Barbara’s story centers on our own very special neighbor friend, Glenna Evans, who must be beheld to be comprehended. Besides giving me the thrill of seeing my wife back at the keyboard, the story has renewed my faith in the future of web comics and even personal narrative.
Posted on 30 November '08 by Douglas, under comics. 2 Comments.
Here’s a podcast of the talk I did for the Institute of General Semantics last Friday night. The talk was about the biggest honor I’ve had as a public speaker: The 56th Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture at the Princeton Club in NYC. The event was just written up by Brian Heater for the NYPress.
This put me at the end of a long line of thinkers I’ve long admired: Buckminster Fuller, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gregory Bateson, Robert Anton Wilson, Abraham Maslow, Ellen Langer, Albert Ellis…you get the idea. It’s hard to accept the fact that I’ve grown up, and that most of the generation of thinkers before me have already moved on. But someone has to carry the torch, and that may as well be all of us.
The lecture has a lot to do with the subject of my upcoming book, Life Incorporated: How a business plan took over the world and how to take it back, which I just finished rewriting last night to include the current financial crisis. It’s the same book, except instead of warning that our corporatist behaviors will soon lead us into a financial crisis, I get to show how it all happened and how to get out. It makes the job of explaining the book or convincing people to read it a lot easier. I’m much less a Cassandra, now, warning of imminent meltdown – and I don’t have to spend as much time doing what might appear to some as naysaying or scolding. We’re all aware that we’re in a fine mess, now, and already interested in understanding what happened and how to fix it.
I tried to make this lecture provocative to the General Semantics people, in particular. General Semantics has over the years limited itself, I argue, to self-help technologies from NLP and psychotherapy to EST and self-hypnosis. All this focus on the self really started back during the renaissance, and coincided with some really dark presuppositions about human nature such as self-interest. And – as I show in the book – these are really just artifacts of corporatism.
The object of the game, I think, is not to change the self (which doesn’t even really exist) but to change the world.
Posted on 18 November '08 by Douglas, under Rushkoff titles, corporatism, talks. 16 Comments.
Running out of town for another talk, but not before completing the final draft of my new book, now entitled “Life Incorporated: How a Business Plan Took Over the World, and How to Take it Back.”
I’ve got some web and life help, incarnated as Janine Saunders, who will be making some posts here of some recent talks – like a podcast-audio of the lecture I gave last week for the Institute of General Semantics. She’s also working on a short companion film for the Life Incorporated book that I hope we’ll have up and finished pretty soon.
In the meantime, I want to make sure you all know about the Life Incorporated course I’ll be teaching through the MaybeLogicAcademy in January. I’ll be released the chapters of the book as readings, so this would be a way to engage with the book six months before it’s released.
Now that the book is done, I should have more time for the Forums here as well as even coming out and attending some events. Thanks, all, for your patience in the meantime. I’ve even gotten the Inbox down below a thousand messages!
Posted on 18 November '08 by Douglas, under personal. 2 Comments.
Though I share in the jubilation at Obama’s election, I find I’m also a bit guarded. Holding back, as if afraid to get “fooled again” by the promise of new leadership.
To be sure, it’s going to feel good and be good for America to have a potential world leader as our president – someone who, instead of bringing himself down to the level of the least common denominator, actually demands that we raise ourselves to his level of discourse and sophistication. Friends are asking me what words like “bipartisanship” mean – a sure sign that they are actually, finally interested in how government functions and what it is Obama might do to change it.
But I’ve also got the nagging sense that too many of us are still hoping and waiting for what Obama’s going to do. As if the president somehow enacts policies or spends money in a way that makes everything better. This is not what a president does. Yes, there are certainly public works programs Obama can promote, to rebuild highways or develop alternative energy technologies while giving jobs to more Americans. These are potentially great top-down stimuli for a failed economy and neglected infrastructure – but they do not rebuild a society ravaged by runaway deregulated capitalism and military misadventure.
That part is up to us. And in this sense, we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol – an awakening, an opportunity.
When there’s a big blackout in New York, especially during the summer, some people take it as a “cue” to start looting. It’s not that the blackout itself makes it significantly to break down store fronts; it’s not that the police are so very busy with the blackout. The lights going out is a cue to behave differently – to release the hidden potential for vandalism and long-repressed rage.
Likewise, the election of a black man to the presidency is a cue that something has changed. As my friend, Ari Wallach explained to me on my new radio show last night, it’s a kind of “shock and awe.” There’s a thoughtful, progressive and black president-elect on the cover of the New York Post. The cognitive dissonance this generates is an opportunity to reprogram. It’s what advertisers and social programmers try to do in pretty much every communication they make. It’s as big a disconnect and reconnect as 9-11 was, only constructive instead of destructive. A narrative is broken; another is born.
But this new narrative is not the story of how we are led by some new person. It’s the story of how we lead ourselves. It’s about how we accept the cue to act.
Everyone I know in my own circles is obsessed with creating the next big Internet phenomenon or organization to marshall all this energy and help people do their own bottom-up activities. I’ve been invited to a few dozen meetings already for such projects, and I’m happy to see everyone so enthused. But if everyone wants to do the “meta” job of creating a brand or utility through which activism happens, then there will be no one left to do the actual organizing.
No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.
My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.
Obama’s going to be busy for while, anyway. Two wars, a dozen failed federal agencies, and a banking industry that needs to be dismantled are going to take up a lot of his time and energy. While he attends to mitigating the damage of past failures, it is we who need to build a new society based on the values we share but have closeted during these decades of institutionalized self interest.
How? Where? Just go out the door and look around. There’s opportunities literally everywhere. If we do get fooled again, it will only be because we have fooled ourselves.
Posted on 6 November '08 by Douglas, under politics. 22 Comments.
Due to a scheduling glitch, I’ll only be appearing on the second half of a new radio project that I’ll eventually be hosting on a regular basis.
It will be taking place on Wednesday, November 5, at 7pm Eastern. We’re calling the show “Radio Bottom Up,” and it will be broadcast out of Point Reyes, California, on NPR affiliate KWMR. I’ll be calling in from home around 7:30pm.
It will also be available through stream at http://www.kwmr.org/
The studio only has two lines and no Skype capability, so my original plan for a free-for-all call-in format will have to wait until I hit WFMU and BlogTalkRadio in the spring will a more fully developed concept. But for now, Robin Gianattassio-Malle and I will be doing the show as a “call out” and inviting some of our best friends and greatest heroes to talk to via telephone about their thoughts, hopes and dreams moving forward post-election.
Currently, confirmed guests include Paul Krassner, RU Sirius, Ari Wallach, and Legba Carrefour.
While you can’t call in, you can chime in via the RadioBottomUp Category on the discussion forums here at rushkoff.com. I’ll endeavor to participate in the “live” conversation during the broadcast.
The point of the whole program, as well as this particular one-off broadcast, is to look at new possibilities for bottom-up, community-directed, decidedly local, or otherwise decentralized progress. My premise is that much of the world we accept as given circumstances is actually much closer to an open source proposition. By talking to people who are cracking and rewriting the codes by which we live, transact, and govern, we can model some powerfully new behaviors and strategies to make our world a better place.
We’ll also make a podcast available shortly after the broadcast.
Posted on 3 November '08 by Douglas, under radio. 4 Comments.
This may have been a false alarm, so I’m deleting the original post until I know more.
I am going to be working with Robin Gianattassio-Malle, of KQED fame, on a new radio show – but next Wednesday may have proved too soon for us to get all the details straight and set.
I’ll keep posting here as I know more. I’m psyched by how enthusiastic everyone has been about the possibility. I promise there will be something very real by April – and hopefully some great experiments before then.
Posted on 1 November '08 by Douglas, under radio. 8 Comments.
PRESS
