On Technologies of Persuasion

My course at the MaybeLogic Academy begins Monday. It’ll take a few days to ramp up, and the first assignment is really easy, so if you decide late and want to join in during the week, you won’t have any trouble.

Here’s an interview I was honored to do with Jon Lebkowsky, who has served as both a friend and mentor to me over the years. He was one of the first people to recognize what was about to “happen” to society, and started a great ‘zine called Fringeware.

Jon: In the anti-marketing school of thought, they talk about creating great customer experiences and triggering word of mouth. In all this, I suppose the “customer” or “consumer” is just another statistic. Hard to be authentic with people you’re seeing as aggregate numbers, and not as human beings.

I’ve been hanging out with people who want to transform economic thinking – build an economy based on sustainability… “economics as if people mattered,” as Schumacher said. How do we get to that kind of transformation? It feels like we have to sell, but selling it is sort of antithetical to the intention.

Doug: I don’t think you can do it without first revealing the underlying biases and false assumptions of the money we’re using.

Centralized currency — invented during the Renaissance, really — favors the kinds of business practices and centralization of power that actually works against good, honest, local commerce. In short, it favors Wal-Mart over, say, Community Supported Agriculture.

There are other kinds of money – and they were in existence until they were outlawed by kings and queens looking to centralize authority. Money that is lent into existence by a central bank will tend towards scarcity and competition. Money that is earned into existence by people in a specific place has very different properties, and works on a model of abundance.

Even sacred economic doctrines, like the law of competitive advantage, are based on a series of assumptions. The models that prove their effectiveness, for example, assume 100 percent employment. And that just isn’t the case in the nations that signed onto NAFTA and other open-market agreements.

So the first step is to separate commerce from the very specific commercial and economic architecture created specifically to favor corporations and promote competition for scarce resources.

more here…

Conspiracy of Dunces?

This latest Arthur column should piss some people off:

CONSPIRACIES OF DUNCES
by Douglas Rushkoff
(from Arthur No. 26)

I have to admit that I do this with some trepidation. I can already feel the assault on my inbox. But after a good long think about potential time and energy being lost by our entire community to senseless and ultimately inconsequential musings, I have to come out and say it: the alternative theories about 9-11 are wrong. Worse, the endless theorizing and speculation about trajectories, explosives, military tests, fake airplane parts and remote control navigation actually distracts some of our best potential activists from addressing the more substantive matters at hand.

Yes, I believe that 9-11 theorizing debilitates the counterculture. It robs us of some potentially creative thinkers. It replaces truly important questions with trivial ones. It marginalizes more constructive investigation of American participation in the development of Al Qaeda as well as its subsequent aggravation. And perhaps worst of all, it is precisely the sort of activity that government disinformation specialists would want us to be involved with.

more…

Corporatism Podcast

Here’s a nice long podcast interview with me about the whole topic of Corporatism – which is both my current interest and book topic.

Thanks to Justin Kirby for wasting so much server space on me.

When the book is actually done, I’ll be sure to create a nice set of these.

I’m Teaching a Course

For those of you who always wanted to take a course with me but don’t go to NYU, or who go to NYU but aren’t in my department, or who ARE in my department but have come to realize that I haven’t been teaching there for a while, this is for you:

I’m teaching a course through a distanced learning site called Maybe Logic Academy – where Robert Anton Wilson used to teach everything from James Joyce to economics theory.

My course, Technologies of Persuasion, is beginning in just two weeks. I haven’t promoted it anywhere – I just haven’t had time or energy these days to do more than what’s right on my plate – so this should be a small and intimate group. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for NYU.

Plus, we’ll get to be a little crazier than people are generally allowed to get in a college seminar room, with some no-holds-barred discussions on how media and technology shape the way we think, and why we seem to remain so pitifully unaware of the biases of the media we use.