ISBN:
039365169X
Title: Team Human Pdf
Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Published Date: 2019-01-22
Page: 256
“Original and uplifting. Just the book America needs right now. In his unique and engaging style, Rushkoff reminds us of our human essence: we are social creatures, and if we trust this truth about ourselves we can accomplish the seemingly impossible.” - Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and Daring Democracy“Rushkoff is the gold standard. He always knows what tech is up to―and he’s usually prophetic. Now he’s here to tell us how our Silicon masters are attempting to pit us against one another for their own gain. Go Team Human.” - Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out and Up in the Air“A vivid thinker, Rushkoff is an insightful and acerbic antidote to Facebook, cultural hegemony, and the corporatization of everything.” - Seth Godin, bestselling author of The Dip, Linchpin, and What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn)“Can the revolution start already? This book will help us. Thank God for Douglas Rushkoff.” - Parker Posey“Technology can be a force for good or amplify our self-destructive capacities. In Team Human, the always-brilliant Douglas Rushkoff reminds us that the tools we design design us in turn, and offers a vision to invert our tools and make them better.” - Jason Silva, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games“An astonishing, paradigm-shifting must-read for all inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Precisely and cogently written. Rushkoff’s best work so far.” - Grant Morrison“A searing critique…Visionary, original, and inspirational. If you’re not already a member of Team Human, you will be once you’ve finished reading it.” - Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct“[A] catalyst for conversations on what it means to be human.” - Booklist Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. The host of the popular Team Human podcast, Rushkoff has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed; written regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast, and the Guardian; and made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like” and “Merchants of Cool.” Rushkoff coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
“A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson
Team Human is a manifesto―a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together―not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups.
Team Human delivers a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity―together―we can make the world a better place to be human.
How to think constructively, connect meaningfully, and act purposefully Douglas Rushkoff wrote this book to help as many people as possible who now struggle in a world in which "autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, and act purposefully. It feels as if civilization itself were on the brink, and that we lack the collective willpower and coordination necessary to address issues of vital importance to the very survival of our species." He then asserts, "It doesn't have to be this way."I agree with Rushkoff while also agreeing with him and countless others that it is far more difficult to remake society together today, not as individual players but as the team we actually are, than at any prior time. As a team? "The first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will."These are among the passages that caught my eye, also shared with you to suggest the thrust and flavor of Rushkoff's perspectives on civilization and human nature:These are among the passages that caught my eye, shared with you to suggest the thrust and flavor of Rushkoff's perspectives on society and human nature:o "Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together...The most successful of biology's creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems. It's hard for us to recognize such widespread cooperation. We tend to look at life forms as isolated from another: a tree is a tree and a cow is a cow. But a tree is not a singular tree at all; it is the tip of the forest. Pull back far enough to see the whole, and one tree's struggle for survival merges with the more relevant story of its role in sustaining the larger system."o "The more advanced the primate, the bigger its social groups. That's the easiest and most accurate way to understand evolution's trajectory, and the relationship of humans to it. Even if we don't agree that social organization is evolution's master plan, we must accept that it is -- at the very least -- a large part of what makes humans human."o "Being social may be the whole point. The things we learn from one another are helpful with the logistics of mutual survival, but the process of learning itself -- the sense of connection, rapport, and comaradarie we develop while communicating -- may be the greatest prize. We may not socialize in order to live more than we live in order to socialize."o "Spoken language could be considered the first communication technology."o "Human inventions often end up at cross purposes with their original intentions -- or even at cross purposes with humans, ourselves. Once an idea or an institution gains enough influence, it changes the basic landscape. Instead of the invention serving people in some way, people spend their time and resources serving it. The original subject becomes the new object."o "Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation...The goal [of persuasive technology] is to generate 'behavioral change' and 'habit formation,' most often wityhouyt the user's knowledge or consent."o "People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume."o "The economy needn't be a war; it can be a common. To get there, we must retrieve our innate good will."o "The long-term danger is not that we will lose our jobs to robots. We can contend with joblessness if it happens. The real threat is that we'll lose our humanity to the value system we embed in our robots, and that they in turn impose on us."o "This is the true meaning of 'the singularity': it's the moment when computers make humans obsolete. At that point, we humans will face a stark choice. Either we enhance ourselves with chips, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering to keep up with our digital superiors; or we upload our brains to the network."o "We mistakenly treat the future as something to prepare for...But the future is not something we arrive at so much as something we create through our actions in the present. Even the weather, at this point, is subject to the choices we make today about energy, consumption, and waste."o "As much as we think we're separate individuals, we're wired from birth and before to share, bond, learn from, and even heal one another. We humans are all part of the same collective nervous system. This is not a religious conviction but an increasingly accepted biological fact."There are dozens of other passages I could also have selected from a lively narrative that offers an abundance of indictments, affirmations, reassurances, and concerns that emanate from Douglas Rushkoff's heart as well as his mind. "We can't go it alone, even if we wanted to. The only way to heal" our wounds from autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media "is by connecting to someone else." In fact, connecting to as many other people as possible. "We are not perfect, by any means. But we are not alone. We are Team Human. Find the others."A (good) slap in the face Doug Rushkoff has written a slap in the face. It’s a loving slap, but a slap nonetheless. And it’s a slap we could all use right now. The essence is this: we humans have created a host of wonderfully freeing advances, but over time they’ve come to enslave and control us–and we need to wake up. We need to question what we call “facts” and remember the potential of our collective humanity. The book is arranged into 100 brief essays under 14 topic headings. From beginning to end you will find yourself saying “yes!” to much of it. And even if you don’t agree with everything he says, you will find his writing helpful in clarifying your thinking.Below are a few passages that stuck with me:On Social Media…What people couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for with money, we would now paid for with personal data. But something larger had also changed. The platforms themselves were no longer in the business of delivering people to one another; they were in the business of delivering people to marketers. Humans were no longer the customers of social media. We were the product.On losing track of figure and ground (a section I found particularly eye opening)…When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems to which we have become enslaved… Take money: it was originally invented to store and enable transactions. Money was the medium for the marketplace’s primary function of value exchange. Money was the ground, and the marketplace was the figure. Today, the dynamic is reversed: the acquisition of money itself has become the central goal, and the marketplace is just a means of realizing that goal. Money has become the figure, and the marketplace full of people has become the ground.On losing track of figure and ground with regards to schools…Once we see competitive advantage and employment opportunity as the primary purposes of education rather than its ancillary benefits, something strange begins to happen. Entire curriculums are rewritten to teach the skills that students will need in the workplace. Schools consult corporations to find out what will make students more valuable to them. For their part, the corporations get to externalize the costs of employee training to the public school system, while the schools, in turn, surrender their mission of expanding the horizons of the working class for the more immediate purpose of job readiness.On the digital media environment…A search engine designed to promote academic thought became the world’s biggest advertising agency, and a social media platform designed to help people connect became the world’s biggest data collector…Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation. Persuasive technology, as it is now called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral change“ and “habit formation,“ most often without the user’s knowledge or consent.Those of us who want to preserve the prosocial, one-world vision of the TV media environment, or the reflective intellectualism of the print era, are the ones who must stop looking back. If we are going to promote connection and tolerance, we’ll have to do it in a way that recognizes the biases of the digital media environment in which we are actually living, and then encourages human intervention in these otherwise automated processes…On mechanomorphism (machines becoming more like us and vice versa)…It’s not that wanting to improve ourselves, even with seemingly invasive technology, is so wrong. It’s that we humans should be making active choices about what it is we want to do to ourselves, rather than letting the machines, or the markets propelling them, decide for us.On economics…The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate goodwill.… The commons is not a winner-take-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a long-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other“ player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.Capitalism as it’s currently being executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplace is in delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity…Corporations are still great at sucking all of the money out of the system but they’re awful at deploying those assets once they have them.That growth mandate remains with us today. Corporations must grow in order to pay back their investors.… With each new round of growth more money in value was delivered up from the real world of people and resources to those who have the monopoly on capital. That’s why it’s called capitalism.In perhaps the most spectacular reversal of figure and ground we’ve yet witnessed corporations have been winning court cases that give them the rights of human beings.The human beings running those enterprises are no less the psychic victims of their companies practices then the rest of us, which is why it’s so hard for them to envision a way out.On artificial intelligence…We’ve got a greater part of humanity working on making our social media feeds more persuasive than we have on making clean water more accessible.We must not accept any technology as the default solution for our problems. When we do, we end up trying to optimize ourselves for our machines, instead of optimizing our machines for us.On solving complex problems…We have been trained to expect an answer to every question, and an ending to every beginning. We seek closure and resolution, growing impatient or even despondent when no easy answer is in sight. This fuels capitalism and consumerism, which depend on people believing that they are just one stock market win or product purchase away from fulfillment. It’s great for motivating a nation to, say, put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, or go to war against some other nation.But it doesn’t serve us as we attempt to contend with long- term, chronic problems. There’s no easy fix for climate change, the refugee crisis, or terrorism. How do we even know when we’re done? There’s no flag to plant, no terms of surrender. Motivating a society to address open-ended challenges requires a more open-ended approach—one that depends less on our drive toward climax than on our capacity for unresolved situations. Like life.The planet’s complex biosphere will survive us, one way or the other. Our own continuing participation, however, is in some doubt.On expanding our view of what we can change…We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe. Money, debt, jobs, slavery, countries, race, corporatism, stock markets, brands, religions, government, and taxes are all human inventions. We made them up, but we now act as if they’re unchangeable laws. Playing for Team Human means being capable of distinguishing between what we can’t change and what we canYou are not alone…As much as we think we’re separate individuals, we’re wired from birth and before to share, bond, learn from, and even heal one another. We humans are all part of the same collective nervous system. This is not a religious conviction but an increasingly accepted biological fact.We can’t go it alone, even if we wanted to. The only way to heal is by connecting to someone else.But it also means that when one of us is disturbed, confused, violent, or oppressed, the rest of us are, too. We can’t leave anyone behind or none of us really makes it to wherever we think we’re going. And we can’t just stay confused and depressed ourselves without confusing and depressing everyone who is connected to us.This is a team sport.
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