Rushkoff on Disinfo Podcast

Disinfo yet lives. They just launched a podcast interview with me about Life Inc, as well as other matters counter-cultural.

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity

Life Inc. Dispatch 01:
Crisis as Opportunity

Back to Life Inc. The Book

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More Life Inc. Dispatches

For more information about Douglas Rushkoff’s book, “LIFE INC. How The World Became A Corporation And How To Take It Back” check out
lifeincorporated.net and the LIFE INC. 9min movie

The LIFE INC. Dispatch = Brief weekly videos encapsulating key concepts and ready strategies from Douglas Rushkoff’s LIFE INC. for de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.
You can also download an MP3 audio file of the Dispatch:
Life Inc. Dispatch 01 – Audio

RSS Life Inc. Dispatch Series

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…

Guest Mutant on BoingBoing

I’m guest blogging on BoingBoing this week and next, so look for twice-daily posts from me over there. I’m attempting to remind people what BoingBoinging is all about – at least for me – and why it’s so particularly appropriate an necessary skill in the current social and economic environment. As well as how it can be fun.

I’ll attempt to list the posts here as I post them.

Rushkoff Here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/rushkoff-here.html
Open Source Democracy: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/open-source-democrac.html
Android: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/android.html
Print Your Own Money: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/what-went-wrong.html

Murdoch and the WSJ

Every time I speak, people ask me about new media and money – namely, how to make money through the internet. And they always bring up Rupert Murdoch. He wouldn’t have bought the Wall Street Journal if he didn’t think there was money in it, right?

Right, but wrong. There’s money for Murdoch in buying the Journal, but not the money you’re thinking about. What Murdoch wants is a respectable business brand. The WSJ is that. It was actually a profitable online business, too – their articles were valuable enough for people to pay real money to access them.

But that’s not the money Murdoch wants. Murdoch wants to spend the WSJ’s credibility on two very different things. First, he wants an international news brand for TV and the Internet. Fox is too O’Reilly-polluted to serve as a seemingly neutral source of authoritative financial news. WSJ has a good decade of international branding left in it before it would be totally watered down through overuse.

Second, the WSJ has enough credibility to influence markets. And that’s the real game being played here. The last of the credible top-down media companies will be employed in the continuing public relations strategy for deregulation, the stock market pyramid, or whatever else is in its owners’ interests. As people learn to look at bottom-up media for the credibility that top-down conglomerate-owned media must by definition lack, things will change again. This time for the better.

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.

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.

more…

Media Viruses

I’ve been working hard on the book, and not posting. I’ve got a ton of things to share, but that will have to wait.

In the meantime, read this essay and discussion about social contagion, from The Edge. I’ve got a lengthy comment in there.

And please check out my friend and colleague Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, which makes a great case for net activity – especially in the face of today’s numerous elitist arguments against the intelligence of our crowd. Clay is a good writer and, more importantly, a good person.

More soon, I promise.

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.

Watch BoingBoingTV

Some of my dearest friends in the world, the happy mutants at BoingBoing, have started broadcasting daily videos – boingboingTV.

This is a rare opportunity not only to watch some truly interesting short-subjecct reports from the edges of technology culture, but also to watch a media form be born and evolve. Currently, BBTV is somewhere between YouTube and the Daily Show. But after only a week or two of existence, it’s still very much in its nascent form.

Knowing how sensitive and responsive BoingBoing’s creators are to the media environment in which their work appears, I am excited to see how they adjust their content and format over the next few months. This could be the birth of something really significant. Think back to what it was like watching those little interstitials on the Tracy Ullman show, and knowing they’d someday be The Simpsons. Or how all those Friendster-clones popped up until Myspace – or is it Facebook – came upon a winning formula.

In this case, however, we’re looking at the people and ethos that makes this space run, to begin with. It’s not another get-rich-quick Internet product, but a posse of dedicated techno-enthusiasts figuring out how – now that the technology is ready for primetime – to push the real, social, pro-cultural and anti-authoritarian agenda of this medium through a new and potentially influential channel. Is it perfect right now? No, of course not. But it’s still plastic, and that’s the very best part.