Rushkoff has a new book: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Team_Human
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From: <douglas(a)rushkoff.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 7:07 PM
Subject: Team Human Book Launch Party and Talk
To: <rushkoff(a)simplelists.com>
I'm doing a book launch event at Civic Hall in New York City on Wednesday
January 23.
It's completely free, but space is limited so you have to rsvp. Free books,
food, conversation, and fun. I'll be doing a short talk, then a discussion
with Medium editor Siobhan O'Connor. Then signing, drinking, and finding
the others.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/team-human-book-launch-event-with-douglas-rush…
This event is the only one of its kind, and it will fill up quickly.
I'll be sending out news of the rest of the tour next week. You can find
out my upcoming dates on the home page of http://rushkoff.com
Meanwhile, for those of you who like this list for the articles I select
for sharing, here's a fun one on Russian Cosmism and how it informs today's
religion of technology:
There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly
care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may
pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of
superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system
embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber,
Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a
little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers,
scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent
nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as
dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.
I tell the story in my new book, Team Human, because it’s one I have yet to
see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with
some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program.
The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War
powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists
to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United
States. Maybe we all have common goals?
They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone
could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day
and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from
Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be
responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up
with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction
gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on
immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life
extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of
the conferences.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but
this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was
the source of human sin and corruption.
The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after
death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The
cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists:
They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our
mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a
compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists
told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a
way to beat death.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but
this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was
the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers
could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.
The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would
be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially
computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that
could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so
Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was
appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not
original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more
thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was
indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.
No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J.
Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior
as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website,
“The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how
computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed
to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever
behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.
As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions
and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s
employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace
human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the
human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks
and derivatives.
The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never
be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human
agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an
abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible
with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on
a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and
humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.
We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires
who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and
technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight
it if we are going to survive.
--
My new book, Team Human
<https://www.amazon.com/Team-Human-Douglas-Rushkoff/dp/039365169X> is
available for pre-order!
Douglas Rushkoff
http://rushkoff.com
Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and
Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens
Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm> - the podcast!
Sign up for RushkoffMail <http://www.simplelists.com/subscribe/rushkoff> to
get updates and newest writing
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From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork(a)greattransition.org>
Date: Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 10:49 PM
Subject: A World Political Party: The Time Has Come (GTN Discussion)
To: <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com>
>From Ronaldo Munck <ronnie.munck(a)dcu.ie>
-------------------------------------------------------
It is great to see Heikki articulating the case for a World Political
Party. As Paul says, if we disagree or have another option for an adequate
vehicle for global transformation, we should offer it up. While there is
not space to do that here, I will make a few points.
What we are offered or suggested is a new global political party, defined
as “an open ethico-political association in pursuit of a broad program of
societal reorganization on a global scale. A WPP offers the most promise
for fostering political coherence in civil society.”
What is suggested as a precursor is the Varoufakis-inspired European civil
society movement DiEM25 which “intends to have a draft constitution
prepared by 2025 that, if adopted, would replace all existing European
treaties. Beyond this process, the movement strives to overcome austerity
and harmful competition in Europe with concrete policy proposals, including
the dedication of 500 billion euros per year to green investment and
industrial conversion.”
What is immediately apparent to me is the mismatch between the enormity of
the tasks set and the relative lack of visibility of the vehicle proposed
to meet the challenges. You cannot just ignore the current political party
set-up, the state alliances, and the forces contesting them and just wish a
WPP into existence. Is it to be ‘beyond left and right’? The Third Way also
said that. Is to be transnational? Take a group of European intellectuals,
add Assange and Chomsky, and off we go?
To call this utopian thinking does not even begin to describe the
analytical and political problems emerging. There seems little strategic
notion of any sort to describe or think how we get from the here to where
we want to go.
For me, one of the underlying conceptual problems in this call is the
reliance on the notion of global civil society, which I (and others) have
critiqued at length elsewhere (
www.researchgate.net/publication/225521084_Global_Civil_Society_Royal_Road_…
). Global civil society (GCS) in contemporary guise (See, for example, John
Keane's Democracy and Civil Society or Mary Kaldor's Global Civil Society:
An Answer to War) is based on universalist moral norms and values. This
normative vision owes much to the work of Habermas, in particular the
importance of communicative dialogue to fulfill the promise of the European
Enlightenment. Thus, GCS is an ideal or virtual space, quite distinct from
the actually existing civil societies around the world. This normative
space is characterized by non-instrumental dialogue and ethical principles.
It eschews all that smacks of self-interest and, of course, the merest hint
that force might play a role in progressive social change and
democratization. Reflecting its origins in Eastern European oppositional
discourse pre-1989, this view of GCS is deeply imbued with the notion of
“anti-politics,” the rejection of all state-oriented or party or mass
politics in favour of an ethical, moral, and individualistic conception of
the good politics.
I have no problem with that, but it is not a global perspective. It cannot
be the basis for a World Political Party because it does not reflect the
politics of the global South in any way. Think of the rise of Bolsonaro in
Brazil now and what it will mean for progressive forces (civil society if
you will) there. The struggle against this will be built by the trade
unions, peasant movements, and community organisations and by those seeking
to rebuild the Workers Party to make it fit for purpose again.
So, I am not against Heikki’s project -- how could anyone? -- but I would
just like to point out that it does not travel well in the parts of the
world where struggle is raw.
Ronaldo Munck
***************************************************
Thursday, January 3, 2019
>From Paul Raskin <praskin(a)tellus.org>
-----
Dear GTN,
Our 2018 forums have spotlighted key movement streams (with more in the
queue for 2019). We have generated a remarkable compendium of essays and
commentary that stands as a unique resource for understanding the vitality
and diversity of progressive forces now at play. Significantly, the series
affirms the fundamental GT premise that different oppositional paths can
lead to a shared conviction: we must urgently act collectively for global
transformation.*
Yet, the nagging sense persists that the current array of movements remains
too fragmented and weak for the task of systemic change. The political
culture still lacks an overarching global organizing framework for
nurturing synergy, mobilizing the discontented, and spreading new social
visions – not to mention serving ultimately as an instrument for attaining
public power.
What might such a framework look like? The question brings me to our
January discussion. Heikki Patomäki offers an answer in his new essay, “A
World Political Party: The Time Has Come.” Heikki envisions a World
Political Party (WPP) as a transnational association dedicated to
democratic principles and processes that, under an umbrella of shared
principles and aims, spawns a vast network of semiautonomous nodes at all
levels. While noting the high hurdles to establishing a WPP, Heikki points
to the deepening world crisis that compels the attempt and makes success
plausible; indeed, he believes an important precursor has already been
launched.
What do you think? Please read the essay at
www.greattransition.org/publication/world-political-party, and let us know.
Does the idea of a WPP resonate? How would you modify Heikki’s conception?
To those of you pursuing other approaches to fostering movement coherence,
this would be a terrific time to tell us about them.
Since we’re starting late, the discussion will go through Monday, February
4.
Over to you,
Paul
* See the framing paper that kicked off this series at
www.greattransition.org/publication/how-do-we-get-there.
-------------------------------------------------------
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