(Conversation Recorded on August 25, 2022.)
On this episode, author and professor Douglas Rushkoff joins me. Douglas and I discuss how human behavior interacts with technology and how we have arrived at a place with enormous wealth and income inequality just as society is rapidly approaching biophysical limits.
Douglas unpacks parts of his new book, “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,” on the need to collectively break away from a top-down mindset to embrace circularity and resiliency.
About Douglas Rushkoff
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the upcoming Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
01:52 – Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
04:48 – Derivative of a stock
05:03 – Web2
06:35 – ‘Meta’ and dehumanization
08:36 – Nate’s story
12:13 – Technology addiction
13:19 – Lateral thinking
16:00 – The problem with techno-solutionism
17:35 – Growth based economic system
18:01 – Expensive things don’t necessarily make us happy
19:22 – The Wanting is stronger than the Having
19:50 – Epson printers have software that make them useless after a number of pages
20:40 – How the monetary system works
23:20 – French President Macron’s speech
23:45 – Europe’s energy challenges
24:20 – Nate’s short movie
25:12 – GDP per capita vs happiness increase in the US
27:56 – 80 richest own half the world’s wealth
29:13 – The Gini number becoming higher
29:20 – The benefits of socially oriented education
34:10 – Why the virtual economy is not the solution to energy problems
37:13 – Jeff Bezos launch of the Blue Origin mission
37:54 – William Shatner response to space
41:30 – Elon musk beliefs on sacrificing people now in order for those in the future
41:39 – Nick Bostrom, MacAskill What We Owe the Future
41:53 – Ecocidal
42:51 – Since the 1970’s, we have had more and more energy access
43:20 – Hubbert’s Peak
43:50 – Natural gas is the equivalent of $200/barrel oil in Europe
44:20 – Debt is used to pull energy forward in time
47:10 – Commons based management of resources
47:39 – Worker owned businesses
48:28 – Local school movements/charter schools
48:59 – Rebirth of public libraries
49:34 – Josh Farley + TGS episodes 1 + 2
59:23 – Team Human
1:01:28 – Why marketing and algorithms are so powerful
1:03:29 – Walter Lippman
1:09:53 – Marshall McLuhan
1:11:20 – Climate refugees
1:12:25 – The culture of young women and girls online
1:12:40 – Ariana Grande bombing
1:14:15 – The culture of young men online
1:15:02 – Github
1:16:07 – Stewart Brand
Teaser photo credit; By FlyingSinger – https://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingsinger/206206248, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10699842
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I’m one of those people who was thinking I need to replace my ICE car with a EV. And your message of using less energy is something I’ve been hearing and reading about occasionally but more frequently lately.
Your podcast is working. I’m gonna hold off on the new EV until my ICE really needs replacing. Thank you Nate, for what you do. 👍