff is joined by longtime friend and counterculture legend R.U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), founding editor of Mondo 2000 . R.U. will help us evaluate the place of the counterculture in the digital landscape. Is counterculture even possible today? Is humanity itself the counterculture as we resist increasingly quantified and abstracted...

Playing for Team Human today is Bas van Abel. Bas is the founder of Fairphone, which began with the radical idea that technology should be built without exploiting human laborers and destroying the planet. Van Abel's experiment of building a "fair" phone has taken him around the world to witness first-hand the lives made invisible in the digital supply chain. Bas and Douglas talk about...

Playing for Team Human today is media historian and theorist Caroline Jack . Caroline is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Data + Society Research Institute . In today's episode Caroline and Douglas explore how powerful people and institutions shape networked civic life through media and communications technology. Caroline has us think deeply and broadly about corporate personhood, imagined machi...

Playing for Team Human today is digital media artist, activist, and filmmaker Alex Rivera. Known for his acclaimed 2008 feature film,  Sleep Dealer , Rivera's work explores the contradictions of a free-flowing globalized economy and the simultaneous stigmatizing of immigrant laborers and erecting of border walls. Together, Rivera and Douglas Rushkoff interrogate the rhetoric of the digital &#3...

Playing for Team Human today is activist trainer and executive director of  theRules.org , Alnoor Ladha. Ladha will help us understand the interplay between political organization, system thinking, storytelling, technology, and the decentralization of power. In a conversation spanning a wide range of topics including anarchism, collective organizing, local economies, psychedelics, and even spiritu...

Playing for Team Human today is Jason Van Anden. Jason is an artist, inventor, and software developer who builds apps to promote social justice. In 2011, Van Anden invented I’m Getting Arrested , software that enabled Occupy Wall Street demonstrators to alert friends and family in the event they were arrested. In 2012 Van Anden developed Stop and Frisk Watch , a tool used to monitor the New York C...

Playing for Team Human today is data-visualization humanist Danne Woo. Woo is going to share with us how he uses data to provoke critical thinking, humor, and even human connection with his creative design. Woo is the creator of  Data Visual   a user-friendly web-based design interface that empowers individuals to create their own shareable data-driven graphics. We'll learn why the Trump presi...

Playing for Team Human today is Brian Fitzgerald, co-founder of Tinkergarten . Tinkergarten began as the passion project  of Brian and his wife, Meghan, a long-time educator. As new parents, Brian and Meghan were looking for hands-on, outdoor learning experiences for their daughter. Unable to find any, they started Tinkergarten. Today, Tinkergarten is a growing community focused on bringing memora...

Playing for Team Human today is Silvia Zuur. In 2012, Zuur founded Chalkle to reignite adult education in New Zealand. Today, Zuur serves as a director at Enspiral , a social impact network that builds community driven solutions for a diverse set of issues including education, funding, and cooperative organizing. Enspiral is famously home to Loomio , a cooperative founded 2012 to create more effec...

This week’s Team Human is part 2 of a fascinating conversation between longtime friends Zach Leary and Douglas Rushkoff. Check out part 1 over on Zach’s show, It’s All Happening . Rushkoff and Zach take a winding path through the “psychedelic substrate” of digital technology, looking back at the strange trips that birthed the modern web and virtual space of the internet. Most importantly, Leary an...

Playing for Team Human today is L.A. Kauffman. Douglas met with Kauffman on the eve of the release of her new book, Direct Action, Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism , published by Verso press. Direct Action charts a history of renewal and reinvention in activist movements since the 1960s with a focus on how we might learn from both the successes and failures of our radical past. I...

Playing for Team Human is Jonathan Larsen. Larsen is a journalist, comedy writer, and TV producer who has worked on the Daily Show w/ Jon Stewart, Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Larsen recently launched  TheFingNews.com , a news digest that brings context, analysis, and humor to the daily news. Jonathan joins Douglas Rushkoff to talk about the Fucking News and the new  Indive...

Playing for Team Human is Brian Hughes. Brian is a recent graduate of the  Media Studies Graduate Program at CUNY Queens College, home to Team Human and the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. Hughes’s work explores media origins and portrayals of extremism. On today’s episode, Hughes begins by sharing his research on Arab Nationalism as related to media technologies from global broadcast to networke...

Playing for Team Human Today is Ari Wallach. In a conversation that spans politics, technology, history, and even biology, Wallach and Rushkoff look at the threat of short-term thinking in times of crisis. This freewheeling discussion tackles deep assumptions of both the Left and the Right, while striving toward a long-term strategy for rebuilding solidarity and progress in society. Visit Ari’s we...

Playing for Team Human today, all the way from Sweden, is local food facilitator Viktor Zaunders. Zaunders is working to organize sustainable, regenerative, and collaborative local food systems. In this episode, Zaunders and Douglas talk about permaculture and the lessons that can be applied to social systems at large. Visit Viktor’s website  zaunders.net  to learn more about the variety of projec...

Playing for Team Human today is Natalie Foster. Foster brings a unique determination and optimism to questions surrounding the future of work. Her research as a fellow of the  Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative   and as an affiliate at the Institute for the Future focuses on rebuilding the social contract for the changing landscape of labor in the 21st century. On today’s episode, Foster an...