For someone who likes to talk about the virtues of disconnecting, the
media critic Douglas Rushkoff seems surprisingly always on. When I
visited him at his storefront office near his home in Hastings on
Hudson, New York, he was preparing to teach a new class, getting ready
for a BBC interview, writing an essay, staring
down a pile of articles to read, trying to figure out his new iPhone,
and hurrying to finish his third book in three years – a graphic novel
called ADD,
which revolves around gaming culture, celebrity and the pharmaceutical
industry. “It also asks the question,” he says, “what if attention
deficit disorder weren’t a bug, but a feature?”
The hyper-speed hyperlinked life is familiar ground for Rushkoff, whose first book Cyberia,
made him a popular tour guide to the Internet in the early 1990s, and
an early prognosticator of its radical potential. But much has changed
between the awkward days of “the ’Net” – then a non-commercial
collection of public networks, accessed by local ISPs – and the
overloaded era of Facebook, YouTube and iPhones. If Rushkoff is well
versed in the language underneath the “digital revolution,” he’s also
become one of its most outspoken critics.
“A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly
articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead
finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of
enduring values,” Rushkoff writes in 2010’s Program or Be Programmed.
His remedy is simple, if ambitious: once people begin to understand how
software works, “they start to recognize the programs at play
everywhere else – from the economy and education to politics and
government…All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize
them, the more we mistake them for given circumstances."
Understanding how things work In order to make them work better is
the basic hacker ethos, but Rushkoff has applied it to his broader
discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by
the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc.,
Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence
pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he’s sought to
show how we the users routinely get screwed by an “operating system”
that’s over 500 years old.
“We’re leveraged in so many ways, it’s like, our economy is leveraged
to produce more than it can in order for it to survive,” he says. “It’s
leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how
do you roll that back and say, well, you know, ‘this is it’?” Or,
rather, “How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the
zombies? That’s sort of what I’m trying to help people with.”
Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November’s Contact Con,
a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to
foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff
enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, which was profiled in our recent documentary.
Rather than shun corporate sponsors, Rushkoff revels in what they
bring to the table, and in the contradictions of the movement. Occupy’s
power, ultimately, is its meme — the idea that a citizenry can not only
protest the system but demonstrate a new way of responding to it and
reworking it. Like his call to program, Occupy’s nebulous mission may be
hard to swallow or carry out. But that also lends it its own kind of
power, he says. Its radical promise isn’t unlike the earlier Internet’s: a distributed and open system that could change civic discourse and remake culture.
But as on the strange battlefield of the Internet, Occupy could also
crash against its own giant ambitions, which will be heavily tested in
the next few months, starting with next week’s “general strike”.
Progress will have to be made gradually, says Rushkoff. “There are ways
to slowly move towards a sustainable life path, and it’s just a matter
of doing that, and I’m hoping that more people in Occupy start seeing it
that way – in that more subtle way, rather than exclusively in the kind
of activist, let’s-get-pepper-sprayed by cops way.”
Much has changed in the decades since Rushkoff started critiquing the
system. But his philosophy is still animated by a big question, one
that applies not only to the digital spaces of the Internet, built by
the Facebooks and the Googles, but to other kinds of “public” spaces
too, in town squares, Congress, and culture: who programmed these
spaces, and to what ends, and how can they be hacked into something
better?