Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

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...

Consider a text message in which you are deciding where to meet for dinner with a friend. As you go back and forth in that stream of abbreviated communication, you suggest, “Let’s eat Italian,” to which your friend responds “Fine.” The one-word text sends you into a state of alarm. Did they mean “fine” as in “great,” or “fine” as in “Fine, you win , we can eat where you’d like”? Somewhere in this...

Elizabeth Stewart, founding executive director of Civic Hall Labs , empowers technologists who put people first, amplifying the “civic” of civic tech. On today’s show, Stewart joins Douglas Rushkoff for a conversation about technology innovations whose value is measured in their contribution to the public good. It’s a type of thinking that asserts the means of tech innovation to be just as importa...

Playing for Team Human today is Alexandra Juhasz. Juhasz brings her extensive and diverse work as a filmmaker, media critic, and feminist activist to the Team Human round table. On today's show, Douglas and Alexandra explore the dangers of a media landscape that amplifies the grotesque and sensational. They also look at how human agency and autonomy are threatened on our hypercommercialized me...

Think back to the last time your eyes were opened wide, your mouth agape, and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end as you took in a profound or inspiring sight… On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Michael Frederickson, lead technical director at Pixar Animation, to talk about this deeply human experience of awe. It's a conversation that spans the “awful” to th...

Playing for Team Human is systems thinker, currency designer, and social hacker Arthur Brock . Art joins Douglas to talk about how currency is less a thing you own and more a way of sharing. It’s a conversation that poses a crucial question of both money and cryptocurrencies alike–how might we design new exchanges that embody values of social and environmental betterment, rather than extraction an...

With the birth of the internet and advance of digital networks, we’ve been promised everything from creative cooperation and digital democracy, to the end of work and a new abundance of leisure time. It’s a promise of a techno-utopia that persists today.  Playing for team human today, Dr. Richard Barbrook challenges this imaginary future by unearthing the neoliberal underpinnings of Silicon Valley...

This week on Team Human, the conclusion of Douglas's soul-searching conversation with friend and author Walter Kirn. Together, Kirn and Rushkoff explore how disingenuously promoted concepts such as “creative destruction” are used to replace human civilization with a business plan. What would it mean to maximize human virtues of compassion or intelligence instead of machine virtues like speed a...

Playing for Team Human today, author and social critic Walter Kirn. Walter and Douglas engage in a two-part conversation that questions the so-called “evolution” of technology. Just how much of our humanity are we willing to surrender to our devices? Why do we deem our own replacement by computer programs to be the inevitable path of progress? And whose progress are we actually talking about? We’v...

This week, a special holiday episode featuring conversations with Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective plus worker cooperative organizer Esteban Kelly.   We launched Team Human a little less than a year ago with little fanfare or promotion. Steadily we’ve assembled a formidable team of listeners via word of mouth, retweets, and person-to-person conversation. We’d like to take this...

Playing for Team Human today is permaculturalist Adam Brock, author of Change Here Now . Adam joins Douglas for a conversation about how humanity is integrally connected to natural ecosystems. “Nature is a textbook,” Adam explains, and so by paying close attention to ecological systems, we can better understand ourselves as part of a greater whole. It’s a theme that serves as the springboard into...

Playing for Team Human is Ramesh Srinivasan, professor and author of Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World .  Today, information travels around the globe in an instant, and connection to far away people and places is merely a click away. Yet the prevalence of filter bubbles, the rise of political extremism, and the consolidation of network power into the hands of behemot...