[P2P-F] Fwd: sneak preview - Team Human

Wed Aug 3 16:30:05 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 6:55 PM
Subject: sneak preview - Team Human
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

Finally, a quiet moment this summer to tell you what's up.

I've been doing a heck of a lot of talks and appearances since March. I was
supposed to do one in Brazil at the end of the Olympics - but, honestly,
I'd rather go to Brazil at a slightly less intense moment so I'm not too
unhappy to stay put.

I did do a talk in Maine for a healthcare services platform company called
AthenaHealth, and their competence and intelligence really did surprise me.
I've gotten used to speaking at startups where the founders are so green
they all think they're going to be the next unicorn; or corporations so set
in their ways that they wouldn't know innovation if it hit them in the
face. Everyone is so obsessed with numbers and targets and competitors that
they're not only awful at what they do but utterly boring to spend time
with.

These folks, on the other hand, were happy to talk - deeply - about John
Stuart Mill or particle accelerators or artificial intelligence. Easily as
intellectual as anything I've found in academia so far. I may try to figure
out someday how some companies end up with smart people, and others don't.

I also had a wonderful time engaging with the labor activists at the Worker
Cooperative National Conference http://conference.coop  I had to do it
virtually, but the hope, enthusiasm, and rigor came right through the
screen at me. I particularly liked the conversation about Guaranteed
Minimum Income, and how it can end up putting recipients in the role of
consumers - and putting more money in the coffers of the same extractive
corporations.

Meanwhile, and not to bury the lead, we're finally about to launch our new
podcast series, Team Human, out of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at
CUNY/Queens. The producer will kill me, but the url for the beta website is
http://teamhuman.fm and we've got the first three rough-cut episodes up
there. This is a labor of love, and a few of our favorite musicians have
even offered up theme songs (Fugazi and Mike Watt!).

Finally, here's a new piece that I posted up on DigitalTrends last week.
It's an idea-in-progress, possibly related to what I'll write about next.
I'm getting interested in what it means when thinking is no longer a
personal activity.

Okay - more soon, including sneak peeks at the upcoming graphic novel. And
more regular missives from me, for sure.
-

Everybody Knows

I once saw a human lie detector perform at a conference – one of those guys
who can call a dozen people up on stage and match them up with the objects
that belong to them, or even “deduce ” their email passwords. He wasn’t
doing magic, of course, but simply reading the cues and tells we all give
one another all the time. As any gate investigator on Israel’s national
airline knows – and its security record attests – our bodies give us away.

If we really do make subtle micro-gestures that betray ourselves to one
another, then we must, on some level recognize those signs in others. Sure,
some con-men and actors have gotten really good at masking their dishonesty
or misdirecting our attention. But many of us have gotten really good at
missing the signals we don’t want to see, or lying to ourselves about
someone’s truthfulness against our own better judgment.

I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of
secrecy we’ve been working under all along.

Subconsciously, anyway, we all pretty much always know when the other is
lying. At best, all we do by lying is add noise to the signal, trigger
alarm bells in the other person’s unconscious defense mechanisms, and push
people away from us in the long run. So why bother to lie at all? Whatever
it is we think we’re hiding, everyone already knows, at least deep down.

In an age when well-founded fears of government or corporate invasions of
our privacy loom, I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the
illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along. The abuses of our
private information notwithstanding, could we be looking at a larger shift
toward greater honesty?

Don’t get me wrong: It sucks that companies and agencies pore through our
data, and sort it algorithmically to predict our future choices before we
know them ourselves. Our social-media
<http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/> feeds steer us toward the
paths most consistent with our big-data consumer profiles, reducing our
spontaneity and manipulating us away from individual agency and
unpredictable outcomes.

But the other side of the dynamic is that in order to get us to acquiesce
to all this exposure, the sorts of things we are ashamed or afraid to
disclose become less aberrant. Hell, marijuana is becoming legal. Gay
people are allowed to get married. Transgender kids are getting bathroom
rights in high school. How many people who were once afraid of what their
email archives or web <http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/> searches reveal
to law enforcement or future employers can now say, “What do I have to
hide? Pot’s not a crime, anymore.”

And as we’ve been reminded once again over the past few weeks, digital
technology exposes abuses by individual police officers as well as systemic
bias. There’s just no hiding anymore.

In the earliest days of the net, I remember young ravers telling me that
the internet was itself just the clumsy precursor to the real connection we
would one day experience through telepathy and other evolutionary advances.
By their logic, the exposures we’re contending with today – whether it’s
your girlfriend seeing that email to your ex, or your employer finding out
you smoke pot – won’t be matters of technological surveillance. That’ll
just be how things are when we’re all *truly* connected.

No, we’re probably not evolving toward an organically shared, telepathic
“uni-mind” anytime soon. In fact, what these optimistic young net
enthusiasts were imagining may actually be closer to an honesty we
experienced long ago – before our media gave us so many opportunities to
obfuscate the truth, hide from one another, and lose the intimacy we shared.

Before the invention of writing, for example, people could communicate only
face to face. To lie to someone in person is a whole lot harder, on many
levels, than writing a false note. While communication could be extended
through time and space, it no longer had the interpersonal reinforcement of
one’s spoken promise. It was more a matter of the law, and how to get
around it.

Likewise, the printing press changed people’s once unquestioning
relationship to the word of God and the actions of government. Ads on radio
and television sold mythologies and pitched lifestyles that were
unattainable lies. To accomplish this, these media alienate us from one
another and ourselves.

The net offers to do the opposite: reveal truths. And while at first these
may be crude truths like political scandals or illegal acts, those might
actually be easier to deal with than the personal truths we hide from one
another. Think honestly for a minute. How devastating would it be for
certain people in your life to know all the secrets your online activities
could tell them? And at the same time, this very fear is an indication of
just how much we are living our lives in shame, secrecy, and isolation? How
much might be released – and gained – if we could break through those
boundaries?

In one of the most intimate moments of the first season of *Mr. Robot*, a
TV show about cyber espionage, the highly alienated, vigilante hero hacker
confesses to his therapist. He spills everything he knows about her from
hacking her personal emails, web searches, and social media
<http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/> connections. He knows her
heartaches, her porn preferences … her very soul. It’s a horrifying moment,
but also the most profound human connection we see our hero make over the
course of the series. True intimacy.

As he apologizes, in his way, for the invasion of privacy, he adds, “But
I’ve helped a lot of people. I want a way out of loneliness, just like you.

Could part of the reason why this show is resonating so much with people –
particularly those of us who spend so much time and energy on things
digital – be that we share some measure of his sense of isolation and
despair? Perhaps digital technologies don’t isolate us from one another so
much than previous media, but they remind us of how much we do and don’t
share with one another. Even the chronic oversharing we see on social media
may be one small indication of a repressed, almost bulimic urge to release
everything, to everyone.

I would never advocate compromising our digital privacy – particularly in
an environment where selective enforcement, illegal government spying, and
corporate manipulation are rampant. It’s simply not safe out there. But we
must also recognize the value of networked “truth serum” for a society as
alienated from each other as ours has become.

Besides, everybody already knows.

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