Hidden Sources: Leary, Harcourt-Smith, and the Real Deal

I just had an enlightening conversation with counterculture heroine/outcast Joanna Harcourt-Smith, on my radio show The Media Squat (this audio stream begins with the Harcourt-Smith interview. To hear the whole show, go to the regular archives page here). She candidly addressed her and Leary’s role in becoming informants for the government, all in the context of Timothy’s imprisonment and Bush-style torture.

I haven’t fully digested everything we spoke about, but thought you should know about the show right away. There’s some new material in here, as well as a new perspective on a particularly dark moment.

In Defense of the Dark Ages

When I was in the process of editing my new book Life Inc., my copyeditor pulled a paragraph out, in which I had explained that the so-called “Dark Ages” didn’t exist – that the ten centuries between the fall of Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance had many good ones among them. And that, in fact, the Late Medieval Era – the 10th through 13th Centuries – were a great age of prosperity and economic development.

She yanked the paragraph because, in her words, no one used the term Dark Ages anymore, and everyone was well aware they were a fiction.

Not so, it seems. The main critique I’m getting these days to my suggestion of reviving some pre-Renaissance media like complementary currency or local banking, is the argument that I’m asking for “a return to the Dark Ages.”

I plan to address that on The MediaSquat tonight. But here’s my two main points:

First off, the Dark Ages were not dark. The Late Middle Ages, in particular, were extremely prosperous. Population and wealth went up, work hours went down. Height and health went up, death and taxes went down. This is when the cathedrals were built, with local profits generated by local economies.

The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began.

That’s right: the plague didn’t happen during the Middle Ages – it was the direct result of centralized monetary and business policy in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. Once the plague killed off more than half of Europe, people got healthier and wealthier again, because the crippled, centralized economy could support that few.

Finally, retrieving technologies and ideas from the past doesn’t mean we have to go back to living the way they did in the ancient past. For example, we might choose to reinstate Sabbath – a day off – as a priority in our always-on culture. Turns out (I really promise) we can do this without all moving back to the desert and living in tents like they did in Bible when this idea first surfaced.

Likewise, we can reinstate some of the social and economic institutions outlawed during the Renaissance (and unrevived to this day) as a way forward rather than a leap backwards. To shun the lessons of history because they happened a long time ago is to remain always a baby.

Stimulus, Ass-Backwards

I just published this essay on Arthur:

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why President Obama’s approach to the economic crisis upsets me so much, so regularly, and I think I figured it out.

His impulse—perhaps as someone with more faith in the power of centralized, top-down decision-making than I have—is to fix our economic problems by supporting existing institutions. In the president’s view, the best approach now is to pump some necessary short-term assets into flagging institutions to help them make it through the rough patches in the economic road, and then get them to pay it back to the government once times are better. That’s the approach he’s taken to the banks, the automotive industry, and even the insurance industry.

What the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to understand is that the institutions they are attempting to prop up are the very ones whose solvency depends on the continuing extraction of wealth and value from the real people and places making up America.

more…

CraigBucks!

Great piece about my idea for CraigBucks, written by the brilliant sci-fi thinker Annalee Newitz:

The Future of Money: DIY Currencies

Futurist Douglas Rushkoff, famous for correctly predicting the rise of social media, is trying to convince Craigslist’s Craig Newmark to create “craigbucks.” He thinks it’s the obvious next step in the evolution of money. “People could buy and sell things exclusively on Craigslist using craigbucks,” Rushkoff enthuses. “Sure they’ll want to keep their Visas and their MasterCards, but they’ll want a specialized, alternative form of cash too.”

more…

Rushkoff on PBS Frontline Tuesday

From PBS:

The Most Wired Place On Earth
Tuesday, April 14
PBS-FRONTLINE/World
9 PM EDT
(check local listings or watch online HERE )

Professional video gamers, “netiquette” for five-year-olds and a rehab camp for Internet-addicted teens: it’s all part of the digital landscape in South Korea. Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff takes a look at this highly wired society tomorrow night as the second segment on PBS’s FRONTLINE/World .

The footage is from our recent trip to South Korea, and it’s part of a larger project we’re producing for FRONTLINE, called Digital Nation

We’re going to be investigating life in the digital age through our website over the upcoming months, and it will culminate in a FRONTLINE documentary broadcast early next year.

—-

Also, for people in NYC this week, my friend Propaganda Anonymous is hosting a panel about the spiritual origins of HipHop. He has been working on this one a long time, and has gathered quite an interesting assortment of people.

Thursday April 16th, Prop Anon and Reality Sandwich present: INFINITY BLESSINGS, a panel event exploring the spiritual and philosophical foundations of hip-hop culture.
Speakers inlcude: Allah B from the Nations of the Gods and Earth’s; Brother Shep from the original Black Panther Party and the Universal Zulu Nation; Dr. Shaka Zulu from the Universal Zulu Nation; Lawyer and Activist, King Downing;Why-G from the Optimus Foundation; and Propaganda Anonymous.
Thursday April 16th, (doors 6pm, talk 7 to 10pm
The Player’s Theater
115 Macdougal St (btw. Bleeker and W. 3rd)
$10
After party at Sutra Lounge, 11pm to 4am
1st and Houston
Free!

Whither and Wither, Amex

I got a postcard from American Express today, telling me that all I need to do to is call a toll free number and they will give me double “points” on all my gas and grocery purchases. (Points can be turned into miles on airlines and that sort of thing.) But rather than call the number, I threw the postcard away.

Why? Because I don’t trust American Express. They fooled me a bunch of times on things, and I gave up on them.

For instance, they once sent a long letter explaining that they were giving me a free, really nice, leather-bound calendar. Then, in the tiniest of print on the back of the envelope in a place I really wasn’t supposed to look, they informed me that if I accepted the free gift, I would receive another calendar every year for something like forty dollars, and that to cancel I would need to send a letter to a special address.

Another time, they sent me a letter explaining that I had been subscribed as I requested (which I hadn’t) in some type of revolving credit account. I didn’t even understand what the credit account was. The letter was signed (stamped) by a head of customer care who offered to answer any questions I might have. All I had to do was call him at the number provided. I did, twice. Waited 45 minutes each time, and gave up. I sent a letter addressed to him instead, to the address on the envelope, kindly asking for any information about what I was enrolled in. Never heard back.

There are a bunch more, but you get the point. I signed up with American Express when I was traveling a lot, earning a lot, and felt I had the two hundred bucks to spare for access to all the airport lounges. Now, I don’t.

Of course, I wouldn’t have thought to have this conversation with myself after a dozen or more years “membership” had American Express not foolishly exploited their real relationship with me to sell silly things like calendars, and to do so in a shady manner. Or kept sending me letters that looked like bills just to get me to open them, when they were actually offers for other unrelated products. It’s not nice to leverage a relationship in that way.

There’s a lesson in this for businesses of all kinds: do really shitty things and set your consumers free.

Vanquished by The Dagger

This time out, my Frontline documentary is going to be released in pieces over the next year before it actually airs on PBS in January. The first bits are now showing up, along with a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff, at the pbsdigitalnation.org website.

Here’s three short pieces, starting with a fun one on Korean pro-gamers.

Also up there right now is this real-life footage we shot of South Korean children learning the Nettiquette song!

Hacking the economy

My cover story for H+ magazine is right
here.

Hacking the economy is easier than it looks.

The first step, of course, is to remember that the economy itself is just a model. It’s a way of understanding the world as a series of transactions made by rational, self-interested beings working to maximize value for themselves. That’s supposedly the given.

Of course, it isn’t even true. We don’t live in an economy. Never did. If we were really all playing some sort of poker game for chips — and making all the right decisions —— then our world might behave like an economy. But seeing as how we’re really more concerned with our moment-to-moment experience, getting laid, or finding a private place to poop, the last thing on our minds is retention of value over time.

more…

My Web 2.0 Talk

Here’s my talk from this past Thursday: “How the Web Ate the Economy and Why it’s Great for Everyone.” This is the first real Life Inc. talk I have given.

They only gave me 15 minutes, and wanted me to encapsulate my last book, Get Back in the Box in addition to whatever I wanted to say about the fall of central banking and new opportunities to create value from the periphery, so it’s a little rushed. But it was certainly fun to begin sharing these ideas, and it has led to a sudden influx of Twitter followers…

Speech at Web 2.0

I’m delivering a keynote at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference on Thursday morning.

“How the Web Ate the Economy, and Why This Is Good for Everyone”
04/02/2009 8:55am – 9:15am PDT Ballroom – 3rd Level

I’m guessing, or at least hoping, the whole conference is webcast or podcast or archived in some way. If not, I’ll bring my voice recorder. This should be a fast and fun one. (I’m informed it will be on Blip.tv)

Meanwhile, RandomAudio just offered to put out an audio version of Life Inc along with the printed book – with me narrating. I’m looking forward that process, and will try to play some excerpts on The Media Squat.