Team Human

Playing for Team Human today, activist, journalist, and science fiction author of the new anthology Radicalized, Cory Doctorow.Cory has a unique way of building stories, metaphors, and scenarios that clarify the underlying dynamics of living in a technologized society. In Radicalized, Cory extrapolates the embedded laws and values defining the present moment to show, not some distant future, but the dystopia that very much exists today. Together, Douglas and Cory explore the question – What do we do with this moment where everything, even truth itself, feels up for grabs? Avoiding nihilism and despair, Cory’s writing and thinking showcase a unique kind of agency and optimism. Is this the moment we flip the script on dystopia? Join Cory and Douglas as they look toward a utopia that engages the collective will and imagination required to overcome crisis and inequality.You can find out more about Cory and his new book, Radicalized, at craphound.com You can also find out more about all of our guests, listen

Returning to play for Team Human today, filmmaker, author, musician, and activist Astra Taylor.Astra joins Douglas for a conversation that wrestles with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in democracy. It’s a discussion explored in her latest film, What is Democracy? and her new book, Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. (Hudson Books, Indie Bound, Amazon)Do we really have a clear vision and political imagination of what democracy should look like? How can we both recognize the tensions in democracy and create conditions where these contradictions are more constructive than destructive? In what ways are we empowered in our everyday lives to enact democracy?Astra and Douglas explore these questions and more as they make the case that democracy is not a “thing” nor a set of procedures, but rather an “unfolding,” a process. Democracy is a verb!Follow Astra on Twitter here.Hear Astra discuss her work with the Debt Collective on the very first episode of Team Human. Today

Playing for Team Human today and closing out this season of the show; author and New York Times and Wired contributor Clive Thompson. Clive is a keen observer of human beings and the way different media and technological environments change how we see ourselves and our purpose. His latest book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, looks at the ways coders are engaged in not only programing our technologies, but programming our reality. In this free-form Team Human conversation, Douglas and Clive discuss the embedded logic behind the codes that shape our society– looking all the way back to Torah, and then on to contemporary platforms.What values are being coded into our everyday experience? Is there still space for that very human, weird, and eclectic expressions of technology we once celebrated at the dawn of the internet?Rushkoff and Thompson bring both a critical eye and sense of hope to the project of writing human virtue and value back into the programming that shapes our expe

Playing for Team Human today, founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle. Kahle is keeping the dream of building a decentralized, open, mind-expanding internet alive. In this Team Human conversation, Brewster and Douglas discuss the faulty dot-com business models and incentives that derailed the net. They look at the mountains of Twentieth Century culture in danger of being lost from the archive. In a historical moment when we feel exploited and distrustful of so much media, Internet Archive presents a refuge for deeper searches, research, and exploration. The Internet Archive’s associated projects including the Wayback Machine, tv.archive.org, the Great 78 Project and openlibrary.org all play a significant role in making sure the internet remains a home for culture and sharing. But don’t take our word for it. Jump in! Dig though the stacks at archive.org. Borrow a book at OpenLibrary. Upload your band’s demo or search your original website on the Wayback Machine. This episode ends with clips f

Gail Bradbrook and Clare Farrell leverage love and grief to build the Extinction Rebellion, a movement that demands immediate action on climate change.“There is an emotional component to waking up to our social, political, economic, and climate predicaments, and a mix of anger, shock, exhilaration, and fear. Yet properly integrated, they can all serve us as we attempt to muster the collective fortitude to confront these interconnected challenges.Playing for Team Human today are two guests who are practicing state-of-the-art activism that acknowledges and leverages these various emotional components. Douglas is joined by molecular biophysics PhD and economic justice campaigner Gail Bradbrook and #bodypolitic fashion designer turned hunger strike activist, Clare Farrell. They’ve begun a movement centered in London but spreading around the world called Extinction Rebellion. They shut down bridges in London last year and are planning to shut down the whole city of London next week (April 15) until government

Playing for Team Human today, professor, scholar, and activist Ananya Roy.Ananya will be showing us how the fight for global social justice, often begins at home.Roy has been working with Occupy Wall Street’s Micah White (Team Human Ep. 04) on a course about housing inequality for the Activist Graduate School, and is a professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare at UCLA, where she is also director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Her book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development unearthed the counter-revolutionary agenda embedded in many so-called “development” programs. She looks at global poverty from a truly global perspective, which sometimes means the inequality in our own back yards and highway underpasses.In this conversation, Ananya and Douglas explore what it means to be a “double agent” as activists, educators, and instigators of social change. Ananya shares wisdom on the ways we might overcome our compromised positions as situated in systems of colonial, raci

Playing for Team Human today; Aaron Gell. Aaron is an editor at large for Medium and an instructor for NYU's Prison Education Project.Aaron will show us how listening and sharing stories can be the key to cultivating empathy. His long-form journalism finds the humanity in even the most compromised and contemptible of characters. In this episode, Douglas and Aaron invite you to eavesdrop into their conversation as they explore the ways stories can connect us. In this moment, when we face existential crisis from many directions, Gell asserts that empathy is an imperative if we are going to preserve our humanity.We’re in this story together. Douglas opens with a monologue on how the end of the Mueller investigation is the opportunity to do a political reset. Being anti-trump is not enough. "Just as Trump’s administration became something of a cult, with subordinates taking increasingly daring and untenable positions in order to win his approval, the anti-Trump movement has become a cult of conspiracy psycho

Playing for Team Human today: musician, investor, reformer, and the author of Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee.Roger will be talking about his mentorship of Mark Zuckerberg and what went wrong. Was it naive idealism? The imperatives of growth-driven capitalism? Greed? Rushkoff and McNamee look at how things have derailed and what must be done to reclaim the driver’s seat for technologies run amok.“There are no rules today.” McNamee warns of online surveillance and the increasing power of behavioral modification. We’ve gone from being exploited as “the product” to becoming “fuel for the fire.”Join Douglas and Roger for a behind-the-scenes look at what is driving these powerful and pernicious platforms.Douglas opens with a monologue proposing a hypothetical. What if Zuckerberg had stayed in school? Would a little more study of history, literature, or a few more ethics courses have prevented the Facebook catastrophe?This special episode of Team Human was recorded live in front of a st

Playing for Team Human Today is lifelong activist, warrior, and witch Blaed Spence AND writer, professor, and author of Slow Media, Jennifer Rauch.Today’s show continues our ‘live from the road’ series as Douglas brings Team Human to the Bunk Bar in Portland, Oregon for an event in collaboration with XRAY radio.Douglas opens with a monologue arguing that politics are still stuck in the television age. What might politics look like when we are not reduced to mere spectators but instead become engaged as active participants?(@1min30s)Blaed Spence joins Douglas on stage for a conversation about the subversive act of looking away from our screens and into each other’s eyes. For Spence, it’ about embracing the opportunity for the awe, wonderment, imagination, and ultimately, true connection. (starts at @12min30s)Author and professor Jennifer Rauch then joins the stage asking us to imagine ourselves as more than just “eyeballs and wallets.” Like Spence, Rauch argues that looking away from our devices and engaging i

Playing for Team Human today: award-winning journalist, activist, and author of No Is Not Enough, This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and most recently, The Battle For Paradise, Naomi Klein.Klein and Rushkoff share a conversation about moving beyond the ideology of individualism. It’s a discussion about what it means, in concrete terms, to forge solidarity with others. Klein finds hope in people’s ability to overcome divides by working together, in common labor, on a common project. One example Klein celebrates is the Green New Deal with its multifaceted and intersectional approach to solving the triple threat of climate crisis, economic inequality, and the surge of racist nationalism. Speaking live on stage at WNYC's the Greene Space, Klein and Rushkoff make a case for humanizing the universal project of saving our planet. After all, the survival of life on earth is a “big tent” under which we all can and must organize.This special episode of Team Human was recorded live in front of a studi

Playing for Team Human today: New York State Assemblyman and candidate for New York City Public Advocate, Ron Kim. Ron will be helping us understand the power of local, grassroots activism and how to make government a thing of the people. With the election just around the corner, February 26th, Kim is spreading a message about putting community over corporations. “This is about people investing in people,” Kim explains. Hear Ron Kim’s vision for change that moves beyond “race to the bottom” politics that pit cities and states against each other.Rushkoff, just back from book tour in the UK, opens the show discussing a great awakening happening across the globe. Thousands of children in Great Britain walked out of school in protest of inaction on climate change. Here at home, grassroots activists won a powerful victory against Amazon and their proposed HQ2 in Queens (listen to last week's show with activists Amy Herzog and Jacinta Gonzalez). Meanwhile establishment pundits and politicians continue to dismi

Playing for Team Human today: immigrant rights activists Jacinta Gonzalez and Amy Herzog.Jacinta and Amy will be showing us why the people living in Queens, New York may not want to welcome Amazon’s HQ2 with open arms. With Amazon poised to deliver on lucrative government contracts for surveillance and immigration enforcement technologies, Jacinta and Amy make it clear that the stakes are higher than just rising rents and gentrification.On today’s episode we’ll take a hard look at Amazon’s “cloud industrial complex.” We’ll look at how surveillance technologies like Amazon’s Rekognition are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to programs that antagonize vulnerable communities. Jacinta and Amy give Team Human listeners a critical and concrete look at the multiple intersections between our technology giants, police-state enforcement policies, and the long history of corporate profiteering on the backs of marginalized peoples. Jacinta Gonzalez is field director for Mijente, a group organizing

In this special episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Siobhan O’Connor, vice president of editorial at Medium. Siobhan and Douglas reverse roles as she hosts the official Team Human book launch. This event was recorded live at Civic Hall on January 23, just one day after the Team Human manifesto hit the shelves. Whether you’ve been a Team Human listener from the very beginning or just started reading the book, this conversation exemplifies Rushkoff at his most open and candid.Douglas begins with a monologue reflecting back on the classic lesson from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, "You are special just the way you are.” Updating this wise old maxim for a digital age, Rushkoff asserts:You are not just the inputs and outputs.You are not just the value you create for the market.You are not just the metrics that we have of your worth or your “net worth.”You are not just your utility value.So what does make humans so special? How do we reassert our inherent value the digital age? Join in on this live con

Playing for Team Human today: journalist and Nation columnist Aaron Maté.Aaron is gong to break down “Russiagate,” taking a sober look at the media frenzy of “bombshell” stories asserting a Russian conspiracy behind the 2016 election. Maté explains why he thinks this narrative ultimately aligns with the longstanding interests of U.S. establishment power. He calls it a “privilege protection racket” that thrives on distraction and misdirection, turning the public away from a real critique of the rise of Trumpism that would otherwise implicate the neoliberal policies of democrats and conservatives alike, foreign policy think tanks, and the media. It’s a Team Human conversation that may play along a divide among listeners, but no matter where you fall on the question of collusion, Maté offers a thought provoking perspective on the dangers of this media obsession. Is the Russia fixation a media virus that our cultural immune system hasn't yet built the appropriate immune response to?Opening the show, Rushkoff

Today’s episode is a special live celebration of the release of Team Human the book and manifesto, which is now available everywhere! On January 8th, Douglas was joined by acclaimed author Seth Godin for a pre-release book party at Betaworks Studios in NYC. Douglas reverses roles for the show, with Seth hosting the conversation. Not the typical book reading, Douglas and Seth use this live event as an opportunity to engage with each other and audience in a spontaneous, free-form Team Human conversation.It’s a talk launched by a question that cuts to the heart of the book itself – How have technologies meant to connect us come to alienate and atomize us instead? Douglas and Seth share why we must reclaim connection and Find the Others.“It’s not too late! We can retrieve what it means to be human in a digital age.”Join Douglas, Seth and the live Betaworks Studios audience for this invocation of the spirit of community and solidarity so desperately needed in this pivotal moment in the human story.A special thank

Playing for Team Human today; technologist, futurist, inventor and mage Mark Pesce.In this conversation with Douglas, part two of a live Team Human show at Civic Hall, Pesce offers a thought-provoking frame through which we might better understand our relationship to algorithms and artificial intelligence:What might you call a creature that feeds on your energy, knows your weaknesses, and can tamper with your emotional state in ways that compel you to act beyond your best interest? Centuries ago we might call this a demon. As algorithms are programmed to exploit humans in order to do their bidding, perhaps it's time to interrogate the Faustian bargains we make each time we sign up, log in, and click thru.It’s a fascinating and sinuous conversation that exemplifies the creative ways humans, together in a room, can think about technology and reassert power over the devils lurking in the details.If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Mark's podcast https://nextbillionseconds.com/This episode features an Aud

Playing for Team Human today: Penny Abeywardena.In part one of a two-part live Team Human show, Douglas is joined by New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs, Penny Abeywardena. Penny’s work looks at the synergies between local and global issues. Guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Penny is helping make New York City a significant player in global efforts to solve humanity’s most pressing issues of immigration, poverty, climate change, injustice, and inequality. In an era of virulent nationalism, racism at the border, and national disfunction; can cities like New York lead the way in solving global crises? Penny shares her insights and experiences, recorded live at the Civic Hall in Manhattan.Learn more the Mayor's Office of International Affairs here as well as programs discussed on the show; Global Vision | Urban Action and OneNYC. Douglas opens the evening with a monologue questioning the very concept of the nation state. Rushkoff asserts that community, rooted in soli

Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it’s not as simple as just “going offline.” How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology? Today’s show reaches back to the origins of what became known as “tactical media” — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.Team Human the manifesto is hot off the press! Order yours here. Ships in January. We've come to the end of the Team Human year! We are grateful for an amazing season

Playing for Team Human today: media and technology scholar Jamie Cohen. Jamie will be helping us understand the commodity of authenticity. His work looks at the ways authenticity is quantized and codified on media platforms such as YouTube. It’s a process through which trust and connection become instrumentalized as tools for the monetization and manipulation of audience attention. Jamie warns how, coupled with powerful algorithms, the gaming of authenticity threatens serious social consequences. Jamie joins Douglas to discuss his research, including his case studies of famous YouTubers like Tyler Oakley and Casey Neistat. Together they dig into the promise and peril of "populist" digital technologies; blogging, VR, and beyond. Jamie Cohen Is a professor at Molloy College where he started the New Media Program. He researches social media, memes, digital culture, and virtual reality. Learn more about Jamie’s work at http://www.jamesncohen.com/Douglas opens with a monologue on how we all became Russia

Playing for Team Human today: business reformer and the author of Reboot: A Blueprint for Happy Human Business in the Digital Age, Jason Stockwood. Jason will be showing us how to minimize the negative externalities of big business. It all comes down to the bizarre idea of providing goods and services that people actually need. Could such a radical business concept catch on today? Jason is striving to use business and technology to be part of the solution, rather than an extractive, negative force. Is there still room in capitalism to embed social justice?Rushkoff opens the show thinking about algorithms. What if we thought of algorithms as a kind of distorted biofeedback? What can we learn about humans from the ways in which algorithms fail?Music Credits: Opening the show, we're trying out a new Team Human original, recorded and performed by TH producer Stephen Bartolomei. Mid-show transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-