Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 130 Astra Taylor "Democracy is a Verb" Jun 12, 2019

Show notes

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’s episode begins with Douglas looking at Trump as “editor in chief.” Is Trump using a Reality TV show mindset to draw the media into his “production” of reality?

Check out written versions of Douglas’s monologues on Medium. Past Team Human podcast episodes can also be found on Medium.

Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Quince and use my code TEAMHUMAN for a great deal: https://www.quince.com
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ep. 129 Clive Thompson "The Lust for Scale" May 01, 2019

Show notes

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 experience of the world.

Douglas opens with a monologue on the significance of language, specifically the machine metaphors, that also shape our understanding of reality. What do we lose when we think of human persons as as objects, “human resources,” inputs and outputs? Is there something more to being human than just being a producer in a system?

Team Human will be taking a much needed break. We’ll still be working, just at a more human pace. We’re going to spend some time updating, planning, and researching the next season. Take some time to dig through the archive of our 129 shows. Check out the Team Human manifesto. Spread the word, and meet us back here soon.

A special thanks to our radio broadcast partners at KSPC 88.7 FM broadcasting from Pomona College in Claremont, CA. You can stream the show at KSPC.org where Team Human plays on Sundays at 11am Pacific Time.

And check out our friends KXRY 107.1 / 91.1 FM broadcasting in the Portland area, or tune in on the web at Xray.fm where Team Human plays Mondays at noon Pacific time

We love college and community radio... if you'd like Team Human to play on your favorite station, please contact team at teamhuman dot fm.

Thanks also to our many subscribers and supporters. You keep this show alive. You can find one another most easily on a new Reddit that was started by some Team Human listeners, so that everyone can find one another more easily. That’s reddit.com/r/teamhuman

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time as well as transition music thanks toHerkimer Diamonds. This episode concludes with Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man plus a Team Human original by Stephen Bartolomei.

Team Human is a production of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens College. Our associate producer is Josh Chapdelaine; our community manager is Michael Bass; our virtual futurist is Luke Robert Mason; our photographer is Erin Locasio, our stage manager is Kristen Needham. Team Human is produced by Stephen Bartolomei.

Thanks for joining Team Human - our last best hope for peeps.

Code Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Clive Photo by Liz Maney

Ep. 128 Brewster Kahle "The Library of Everything" Apr 24, 2019

Show notes

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 from the Prelinger Archive, including video produced for the World’s Fair by Westinghouse and a Civil Defense film teaching students to “duck and cover” in the age of atomic weapons.

Douglas opens today’s show with an exploration of Operation Mindfuck. Was Operation Mindfuck too successful? Has consensus reality disappeared all too completely so that we are left with nothing real, no true grounding at all? Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!

Ep. 127 "All Hands On Deck" Extinction Rebellion with Gail Bradbrook and Clare Farrell Apr 10, 2019

Show notes

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 agrees to engage with them about this global emergency.”

Visit https://rebellion.earth/ to join the movement. For more details on the April 15th action hen Extinction Rebellion shuts down London, visit this link: https://extinctionrebellion.org.uk/event/uk-rebellion-shut-down-london/

Listeners in the US may also want to jump in and get involved with the Sunrise Movement.

Douglas opens today’s show with a monologue looking at the signs that the activist counterculture has claimed victory over mainstream culture. He then questions “gotcha politics” with an argument for embracing the “newly woke” as allies in today’s progressive movement.

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) We also played Reverand Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. Our Outro features the Mike Watt’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!

A special thanks to Luke Robert Mason who recorded Clare and Gail on site.

Ep. 126 Ananya Roy "Occupying the Master’s House" Apr 03, 2019

Show notes

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, racial, and economic oppression . She asks us to imagine how these spaces of contradiction and complicity might be transformed into spaces of empowerment. While “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house, the master’s tools can certainly occupy the master house.”

Join Douglas and Ananya for this master class poverty, housing, student activism, and the everyday work of building solidarity in our community and beyond.

Today’s show opens with a monologue looking at the cycle of technological innovation as it relates to the human condition. “Our media and technologies have been undermining our social bonds for centuries. So, what’s different now? Is this digital alienation the same thing amplified, or is something else going on?”

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!

Ep. 125 Aaron Gell "We're in the same story, here." Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

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 psychosis."

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

Check out these stories from Aaron on Medium https://medium.com/@aarongell

“How to Survive a Midlife Crisis: Drugs, Dance Music, and Free Love”

I ditched my wife and kids to party in the woods with 250 sex-positive millennials

https://medium.com/s/youthnow/drinking-the-kool-aid-857cfe8c8c96

“Love is a Battlefield”

Hardcore military role players meet regularly to act out the Second Civil War. I strapped on an AR-15 and headed downrange

https://medium.com/s/love-hate/a-dispatch-from-the-second-civil-war-835635943c53

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!

Ep. 124 "Don't Know Much About History" - Live from the Greene Space with Roger McNamee Mar 20, 2019

Show notes

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 studio audience in collaboration with WNYC’s Podcast Mixtape at the Greene Space. Look for future live dates on teamhuman.fm.

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard Roger McNamee's band Moonalice. Our outro features Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Live Photos thanks to @EDLphotography

Ep. 123 Live from Portland with Blaed Spence and Jennifer Rauch "Beyond the Screen" Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

Playing for Team Human Today is lifelong activist, warrior, and witch Blaed Spence AND writer, professor, and author ofSlow 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 in Slow Media practices creates the space for us to use all media more thoughtfully and autonomously. “We’ve internalized the logic of faster, more efficient, more production, but there is a whole world of experience that is beyond quantification.” (starts @ 39mins)

This episode ends with a group conversation and audience Q&A. (@67mins)

More on our guests:

Blaed Spence is a lifelong activist, warrior, and witch — a change-agent who’s worked extensively with Starhawk and the Reclaiming Collective in the U.S. and Canada; an alum of the Apple Multimedia Lab, founding partner of Wired Magazine, Senior Designer at Paul Allen’s Interval Research; and an operative of the rEvolution working to dismantle the patriarchy and predatory capitalism from within the belly of the beast.

Jennifer Rauch is the author of Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smartand a Professor of Journalism & Communication Studies at Long Island University Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in the Huffington Post, Medium, and Urban Audubon.

Check out Rushkoff’s regular column on Medium for essay versions of this and other show monologues.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!

Ep. 122 Live at WNYC's the Greene Space with Naomi Klein - "The Big Tent" Feb 27, 2019

Show notes

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 studio audience in collaboration with WNYC’s Podcast Mixtape at the Greene Space. Join us live next week, Monday March 4th, for another live Team Human taping at the Greene Space with original Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, Roger McNamee. McNamee’s new book Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe takes a critical look at Facebook and the deep rooted problems of the Silicon Valley ethos.

Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time. Our outro features Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Photo credit: @EDLphotography

Ep. 121 Ron Kim "No More Race to the Bottom" Feb 20, 2019

Show notes

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 dismiss these efforts as naive or foolish. What does this ridicule tell us about this revolutionary moment we are in?

You can find versions of Rushkoff’s monologues as well as archives of this show on Medium.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show was Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

OrderTeam Human the manifesto, now available everywhere!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected