Robert Anton Wilson will be my guest on The Media Squat this Monday evening.
Alas, he’ll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He’s the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.
Posted on 31 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 5 Comments.
I’m doing a “live” appearance in Second Life, this Sunday evening at 9p Eastern, for CopperRobot.
We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.
If you don’t go to Second Life, you can also watch it as live video on the web.
Posted on 29 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 7 Comments.
Following my own advice to go local, I’m ready to settle down in a real place and time. I’m hoping that will be teaching media, interactivity, and narrative in a friendly, NY-area program that offers me a place to do it in an ongoing way. Strange to have a moment of “openness” like this.
To that end, I’m doing talks at some of my favorite schools in the area, to meet people and let my intentions be known. Two weeks ago, I had a great time at the New School – where I was truly inspired by the radical stripe of the student body. It did not feel fake.
This Wednesday at noon, I’ll be at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, in Brooklyn, speaking about “The End of Narrative.”
A Lecture by Douglas Rushkoff
Presented by The Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Interactivity changes our relationship to stories as well as the technologies through which they are transmitted. Where the power of a story to influence audiences often depended on the mysteriousness of the medium through which it was told, today’s storytellers must actually engender trust and playfulness – and they must do so on an increasingly violent paranoid playing field.
These are the challenges confronting anyone who wishes to communicate in today’s mediaspace. Do we create myths to compete with the ones we hope to dispel? Or do we abandon myth altogether? Is the traditional story itself a relic, incapable of providing meaning over time? Are the kinds of meaning it can convey biased towards creating childlike passivity in the recipients? Is it our job to create stories capable of competing with the ones currently programming our society, or to abandon this arms race altogether in favor of new artistic and cognitive mechanisms. And, if so, what are they?
Posted on 26 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 13 Comments.
I hope everyone who reads my posts already understands that the real beneficiary of the AIG bailout was Goldman Sachs. In brief, Goldman made money underwriting mortgage investments that it sold to various pension funds. Goldman suspected that the investments were doomed, and leveraged a whole lot of money to make bets against the very investments it was underwriting and selling.
When the mortgage industry collapsed, Goldman won very very big. They were right to bet against the investment products they were selling. So they made money on both ends – selling the crap, and betting against the crap. Problem is, AIG was on the other side of those bets, essentially insuring the awful mortgage packages. And AIG didn’t have enough money to pay Goldman its winnings.
Instead of letting AIG fail, and leaving Goldman with only its original profits from selling awful mortgage investments to major American pension funds, the central government (advised by its fiscal staff of former Goldman execs) bailed out AIG so that it could pay back Goldman its winnings. Our grandchildren’s tax money will be used to pay Goldman for winning its bets against the products it sold to our pension managers.
Now that Goldman has paid its executives the biggest bonuses in the company’s history, many people are mad. So the Administration’s bright idea is to force companies who took government bailout money to put caps on such bonuses. Problem is, Goldman didn’t get bailout money – not directly, anyway. They got the money, sure, but the loans were not made to Goldman.
So they get to keep it all. Again.
Kind of makes you wish you’d bought GS stock when it was down around 60 last year…
Posted on 22 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 7 Comments.
I can’t figure out who this is writing, but they definitely got what I was going for with Life Inc. It’s a site called Daily Mortgage Rates – but it’s basically reviews of books.
The last chapter of the book, “Here and Now,” subtitled “The Opportunity to Reconnect,” is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal’s original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas… and it’s when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules — and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this,” notes Rushkoff, “Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another.”
Posted on 22 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 9 Comments.
Finally, a newspaper review that really does get what I was going for. I’m still holding out for a NYTimes review – even a pan would be nice. (I’m not exactly sure why they’ve passed on this book so far, when they reviewed other less significant books I’ve written.)
But this one makes up for it, and reminds me that it’s only been out a few months and anything can still happen. I’m scheduling some talks and other events to help promote DIY culture and bottom-up activism. More on that very soon.
Corporations and the concentration of power
LAURA SLATTERYBOOK REVIEW: Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff Published by The Bodley Head, priced £12.99
BEING MUGGED at gunpoint is never going to be a pleasant experience, but for Douglas Rushkoff, his trauma was made all the weirder by the reaction of his neighbours.
E-mailing his local parents’ group to tell them a mugger was targeting that part of Brooklyn, New York, Rushkoff thought he was doing the responsible thing – hey, he might even get some sympathy. Instead, the responses were angry. How dare he mention the street where the crime had happened? Didn’t he know what that was going to do to their property prices?
Rushkoff was stunned. Had people been so sucked into the race for wealth that they cared more about the market value of their neighbourhood than what was actually happening within it? This was more than just an expression of a property mania, this was indicative of some deeper disconnect in society. And so Rushkoff, an American media and business commentator who once coined the term “viral marketing” (but he’s not entirely proud of it), was spurred to complete his “what went wrong” treatise.
Whether you’re part of the No Logo generation or you’ve heard your local priest sermonising about the amorality of consumerism, you’ll be familiar with the starting point for Rushkoff’s thesis: that the world has become corporatised, human needs commodified and human emotions commercialised to the detriment of all. Whereas once people were connected to their local communities and each other by mutual dependency and respect, now they only care about “brand me” – hell, we might as well just tattoo a barcode on our foreheads and be done with it. This is Life Incorporated.
But Rushkoff’s soundly reasoned, fact-packed volume is more than just superficial observation; Life Inc. kicks off with a powerful historical dissection of how we got here. There is no rose-tinted view of pre-Reaganite times or nostalgia for the era before public relations agencies. Rushkoff places the origins of corporatism’s corroding influence on wellbeing way further back in the timeline than you might imagine. Hands up who thought the Renaissance was all progress?
Rushkoff frames the Renaissance as a time when wealth accumulated in the hands of the aristocracy just as social conditions in Europe were deteriorating fast. The late Middle Ages, the period 1100-1300, was the real time of prosperity. As trade developed, a new merchant class emerged and towns thrived. But the sovereign rulers of Europe, faced with a democratisation of wealth, weren’t happy with that, and so they snuffed it out by establishing monopolistic corporations. The structure of corporations was not designed to promote commerce, but to prevent it by royal charter.
Meanwhile, the existence of local, multiple forms of currency, which had allowed smaller groups and regions to create and keep value for themselves based on their labour, were obliterated by centralised currencies designed to extend the power of central banks. “Those on the periphery owe, while those in the centre grow,” writes Rushkoff.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the corporation and its sole structural purpose – to “drive shareholder value” – is so entrenched that people who attempt to do things differently get walloped by legislation biased in favour of the wealthy. Even the poster children for corporatism, like the US car companies, are destroyed by the instability of bank-based economies.
Life Inc. is a compelling history lesson, and an important study of this stuff we call money. For my money, though, many readers will enjoy this book most when Rushkoff lets rip at some modern craziness. He’s none too happy about the corporatisation of friendship, charitable causes and even political beliefs via Facebook et al; while the popularity of self-help psychobabble phenomenon The Secret and pseudo-philosopher Malcolm Gladwell (much loved by “compliance professionals”) unsettles him greatly.
More enjoyable still are his first-hand encounters with the people who try to do things differently. Cindy, a Chicago department store worker, helps a colleague do his job, but is reprimanded for breaking the store’s “survival of the fittest” staff policy, whereby slower sellers are summarily dismissed.
John, owner of the Comfort café (Rushkoff’s local), finds he can’t finance the building of his second outlet (because the banks are broken) and so he turns to his loyal customers for help. Using an “alternative” currency dubbed “Comfort dollars”, John and his customers stop the spoils of their incomes from leaking away.
As corporatism is about controlling the masses, it actually has the same intellectual underpinnings as fascism, Rushkoff concludes. But he does not advocate extreme action. Instead, he implores readers to support the economic activity of their communities.
Everybody needs good neighbours, as the song goes.
© 2009 The Irish Times
Posted on 19 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 5 Comments.
Greenspan Says U.S. Should Consider Breaking Up Large Banks
By Michael McKee and Scott Lanman
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — U.S. regulators should consider breaking up large financial institutions considered “too big to fail,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said.
Those banks have an implicit subsidy allowing them to borrow at lower cost because lenders believe the government will always step in to guarantee their obligations. That squeezes out competition and creates a danger to the financial system, Greenspan told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”
At one point, no bank was considered too big to fail, Greenspan said. That changed after the Treasury Department under then-Secretary Hank Paulson effectively nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Treasury and Fed bailed out Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc.
“It’s going to be very difficult to repair their credibility on that because when push came to shove, they didn’t stand up,” Greenspan said.
Fed officials have suggested imposing a tax or requiring higher capital ratios on larger banks to ensure the firms’ safety and reduce some of the competitive advantage from the implied subsidy. Greenspan said that won’t work.
“I don’t think merely raising the fees or capital on large institutions or taxing them is enough,” Greenspan said. “I think they’ll absorb that, they’ll work with that, and it’s totally inefficient and they’ll still be using the savings.”
The former Fed chairman said while “just really arbitrarily breaking down organizations into various different sizes” goes against his philosophical leanings, something must be done to solve the too-big-to-fail issue.
“If you don’t neutralize that, you’re going to get a moribund group of obsolescent institutions which will be a big drain on the savings of the society,” he said.
“Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system,” he said. “If you start focusing on those who should be shrinking, it undermines growing standards of living and can even bring them down.”
Posted on 16 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 4 Comments.
No, I haven’t been granted any GoogleVoice invitations yet, so quit asking. But I will admit that all the requests gave me the idea for this week’s column on Daily Beast:
Ubiquity ain’t what it used to be.
For Google, the problem with being a free, abundant, and rather infinite set of services is that it’s hard to create much of a stir about anything. There are so many major software service options under the “more” menu on the Gmail page that they’ve had to go and add a final item called “even more.” Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Earth, Health, YouTube, Chrome—it’s all there, all the time, for everyone.
While that may be great for a 21st-century technology movement dedicated to offering the infinity of the info-sphere to the masses, it’s not necessarily great for a 21st-century technology company looking to increase value for its shareholders. To do that, a company needs some mystique, some barriers to entry: a virtual velvet rope that—just like the one used by a nightclub—has less to do with any real threat of overcrowding than the need to create the illusion of exclusivity. If you block them, they will come.
Posted on 15 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 4 Comments.
I’m working on the proposal for my next book. As I do, I end up churning out little thought pieces. I figure I may as well share them now instead of later, and even let people participate in the formation of these ideas and arguments.
Jay Babcock at Arthur has maintained a place for me to publish these and reach a wider audience, so I’ll just excerpt and link to over there.
The first time I worked with a computer, way back in high school in the late ’70s, there was no such thing as software. To use the terminal, I had to write my own code and then input it into the computer. Only then would the computer be a typewriter, a calculator, a psychiatrist, or an elevator controller. A computer was an “anything” machine. Moreover, everything I wrote and saved—my “content”—was accessible and changeable by anyone else on the system—unless I specifically ordered otherwise. Media was no longer fixed, it was changeable. Not only ownership, but also the notion of finality itself had become arbitrary—even artificial.
Today, most of us think of computers—and all of our digital devices—in terms of the applications they offer: “What does it already do” instead of “what can I make it do?” Likewise, instead of teaching computer programming in school, we teach kids how to use Microsoft Windows. This difference is profound. It exemplifies the core difference between a society capable of thinking its way beyond its current limitations, and one destined to repeat the same mistakes until it drives itself to extinction.
Computers and networking technology present humanity with the greatest opportunity for renaissance since the invention of the 22-letter alphabet in about the second millennium BCE. But, just like then, we are squandering the opportunity.
Posted on 14 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 10 Comments.
We’re starting something new on The MediaSquat (my WFMU radio show): Media Squat Classics. Every other week, sometimes more frequently, we’re going to be broadcasting a rare lecture from my very strange archive of great MediaSquatters – from RAW and Leary to McLuhan and Fuller.
This will amount to a foundations course in mind and media hacks, complete with commentary by me on what the heck these people might have meant.
Of course, all of this will be archived in the MediaSquat archive at WFMU.org.
Posted on 10 October '09 by Douglas, under Uncategorized. 5 Comments.
PRESS
