[P2P-F] Fwd: Team Human Book Launch Party and Talk

[Michel Bauwens]

Rushkoff has a new book: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Team_Human

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 7:07 PM
Subject: Team Human Book Launch Party and Talk
To: <rushkoff at 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-rushkoff-and-siobhan-oconnor-tickets-54489484515

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
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-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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