Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff

Playing for Team Human today, American Journalist and author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells.David Wallace-Wells joins Team Human to share why he believes that the climate crisis that is both inevitable and avoidable. In his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells works to deconstruct the myth that humans are insulated from the worst effects of climate change. He does this by showing that the obsession with the science behind climate can often hide the larger humanitarian crises. Together, Douglas and David reveal how living in a hotter and less hospitable world will require more than a techno-solutionist approach. Instead, it will require collective political engagement that begins with the making the possibility of societal collapse comprehensible to the public today.You can find out more about David and his new book The Uninhabitable Earth by following him on Twitter.You can also find out more about all of our guests, listen to past shows, find out about upcoming live events, and become a contributing subscriber by visiting us at TeamHuman.fmYou can read written versions of Rushkoff’s show monologues at Medium. Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible.You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records.Team Human is a production of the laboratory for digital humanism at Queens CUNY. Our associate producers are Stephen Bartolomei & Josh Chapdelaine. Luke Robert Mason edited and mixed this show.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human today, activist, journalist, and science fiction author of the new anthology Radicalized, Cory Doctorow.Cory has a unique way of building stories, metaphors, and scenarios that clarify the underlying dynamics of living in a technologized society. In Radicalized, Cory extrapolates the embedded laws and values defining the present moment to show, not some distant future, but the dystopia that very much exists today. Together, Douglas and Cory explore the question – What do we do with this moment where everything, even truth itself, feels up for grabs? Avoiding nihilism and despair, Cory’s writing and thinking showcase a unique kind of agency and optimism. Is this the moment we flip the script on dystopia? Join Cory and Douglas as they look toward a utopia that engages the collective will and imagination required to overcome crisis and inequality.You can find out more about Cory and his new book, Radicalized, at craphound.com You can also find out more about all of our guests, listen to past shows, find out about upcoming live events, and become a contributing subscriber by visiting us at TeamHuman.fmYou can read written versions of Rushkoff’s show monologues at Medium. Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time. This episode concludes with Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.Team Human is a production of the laboratory for digital humanism at QC. Our associate producers are Josh Chapdelaine and Luke Robert Mason. Stephen Bartolomei edited and mixed this show. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Returning to play for Team Human today, filmmaker, author, musician, and activist Astra Taylor.Astra joins Douglas for a conversation that wrestles with the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in democracy. It’s a discussion explored in her latest film, What is Democracy? and her new book, Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. (Hudson Books, Indie Bound, Amazon)Do we really have a clear vision and political imagination of what democracy should look like? How can we both recognize the tensions in democracy and create conditions where these contradictions are more constructive than destructive? In what ways are we empowered in our everyday lives to enact democracy?Astra and Douglas explore these questions and more as they make the case that democracy is not a “thing” nor a set of procedures, but rather an “unfolding,” a process. Democracy is a verb!Follow Astra on Twitter here.Hear Astra discuss her work with the Debt Collective on the very first episode of Team Human. Today’s episode begins with Douglas looking at Trump as “editor in chief.” Is Trump using a Reality TV show mindset to draw the media into his “production” of reality? Check out written versions of Douglas’s monologues on Medium. Past Team Human podcast episodes can also be found on Medium. Team Human is made possible thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time. This episode concludes with Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human today and closing out this season of the show; author and New York Times and Wired contributor Clive Thompson. Clive is a keen observer of human beings and the way different media and technological environments change how we see ourselves and our purpose. His latest book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, looks at the ways coders are engaged in not only programing our technologies, but programming our reality. In this free-form Team Human conversation, Douglas and Clive discuss the embedded logic behind the codes that shape our society– looking all the way back to Torah, and then on to contemporary platforms.What values are being coded into our everyday experience? Is there still space for that very human, weird, and eclectic expressions of technology we once celebrated at the dawn of the internet?Rushkoff and Thompson bring both a critical eye and sense of hope to the project of writing human virtue and value back into the programming that shapes our experience of the world.Douglas opens with a monologue on the significance of language, specifically the machine metaphors, that also shape our understanding of reality. What do we lose when we think of human persons as as objects, “human resources,” inputs and outputs? Is there something more to being human than just being a producer in a system?Team Human will be taking a much needed break. We’ll still be working, just at a more human pace. We’re going to spend some time updating, planning, and researching the next season. Take some time to dig through the archive of our 129 shows. Check out the Team Human manifesto. Spread the word, and meet us back here soon.A special thanks to our radio broadcast partners at KSPC 88.7 FM broadcasting from Pomona College in Claremont, CA. You can stream the show at KSPC.org where Team Human plays on Sundays at 11am Pacific Time.And check out our friends KXRY 107.1 / 91.1 FM broadcasting in the Portland area, or tune in on the web at Xray.fm where Team Human plays Mondays at noon Pacific timeWe love college and community radio... if you'd like Team Human to play on your favorite station, please contact team at teamhuman dot fm.Thanks also to our many subscribers and supporters. You keep this show alive. You can find one another most easily on a new Reddit that was started by some Team Human listeners, so that everyone can find one another more easily. That’s reddit.com/r/teamhumanCheck out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time as well as transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds. This episode concludes with Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man plus a Team Human original by Stephen Bartolomei.Team Human is a production of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens College. Our associate producer is Josh Chapdelaine; our community manager is Michael Bass; our virtual futurist is Luke Robert Mason; our photographer is Erin Locasio, our stage manager is Kristen Needham. Team Human is produced by Stephen Bartolomei. Thanks for joining Team Human - our last best hope for peeps. Code Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Clive Photo by Liz Maney     Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, shares his vision for a decentralized library of digital culture. He discusses the challenge of preserving 20th-century works and the importance of controlled digital lending. Kahle highlights the gaps in access to academic research and advocates for open access against corporate models. The conversation touches on the need for resilient digital infrastructure and how algorithms can help verify information. Listeners are encouraged to engage with the archive and explore its vast collections.

Gail Bradbrook and Clare Farrell leverage love and grief to build the Extinction Rebellion, a movement that demands immediate action on climate change.“There is an emotional component to waking up to our social, political, economic, and climate predicaments, and a mix of anger, shock, exhilaration, and fear. Yet properly integrated, they can all serve us as we attempt to muster the collective fortitude to confront these interconnected challenges.Playing for Team Human today are two guests who are practicing state-of-the-art activism that acknowledges and leverages these various emotional components. Douglas is joined by molecular biophysics PhD and economic justice campaigner Gail Bradbrook and #bodypolitic fashion designer turned hunger strike activist, Clare Farrell. They’ve begun a movement centered in London but spreading around the world called Extinction Rebellion. They shut down bridges in London last year and are planning to shut down the whole city of London next week (April 15) until government agrees to engage with them about this global emergency.”Visit https://rebellion.earth/  to join the movement. For more details on the April 15th action hen Extinction Rebellion shuts down London, visit this link: https://extinctionrebellion.org.uk/event/uk-rebellion-shut-down-london/Listeners in the US may also want to jump in and get involved with the Sunrise Movement.Douglas opens today’s show with a monologue looking at the signs that the activist counterculture has claimed victory over mainstream culture. He then questions “gotcha politics” with an argument for embracing the “newly woke” as allies in today’s progressive movement.Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) We also played Reverand Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. Our Outro features the Mike Watt’s beak-holding-letter-man.Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!A special thanks to Luke Robert Mason who recorded Clare and Gail on site.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human today, professor, scholar, and activist Ananya Roy.Ananya will be showing us how the fight for global social justice, often begins at home.Roy has been working with Occupy Wall Street’s Micah White (Team Human Ep. 04) on a course about housing inequality for the Activist Graduate School, and is a professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare at UCLA, where she is also director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Her book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development unearthed the counter-revolutionary agenda embedded in many so-called “development” programs. She looks at global poverty from a truly global perspective, which sometimes means the inequality in our own back yards and highway underpasses.In this conversation, Ananya and Douglas explore what it means to be a “double agent” as activists, educators, and instigators of social change. Ananya shares wisdom on the ways we might overcome our compromised positions as situated in systems of colonial, racial, and economic oppression . She asks us to imagine how these spaces of contradiction and complicity might be transformed into spaces of empowerment. While “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house, the master’s tools can certainly occupy the master house.”Join Douglas and Ananya for this master class poverty, housing, student activism, and the everyday work of building solidarity in our community and beyond.Today’s show opens with a monologue looking at the cycle of technological innovation as it relates to the human condition. “Our media and technologies have been undermining our social bonds for centuries. So, what’s different now? Is this digital alienation the same thing amplified, or is something else going on?”Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt’s beak-holding-letter-man.Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human today; Aaron Gell. Aaron is an editor at large for Medium and an instructor for NYU's Prison Education Project.Aaron will show us how listening and sharing stories can be the key to cultivating empathy. His long-form journalism finds the humanity in even the most compromised and contemptible of characters. In this episode, Douglas and Aaron invite you to eavesdrop into their conversation as they explore the ways stories can connect us. In this moment, when we face existential crisis from many directions, Gell asserts that empathy is an imperative if we are going to preserve our humanity.We’re in this story together. Douglas opens with a monologue on how the end of the Mueller investigation is the opportunity to do a political reset. Being anti-trump is not enough. "Just as Trump’s administration became something of a cult, with subordinates taking increasingly daring and untenable positions in order to win his approval, the anti-Trump movement has become a cult of conspiracy psychosis."Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.Check out these stories from Aaron on Medium https://medium.com/@aarongell“How to Survive a Midlife Crisis: Drugs, Dance Music, and Free Love”I ditched my wife and kids to party in the woods with 250 sex-positive millennialshttps://medium.com/s/youthnow/drinking-the-kool-aid-857cfe8c8c96“Love is a Battlefield”Hardcore military role players meet regularly to act out the Second Civil War. I strapped on an AR-15 and headed downrangehttps://medium.com/s/love-hate/a-dispatch-from-the-second-civil-war-835635943c53Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid-show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human today: musician, investor, reformer, and the author of Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee.Roger will be talking about his mentorship of Mark Zuckerberg and what went wrong. Was it naive idealism? The imperatives of growth-driven capitalism? Greed? Rushkoff and McNamee look at how things have derailed and what must be done to reclaim the driver’s seat for technologies run amok.“There are no rules today.” McNamee warns of online surveillance and the increasing power of behavioral modification. We’ve gone from being exploited as “the product” to becoming “fuel for the fire.”Join Douglas and Roger for a behind-the-scenes look at what is driving these powerful and pernicious platforms.Douglas opens with a monologue proposing a hypothetical. What if Zuckerberg had stayed in school? Would a little more study of history, literature, or a few more ethics courses have prevented the Facebook catastrophe?This special episode of Team Human was recorded live in front of a studio audience in collaboration with WNYC’s Podcast Mixtape at the Greene Space. Look for future live dates on teamhuman.fm.Check out Douglas’s regular column on Medium, featuring expanded versions of the monologues you hear each week opening the show.Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard Roger McNamee's band Moonalice. Our outro features Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.Live Photos thanks to @EDLphotographyAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Playing for Team Human Today is lifelong activist, warrior, and witch Blaed Spence AND writer, professor, and author of Slow Media, Jennifer Rauch.Today’s show continues our ‘live from the road’ series as Douglas brings Team Human to the Bunk Bar in Portland, Oregon for an event in collaboration with XRAY radio.Douglas opens with a monologue arguing that politics are still stuck in the television age. What might politics look like when we are not reduced to mere spectators but instead become engaged as active participants?(@1min30s)Blaed Spence joins Douglas on stage for a conversation about the subversive act of looking away from our screens and into each other’s eyes. For Spence, it’ about embracing the opportunity for the awe, wonderment, imagination, and ultimately, true connection. (starts at @12min30s)Author and professor Jennifer Rauch then joins the stage asking us to imagine ourselves as more than just “eyeballs and wallets.” Like Spence, Rauch argues that looking away from our devices and engaging in Slow Media practices creates the space for us to use all media more thoughtfully and autonomously. “We’ve internalized the logic of faster, more efficient, more production, but there is a whole world of experience that is beyond quantification.” (starts @ 39mins)This episode ends with a group conversation and audience Q&A. (@67mins)More on our guests:Blaed Spence is a lifelong activist, warrior, and witch — a change-agent who’s worked extensively with Starhawk and the Reclaiming Collective in the U.S. and Canada; an alum of the Apple Multimedia Lab, founding partner of Wired Magazine, Senior Designer at Paul Allen’s Interval Research; and an operative of the rEvolution working to dismantle the patriarchy and predatory capitalism from within the belly of the beast.Jennifer Rauch is the author of Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart and a Professor of Journalism & Communication Studies at Long Island University Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in the Huffington Post, Medium, and Urban Audubon.Check out Rushkoff’s regular column on Medium for essay versions of this and other show monologues.Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy