Excerpts from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff.
There’s a reason for our current predicament: an anti-human agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media.
Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. […] Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate and repress it.
It doesn’t take much to tilt a healthy social landscape toward an individualist or repressive one. A scarcity of resources, a hostile neighboring tribe, a warlord looking for power, and elite seeking to maintain its authority, or a corporation pursuing a monopoly all foster antisocial environments and behaviors.
Before language, there was no such thing as a lie. The closest thing to lying would have been behavior such as hiding a piece of fruit. Speech created a way of actively misrepresenting reality to others.
Instead of promoting a new culture of ideas, the printing press reinforced control from the top.
Once under the control of elites, almost any new medium starts to turn people’s attention away from one another and toward higher authorities.
Television commercials depended on alienated individuals, not socially connected communities. A blue jeans commercial promising a sexier life doesn’t work on someone already in a satisfying relationship.
Whoever controls media controls society.
We have ended up living in a state of perpetual interruption that used to be endured only by 911 emergency operators or air traffic controllers, only we do it 24/7 and we pay for the privilege.
Engagement through digital media is just a new way of being alone. Except we’re not really alone out there — the space is inhabited by the algorithms and bots that seek to draw us into purchases, entertainment, and behaviors that benefit the companies that have programmed them.
On the internet of things, we the people are the things.
The internet’s emphasis on metrics and quantity over depth and quality has engendered a society that values celebrity, sensationalism, and numeric measures of success.
The internet reinforces its core element: the binary. It makes us take sides.
Our mechanomorphic culture is embracing a digital aesthetic that irons out anything uniquely human.
The internet’s tremendous social and intellectual potential was surrendered to short-term market priorities, turning a human-centered medium into a platform for manipulation, surveillance, and extraction.
People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume.
The math doesn’t work: we are quickly approaching the moment when we will need a major, civilization-changing innovation to occur on a monthly or even weekly basis in order to support the rate of growth demanded by the underlying operating system.
“Subsidiarity” – A business should never grow for growth’s sake. It should only grow as big as it needs to in order to accomplish its purpose.
All we’re really training (AI’s) to do is manipulate our behavior and engineer our compliance. We shape our technologies at the moment of conception, but from that point forward they shape us.
The day that computers pass the Turing test mah have less to do with how smart computers have gotten than with how bad we humans have gotten at telling the difference between them and us.
Instead of communicating to one another through our bodies, expressions, or words, we do it through our purchases, the facades on our homes, or the numbers in our bank accounts.
The whole social convention of hiding one’s wealth or lack of it has less to do with protecting one another’s feelings than protecting the controlling power of our superiors.
The invention of writing gave people the ability to record the past and make promises in the future. Historical time was born, which marked the end of spirituality and of an eternal present, and the beginning of linear religion and monotheism.
Agriculture became the means to an end that had nothing to do with feeding people and everything to do with amassing power.
The transition from cities to nations transformed people from members of a community to citizens of a state.
Money, debt, jobs,slavery,countries, race, corporatism, stock markets, brands, religions, government,and taxes are all human inventions. We made them up.