[P2P-F] Fwd: BookTV tonight and more

Sun Mar 20 01:03:57 CET 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 6:46 AM
Subject: BookTV tonight and more
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

I've been traveling and promoting the cause of "digital distributism" along
with my book. It's been great but exhausting. I did this talk
<http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid4737475051001?bckey=AQ~~,AAADf1OjKiE~,mDP7QD494oAFZ4aKbZ1R-V15ZQuwI0mU&bclid=4740425276001&bctid=4799749120001>
at the SouthBySouthWest festival, and the followed up with 15 interviews
over the next 10 hours.

There have been a whole lot of great interviews and articles on the book
and its issues. And I've been making an impassioned plea for people not to
rely on a single interview or tweet as a substitute for getting a full
'education' on how digital economics works and how to optimized it for
distributed prosperity instead of winner-takes-all extremes. It took us
over 500 years to get into this predicament, and it really does take a few
hours to absorb what happened, why it happened, and how we can make it
better.

Anyway, I'm posting the best of what's happening on my blog, and sharing as
much as I can here.

I will be on BookTV tonight (Friday) at 8:15p. That's a show on CSPAN-2,
for which they shot the discussion about the book I had with New America
Foundation at Civic Hall in NYC.

I've got some great big events upcoming.

San Francisco!
  - City Lights <http://www.citylights.com/info/?fa=event&event_id=2558>,
Wednesday, March 23, 7p
  - SF Commonwealth Club
<http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2016-03-24/douglas-rushkoff-throwing-rocks-google-bus—how-growth-became-enemy-prosperity>,
Thursday March 24, 6:30p

NYC!
 - 92nd St Y <http://www.92y.org/Event/Throwing-Rocks-at-the-Google-Bus>,
March 30, 7pm (get student-rate tickets)
 - Webvisions <http://www.webvisionsevent.com/new-york/>, April 7 (it's a
whole conference, though - no a la carte)

More soon. For now, here's a piece and super-short video you might have
missed, from TechTimes:

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF ON ‘THROWING ROCKS AT THE GOOGLE BUS: HOW GROWTH BECAME
THE ENEMY OF PROSPERITY’ by Stacey Szewczyk

In late 2013, activists in San Francisco and nearby Oakland responded to an
influx of affluent tech workers to the Bay Area, and the attendant
skyrocketing rents, by throwing rocks at the buses Google provided to
shuttle itsemployees to and from Silicon Valley.

The event forms the backdrop for Douglas Rushkoff‘s latest book, *Throwing
Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity*
(Portfolio/Penguin,
2016), a historically-minded look at the effects digital technology has had
on local economies, big business and the life expectancy of the corporation
as we know it.

As a bestselling author of books about the interface between digital
technology and culture, ranging from *Cyberia, Life in the Trenches of
Hyperspace*(HarperOne, 1994), a survey of the subcultures evolving around
the then-burgeoning World Wide Web, to *Present Shock: When Everything
Happens Now* (Current, 2013), a critique of our digitally enhanced present,
Dougles Rushkoff is a top future tech speaker and sought-afterconsultant
among CEOsunder pressure to sharpen their digital edge.

In his view, the problem with Google and other high-tech corporations is
that they are configured to extract value from people and communities to
fulfill shareholder expectations of constant growth, and that’s inappropriate
in a digitally charged world. Long-term survival in a digital landscape
requires corporations to “re-code” for greater value creation, scalability
and sustainablility.

“They’re still operating as if they were twentieth-century industrial
corporations – only the original corporate code is now being executed by
entirely more powerful and rapidly acting business plans,” he writes in a
keyed-up technospeak that enlivens erudite historical passages, and *Economics
for Dummies*-styleexplainers, in an engaging discourse on the parameters of
a digital economy. “What algorithms do to the trading floor, digital
business does to the economy. In the purely rational light of the computer
program, a digital corporation is optimized to convert cash into share
price – money and value into pure capital.”

The bigger the corporation, the less efficient it becomes at putting its
cash to work. “You have giant companies sitting on tons and tons of cash
but they don’tknow how to deploy it,” he says. “They don’t have research
and development. They don’t even do their own work. They’ve outsourced
their competencies.”

Among other things, Rushkoff‘s book is a call for tech companies to
recalibrate their growth targets, re-educate their shareholders and
redirect profits back to the communities that comprise their markets.

“Big companies need to begin thinking of their employees and the towns in
which they operate as economies they need to develop,” says Rushkoff. “You
can make platforms that are optimized toward helping people create and
transact value. If your users get rich, that’s not a bad thing. That’s not
money you’ve lost.It’s money that comes into the ecosystem of your
business.”

He’s speaking to Walmart, Uber and every mobile app developer with
aspirations of making his or her first billion by 30. He’s speaking from
Codecademy, in NewYork’sFlatIron District, a free, online coding school
where he serves on the advisory board.

“Their business model is based on helping people create value and transact
between each other,” says Rushkoff, holding forth from a co-working space
armchair like a bantam edition of an Oxford World Classic – his manner is a
Marshall McLuhan-Woody Allen mash-up.” After you’ve learned a little bit of
code you get up to a level where other students can pay you to tutor them
in their lessons. There’s all these different ways that the platform lets
people create value. And that’s really the trick in the modern Internet.”

A longtime observer of the digital landscape, he sees a world where the
Internet can no longer make money purely by extracting value. “Look at
what’s happening to Uber and its drivers,” he says. “People can’t be
squeezed anymore.”

Rushkoff calls for harnessing the hyper-local, hands-on applications
digital tools offer to introduce value-building to businessess that
currently focus on value extraction. His book advocates for replacing
corporate growth imperatives withlong-term sustainability.

“All you have to do is think of your business, the way you start it, the
way you run it and even the way you sell it – think of it less as something
to grow and flip and rather as something that has a sustainable business
model,” he suggests. “Think about your company like a family business
where, instead of trying to earn enough money so that you could pay for
your child’s future, [you] think about creating a business where your kid
would want to work.”

Throwing rocks at Google shuttle buses is, in Rushkoff‘s view, a
wrongheaded response to a system that is working as it was programmed to
work. Reprogramming the system is the way to effect change.

“People don’t realize how much power they have,” says Rushkoff. “And
that’s partly
because the real world has been dwarfed by this digital simulacra which
seems much more important than our reality, but its not – it needs to be in
service of our reality.”

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