New Podcast: Right Where You are Sitting Now

I did a Skype interview last week with some smart people from the UK who run a site called Right Where You are Sitting Now. They kept me on my toes. Here’s their intro, and the link:

This week we talk to one of my all time favourite writers and thinkers Douglas Rushkoff. In this episode we discuss Obama’s potential to tap into bottom-up politics, what happens if we stop believing in the economy, Conspiracy Cultre, hacking reality, what the next renaissance might look like, writing comics, why advertising doesn’t work and Magick. I really hope you enjoy this special 20th episode of the show. I’m a HUGE fan of Mr Rushkoff making this a very special episode for me!

Link to podcast

Writers and Alcohol

Last winter I gave an interview to the NY Post about writers’ favorite cocktails. Looks like they finally ran the piece.

“Real writers don’t drink cocktails. Real writers drink straight liquor. You’ve got to be able to dose it properly. When I was a drinking writer, I would write with a bottle of sipping whisky with me. But very few of us are still drinking writers. Writing has been divorced from some of its essential chemicals…”

American Music: Off the Record

Here’s a little clip of me talking about protest music in the corporate state, for a soon-to-be released documentary featuring me and Noam Chomsky called American Music: Off the Record.

Me on Open Source

I can’t hear myself under the translation, but my own voice is too loud for me to hear the translation, either. It makes an interesting comment on open source, itself.

This was shot last summer at Community Books in Brooklyn. As you can see, fatherhood means shaving less.

Rushkoff on NPR, Monday Morning

I’ll be sharing some of my most current ideas about market forces Monday morning on New York’s NPR station, WNYC. It will be simulcast on Brian Lehrer Show web page. My segment will be on at 11:40AM Eastern Time.

Although the “hook” will be my recent brush with a mugger on my front stoop, the topic of my appearance will be the influence of market forces and gentrification on community, segregation, and local values – as well as what is the greater social cost, if any, of participation in real estate market-mania.

This will be the first interview related to a book I’m just beginning to write (the proposal is going out this week, in fact) about the rise of “Corporatism” as America’s value system.

Idiocy and the Sublime

Two new Rushkoff-related posts for the new year.

First, a great – if abstract and lengthy – interview with Pop Occulture about my work, my thoughts about media, and a whole lot of deep stuff about the nature of life and such.

“As for what constitutes the authentic human being, well, I guess it’s have something to do with the *other* human beings. I don’t know if we’re fully constituted unless we’re in relationship with other ones. Somehow, it seems to me that this whole notion of individuality, born in Ancient Greece but revived during the Renaissance, is a crock. And it leads to a lot of paradoxes that go away once you realize people don’t really exist if they’re alone. Medically, it’s the main reason people get depressed and die – they’re cut off from the rest of the human organism. They are no longer constituted.” more…

Second, what I’d consider to be an idiotic “call to arms” by the American Jewish Committee – the largest Jewish organization in the US. In their new whitepaper, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” they blame “progressive Jews,” and yours truly by name, for promoting the extinction of the Jewish people. Of course, in my opinion, it is their racist and triumphalist stance that represents the antithesis of the Mosaic insights – and the greatest threat to what it was Jews have to offer the world in the first place.

Download the paper if you’re interested, or check out Dan Sieradski’s more lucid response at Jewschool:
“…there is no safe space for legitimate criticism of Israel within the Jewish community itself. Those who question Israeli policies are hastily isolated, demonized, marginalized and excluded. The resentment of this treatment frequently results in movement towards the farthest fringes of the discourse and the adoption of a tarnished impression of the Jewish community.”