Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Playing for Team Human today is interactive artist Lauren McCarthy . Lauren’s thought provoking work brings a unique and creative perspective on social interaction and the intersection of humans and technology. In this episode, Lauren’s app Crowdpilot becomes the first “advertisement” to be featured on Team Human. Crowdpilot is an app in which real time conversation advice is crowdsourced from onl...

This week we continue with part two of our special live recording of Team Human at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Fransisco. Joining Douglas on stage is cyberculture pioneer, educator, artist, author, visionary, and shoe painter, Howard Rheingold.  “Mind amplifiers,” “psychedelic signifiers,” and “the instrumental vs. the sacred” are just the tip of the iceberg in a conversation that exp...

This week's Team Human comes to you recorded live at the historic Grand Theater in San Francisco's Mission District, home to Gray Area Foundation for the Arts . We'll be sharing four installments of this live event, kicking it off with a conversation with Annalee Newitz , author of the mind blowing sci-fi novel Autonomous , as well as prior work Scatter Adapt and Remember: How Humans w...

Playing for Team Human today is interdisciplinary thinker and technology philosopher Damien Williams. In this episode, Williams and Rushkoff look at the embedded biases of technology and the values programed into our mediated lives. How has a conception of technology as “objective” blurred our vision to the biases normalized within these systems? What ethical interrogation might we apply to such t...

Playing for Team Human today, cyber security expert Eleanor Saitta . Eleanor shares her deep knowledge on building secure and robust digital ecosystems. As Eleanor and Douglas converse on issues of privacy, encryption, and surveillance, a set of thought-provoking insights about online identity and human to human connection emerges. Does empathy scale across our cyber connections? Or is it confusio...

Playing for Team Human today is journalist, Boing Boing editor, Institute for the Future research director and recent Grammy Award Winning record producer David Pescovitz. Douglas spoke to David just days before he won the Grammy, with collaborators Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad, for best boxed or special limited-edition package for The Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition . The Voyager...

Playing for Team Human today is world renowned social scientist and systems thinker, Merrelyn Emery. Emery, with her partner the late Fred Emery, advanced Open Systems Theory and applied it to management of organizations and government. Open Systems Theory, or OST is the idea that autocracies make for bad governments, companies, and organizations. In this conversation, Merrelyn and Douglas discuss...

Playing for Team Human today is Danielle Butin , founder of the Afya Foundation . Afya collects and sends surplus medical supplies from the US to those who need them around the world. In today’s conversation with Douglas, Danielle shares not only stories of the good accomplished through Afya, but also a broader strategy for human intervention. How did Danielle, an occupational therapist and geriat...

Playing for Team Human today is immersion experience artist and pioneer, Ghislaine Boddington. Ghislaine joins Douglas for a conversation about the nature of immersive technologies and how we might bring our bodies with us into the digital realm. Rather than diminish the role of the physical body, Ghislaine’s work celebrates the body as an integral part of enhanced immersive experience. As Creativ...

Playing for Team Human today is Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation. Stacco brings with him deep knowledge and enthusiasm for the power of the commons. Stacco and the Commons Transition team put their faith in people, believing in the potential of diverse, empowered communities to address complex problems. Far from a utopian fantasy, P2P offers a wealth of resources including models from groups...

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has been one of my dearest and most human friends for the past few decades. Gen’s a musician, icon, cut-and-paste artist, occultist, and pandrogyne with whom I’ve worked and played in many ways over the years.  Gen founded The Coum Transmissions , Throbbing Gristle , and Psychic TV , with whom I played keyboards in the early 2000’s. Gen also embarked on a very personal cut...

Playing for Team Human today, occult scholar and author Mitch Horowitz . Mitch, the author of Occult America  (Bantam);  One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life   (Crown); and  Mind As Builder: The Positive-Mind Metaphysics of Edgar Cayce (A.R.E. Press) joins Douglas for a conversation about the shared histories of magic, capitalism, and American political thought. It’s a conve...

Playing for Team Human today is Erin Barnes co-founder of ioby . Ioby (in our backyards) is a “ crowd-resourcing”  platform for citizen-led, neighborhood-focused projects. Rather than just raise money, ioby mobilizes civic engagement by putting resources in the hands of local leaders who want to steward positive change in their neighborhoods.  Erin shares with Douglas how ioby harnesses the power...

What can we learn from a mere handful of dirt? For Nikki Silvestri, soil is both a metaphor and the literal “fertile” ground through which complexity and diversity thrive. Having worked on issues of food systems, sustainability, and public health, Silvestri describes soil as the link through which to engage in the work of building community, resilience, and social equity. Today, in her conversatio...

Playing for Team Human today are Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen from the Small Planet Institute . Lappé and Eichen are out on the road with a mission to reinvigorate “civic courage” and inclusive participation in democracy. Their latest book Daring Democracy Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want offers a diagnosis of what has come to ail our democracy and recommends...

Today on Team Human, we share a conversation with author, musician, humorist, and culture hacker Hugh Gallagher . Gallagher began his professional writing career thanks in part to a college entrance essay that went viral in the 90s, earning the distinction of being an early, if not the first, internet comedy meme. With lines like, “I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice.....

Net impresario Tim O’Reilly now recognizes how the short-term focus of digital business is draining the real economy. Its algorithms have been programmed to extract value from us all. For O’Reilly, however, the solution is not to eliminate algorithms, but to write better ones.  If there’s an argument to made for technosolutionism, O’Reilly makes as good a case as there is. Rather than confronting...

Playing for Team Human today is Neal Gorenflo from Shareable.net . Neal joins Douglas to spread the word about Shareable’s latest resource, Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons . Sharing Cities is an inspiring collection of 137 case studies and policies across a wide spectrum of issues that show how empowered communities are building citizen-run, democratic solutions using commons thinking...

A high school basketball team organizes a canned food drive. A church volunteer group restocks the local pantry with donations from Walmart. Both examples are seemingly positive portrayals of American civic engagement… So what’s wrong with this picture? Playing for Team Human today is Andy Fisher, author of Big Hunger: the Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups . In the b...

What is a robot? Are robots our friends? Does the term “friend” even apply? So begins this week’s episode of Team Human with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case . Amber and Douglas look at how algorithmically programmed systems of automation and control might just be turning us into the robots. Case’s recent book, Calm Technology Design For the Next Generation of Devices proposes another way. How mig...

Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That . On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change. Richard’s work calls on us to look at the fundamental ethica...

On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Professor Steve Fuller. Fuller teaches Sociology at the University of Warwick. In his recent book, Humanity 2.0 , Fuller embraces a future vision in which technological and medical advancement will enable humans to evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations. Steve will use this concept to teach us what distinguishes transhum...

For this week's Team Human, Douglas is out on the road in Austin, Texas where he caught up with longtime friend and cyberculture pioneer, Jon Lebkowsky . Jon and Douglas first look back on the promise of the early cyber revolution, and then look forward to the ways in which those quirky fringe elements might be folded back into the work of promoting justice, solidarity, and even a bit of ambig...

When was the last time you found yourself truly bored? Have you forfeit those nooks and crannies in the day when you used to let your mind wander aimlessly in a daydream? On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Manoush Zomorodi , host of the popular WNYC Studios podcast,  Note to Self . On Note to Self, Manoush initiated a series of listener experiments aimed at breaking the inf...

This week is a special episode of Team Human. We are sharing an excerpt of a panel discussion recorded on location at IBM Watson in New York from August 2015, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff and produced by our friends at Virtual Futures in London. Douglas was joined by philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller, tech entrepreneur and ethicist Martine Rothblatt, IBM Watson researcher Michael Karasick, and ph...