Digital Minds Blog

Nice interview with Ido Hartogsohn for Israeli newspaper, Maariv, now translated to English and posted on the Digital Minds Blog. It runs through a lot of topics – from religion to media and back again – and offers a good summary of my thinking on the relationship of open source, spirituality, media, and viral transmission.

Here’s a snippet –

Hartogsohn: Can the role of media be reversed? Can it turn from a disempowering agent into an empowering force? If so, then How?

Rushkoff: I don’t think things go one way and then we turn them around and make them go another. It is not just one thing. The media is many things, and it acts in many ways at many times on many people.

I think the best first step for helping people exploit media in appropriate, life-affirming ways would be to teach the biases of media. Different media have different biases. They were created with different purposes in mind. TV was created to market. The Internet was created to share. What is a blog? Is that the only way to use the Internet, or are there others? How was the Internet changed from a sharing medium to a publishing medium? Why does Rupert Murdoch like MySpace so much?

By understanding how different media and platforms work, and what sorts of behaviors they encourage, who in particular they empower, we end up in a better position to choose what we do.

But the first step is understanding that this stuff is programmed. It’s not pre-existing. It’s coded by people.

Why not to buy gold

Lots of my friends and students have been using their savings to buy gold, under the belief that as cash becomes less valuable gold will be a safe haven for their assets.

In a normal economy, this might be true. And even in ours, it’s a bit true. As cash and other investments become more transparently worthless, people will look to real materials, commodities, and precious metals as stores of value.

The problem, however, is that the gold market isn’t any more real than any other market at this point. Speculation in gold still far outweighs the use of gold. And “real” speculation through gold – the kind that you or I might do by buying gold or a gold fund with our money – is outweighed by the “fake” speculation done by hedge funds and other pro investors.

Hedge funds are really just a bunch of rich guys who put a few hundred million bucks together, and then *leverage* it to be a few billion dollars, instead. So every dollar a hedge fund guy puts into a hedge fund might be leveraged to a hundred times its original value. This means his dollar – his chip, his vote, and his influence – is a hundred times more than yours or mine. Not just because he’s putting in more real money, but because his money is used to borrow a hundred times its original worth.

So, while part of the reason gold has gone up is because real people are converting cash into gold, the other reason is that hedge fund managers are putting their leveraged borrowed non-existent money into gold as well. And if they get a margin call on all this leveraged fake money – like from one of their other investments – they’ll sell their gold to go cover it. And you and I can’t own enough gold to compensate for the kinds of movements that their buying and selling will produce.

You can make money off gold by beating hedge funds to the purchase, and getting out before they do. But the underlying “real” value of gold as a commodity has almost nothing to do with its current price.

If you want to invest your money in something real, improve the quality and maintenance of your property and equipment, support local businesses and agriculture, put some people through school, clean up some toxic waste, develop a natural fishery. These kinds of investment are truly as good as gold.

Is Wright Right?

Everyone, including Obama, is supposed to reject and repudiate everything that Reverend Wright has said about America and white people. Problem is, most of what he’s saying is true, or at least arguable.

Claim 1. American foreign policy was responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
Well, I rejected this idea the day after 9-11, when I first saw it posted on a prominent Internet list called NetServe. Having watched the buildings fall and seen some real blood, I was just in too much shock. But a few weeks later, having calmed down a bit, I could not deny that American foreign policy was at least part of the reason behind the attack. Al Qaeda is mad about US army bases in Saudi Arabia, and America’s propping up of dictators in the Middle East. We can argue whether or not it’s appropriate for the US to have bases near Mecca, but it’s inarguable that these policies are at least in part responsible for the war in which we’ve found ourselves.

Claim 2. America is bad to blacks, and black Americans might better sing “God damn America” than God Bless America.
According to the NYTimes, by 2004, 21 percent of black men who had not completed college were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school. We also shouldn’t forget that a great majority of black Americans are the descendants of slaves who were brought to this country against their will, and who built a great portion of the cities and infrastructure they are still not entitled to enjoy today, thanks largely to land management and employment policies that excluded them for more than a century.

Claim 3. AIDS is a man-made virus.
I don’t agree with this one, personally. But throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, this was still considered a leading theory for the virus’s origins. Controversial but well-researched journalists, such as Spin’s Celia Farber, still present credible alternatives to the HIV-causation theory of AIDS. The theory that AIDS migrated to humans as we ate monkey-brain is far from proved, and the virus still behaves and mutates in a fashion that confounds researchers. Two medical researchers with whom I’ve spoken over the years have told me that AIDS “doesn’t act like a natural virus.” Beyond this, the government’s slow response to the AIDS crisis was similar to its reaction to Hurricane Katrina – and it did seem as though the victims were regarded with a similar lack of urgency because they were mostly blacks and gays.

Claim 4. The US Government puts drugs on the streets.
This one most probably came from the well-publicized series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA importing drugs and selling them on US streets. Although the New York Times later found the evidence scant, the mythology behind these claims is compelling and persistent. While no proof has been found that arms were given to contra fighters in exchange for drugs, we do know that the same people bringing the illegal arms from the USA to Nicaragua were bringing back drugs to the US on the same small planes. Further, the US occupation of Afghanistan has led to the largest crop of poppies and export of heroin in that nation’s history. Either through intentional policy or incompetency, America fosters the Afghan heroin industry.

White Americans are still afraid of blacks because they know that black rage is justifiable. If anything, whites are probably surprised that blacks aren’t more angry for the way they were and are still treated. Obama is acceptable as long as he represents an easy way out of the racial injustice from which we’ve been attempting to extricate ourselves for almost two centuries. As Thomas Jefferson said of slavery, “it’s like having a wolf by the ears.” Until now, Obama has represented a way out of karmic debt. Wright reminds us that even if Obama is elected, there will still be black people angry for the continued culture and policy of racism in this country.

The real lesson to be learned from Obama’s association with Wright and subsequent scandal is how ludicrous it is for us to demand that our elected leaders be Christians at all. (I can only guess that a man as intelligent as Obama joined the church to begin with as a way of engendering himself to Chicago’s black community – itself a cynical charge.) Religion can no longer be a prerequisite for political office, and in the age of YouTube, the silly and dangerous superstitions espoused by our religious leaders will now come to light. Religions were created, in part, as repositories for ethnocentrism – as ways of justifying our wars against other tribes and nations. It’s part of their most central programming.

Should Hillary Clinton reject and repudiate her pastor’s belief that me and my family are damned to hell for not accepting Jesus as Lord? Have you ever listened to the words of the prayers the Senator Joe Leiberman says out loud every Saturday morning? Why didn’t all conservatives reject Pat Robertson’s support when he blamed 9-11 not on US foreign policy, but on the gays and non-believers of New York who brought the attack on themselves? Had they never heard him say stuff like this before?

I don’t know whether I’d be more worried about a candidate whose minister believed that US policy was in part responsible for 9-11 (it was), or one whose minister believed that the world was created by a supreme being in six days, a few thousand years ago. Or, as in the case of our president, that the end of the world as predicted in the Revelations will occur in our lifetimes.

Just because the rage behind such destructive visions is expressed by a calm white person instead of an angry black one doesn’t make it any less violent and inappropriate.

TreeHugging Inside the Box

The most gratifying thing for a writer or thinker is to see other people implement his ideas – and in ways he didn’t imagine himself. Here’s a post on MediaEnvironment, applying Get Back in the Box to Treehuggers:

Since this week we’ll be looking at strategic communication in the context of environmental media and business, I thought I’d spend this post looking at these forces through the prism of a wonderful book called Get Back in the Box by noted writer, lecturer, theorist Douglas Rushkoff of NYU. The main premise of the book is that business is so obsessed with out-of-the-box thinking and increasingly interruptive marketing that they have become divorced from what Rushkoff calls their “core competencies.” In other words, they don’t actually do the thing they do. Instead of pouring money into research and development companies divert funds to strategic campaigns or hire outside consultants to reimagine their enterprise rather than actually trying to make something good and useful – something that has value and solves real needs. In terms of environmental media, treehugger seems to be a textbook example of an online mediaspace that embodies the power of what Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Treehugger has been wildly successful because it offers a place where passionately involved members can go to pursue a common interest. Treehugger content itself, to use Rushkoff’s words, is a “medium for interaction.” Treehugger marketing and strategic communication may have helped their awareness level, but it was Treehugger’s own competency as a marketplace for interaction, education, and subtle activism that made it valuable to people. Treehugger is a good website and that’s why people visit it. That seems naively simple, but it’s a surprisingly elusive concept for many in business to grasp.

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Bottom Line as Big Picture

I’ve been having a great time on the Brian Lehrer Show this month. We’re doing weekly conversations called “Open Source Living,” through which I’m trying to show the way our relationship to media and new media can be used to model our relationships to pretty much everything else.

Some terrific people have called in already, sharing some of what they’ve been doing with and through the web. It’s been inspiring.

There’s been an online conversation running throughout, and I found myself particularly amused by one person who not only thought that I was missing the big picture (that people should make money off these technologies) but saw fit to add that he currently earns 200k per year. I think that about says it.

X Saves the World

Here’s my friend Jeff Gordiner, talking about his new book X Saves the World.

I offer it as a compelling argument against anyone who thinks GenX didn’t really exist. I hadn’t really thought about GenX myself since, gosh, maybe ten years ago. I even put together an anthology back when, attempting to correct all the false impressions about what GenX might or could be. But then gave up on trying and just dedicated to doing.

Over the past ten years, GenX has accomplished a whole lot. And, as Jeff argues, a lot more quietly and with less of a need for “credit” than both their predecessors and those who followed afterwards.

At a moment when a quiet buster is running for president against a loud boomer, this explanation of GenX is particularly relevant – and, I hope, useful.

Radio, Thursday Mornings

I’ll be doing an overview of new media’s impact on society, business, people and politics for the next four Thursdays at 10:40AM Eastern Time on the Brian Lehrer Show on NPR – 820am in NYC or streaming live here.

I’m not exactly sure how it will go, but I’ve got twenty minutes a week for the rest of the month, so it should develop over time. Please listen in and, if you’re interested, call the show while I’m on and we can talk.