#dougrushkoff — Public Fediverse posts

#AI #DougRushkoff
“... They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told the Guardian in an interview.

‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

"The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/28/artificial-intelligence-doug-rushkoff-tech-billionaires-escape-mode

#AI #DougRushkoff
“... They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told the Guardian in an interview.

‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

"The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/28/artificial-intelligence-doug-rushkoff-tech-billionaires-escape-mode

#AI #DougRushkoff
“... They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told the Guardian in an interview.

‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

"The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/28/artificial-intelligence-doug-rushkoff-tech-billionaires-escape-mode

@mike I'll admit I don't know as much about the specifics of the US energy mix as my own country. But I do remember #DougRushkoff saying the solar industry already employs more US workers than the coal industry. Which suggests that renewables are making more progress there than most people realize, despite decades ofmassive subsidies to the fossil fuel industries (especially when you include #MilitaryKeynsianism). (2/2)
@Wolf480pl

I'm listening to #DougRushkoff's interview with #FredTurner on #TeamHuman and its occurs to me that we are presented with a false choice, when it comes to the future of democracy. One the one hand, we're being asked to resuscitate the old, centralized model of the "nation-station", and on the other hand to abandon it in favour of a completely fluid, distributed model of P2P consensus over social networks. A model that we've seen lend itself to massive tyrannies of structurelessness. (1/2)

I'm listening to #DougRushkoff's interview with #FredTurner on #TeamHuman and its occurs to me that we are presented with a false choice, when it comes to the future of democracy. One the one hand, we're being asked to resuscitate the old, centralized model of the "nation-station", and on the other hand to abandon it in favour of a completely fluid, distributed model of P2P consensus over social networks. A model that we've seen lend itself to massive tyrannies of structurelessness. (1/2)

@lj_writes as for poverty, that pretty much began with industrialization, when people were forced off the land and into cities that didn't have the capacity to accommodate them. People look at the early industrial era and assume things were even worse before then. Actually, it was pretty much the low point for human quality of life in all of history. Pre-industrial serfs ate better and had more holidays than most modern people. See #DougRushkoff's book #LifeInc. for references on that. (2/2)

"[Zuckerberg's] notion that connecting the whole world on one network was so obviously a good idea that it justified whatever means were necessary to get there."
- #RogerMcNamee talking to #DougRushkoff on #TeamHuman

An otherwise laudable desire for universal human unity, without respect for #DueProcess, or community rights to be autonomous from larger structures of power, is the essence of Empire. #KenWilbur pointed this out in 'A Brief History of Everything'. Democracy is network, not empire.

@aral could I suggest an addition?

> "Is owned and controlled by individuals ..."

... *and our communities*

The #NeoLiberal myth of the atomized, sovereign individual was a crucial part of the sale pitch for the centralized "social media" #DataFarms, which claimed it was providing a "democratic" platform for "peer-to-peer" interactions between them. #SmallTech needs to assert that cooperation is essential to individual freedom, and sovereignty is a team sport, to paraphrase #DougRushkoff.

@humanetech was that expert #DougRushkoff by any chance? I've heard him tell stories that sounds similar to this on his #TeamHuman podcast
@paulfree14

@clacke private debt implies usury, which implies that there is extra value to be extracted as a "return on investment". Enough to make it worth the risk of defaults. With a lot of latent economic energy, the returns are not high enough, or the scale not big enough, or the timeframe for result not short enough, to interest the lenders who are sitting on all the gold on behalf of the 1%. Besides, as #DougRushkoff explains in #ThrowingRocks... this just reinforces the financialization of power.

@msh in that case it's pretty easy to know; it was killed on purpose by the central government. The monopoly on issuing currency is almost as important to the essence of the state as the monopoly on the use of force, and as important as the power to tax. In every country, states have sabotaged or outright banned local currencies, to enforce this power. #DougRushkoff goes into that history in his book #LifeInc.
@clacke

@z428 I think we're talking past each other. I'm objecting to web ads and tracking. I have no problem with charging users for premium services, like #Pinboard.in, the new #FlickR, #Loomio, and so on. Also Vulture Capitalists are the people who use capital as a tool to extract value from online service companies, as described by #DougRushkoff in his #ThrowingRocks book, not the people running the services.
@pootz

@lynnesbian I remember #DougRushkoff talking about how weird it was to him that within a couple of generations, US Jews have gone from being an excluded target of #WhiteSupremacy, to being included in the "white" category (Doug is Jewish). I imagine US folks of Italian and other non-WASP ethnic descent must have noticed this too.

Note that this was 3 years before #DougRushkoff published #ThrowingRocks, and 4 years before @aral did his talk about unicorns
(https://2017.ind.ie/excuse-me/),
but it was motivated by a similar disillusionment with the #VultureCapitalist model of financing internet services.

In his opening monologue, #DougRushkoff says the 3 part documentary series #OperationInfektion is as significant as the #AdamCurtis series 'Century of the Self', which is high praise IMHO;
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

@z428 absolutely. I've been bashing on about this for years, even since most of the global #Indymedia network collapsed under its own weight. #DougRushkoff explains the problem with relying on VC-funded startups as our default organizing model really well in his 'Throwing Rocks ...' book. This is why I'm very excited by the #PlatformCooperative movement.
@jcbrand

@mlg fair point, but notice most people don't use local currencies at all, even when they are trading with strangers in their local area. Why not? Because they've been actively supposed by states at many points in history. #DougRushkoff goes into this history in detail in 'Life Inc.' #DavidGraeber goes one better in 'Debt', by describing how money (coins) and taxes were invented simultaneous by states, to provision the first standing armies. Local trading systems interfere with this, so ...

I know I keep pimping 'Throwing Rocks ...' by #DougRushkoff, but it just does such a good job of explaining why corporate hierarchies and "investment" extract value out of things, rather than adding it, leading to the results described above. As does The Corporation:
https://kino.social/the-corporation-2003/

@adfeno #DougRushkoff's monologue on a recent edition of #TeamHuman is kind of relevant here. He's talking about the image of the US projected to Europe during the Cold War.
> "The problem was that the image of America the agencies [State Department, CIA, US Information Agency etc] were projecting to the world, wasn't the image many Americans had of themselves".
https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-108-jessica-blank/

#DougRushkoff recently interviewed the film-maker of Paywall, Jason Schmitt, for the #TeamHuman podcast:
https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-109-jason-schmitt/

@Shamar @RandomDamage @Wolf480pl @bob
> Give me a better theory that explain these facts better,

How about the theory that the problem is corporations and venture capitalism, not open source. I suggest you watch the documentary 'The Corporation':
https://archive.org/details/The_Corporation_

... read 'Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus' by #DougRushkoff.

... and check out Dymitri Kleiner's work on "venture communism":
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=L01iiJz8Thc

#DymitriKleiner pitching his #VentureCommunism concept at #SigInt 2010:
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=L01iiJz8Thc

This is worth a watch even if you consider yourself pro-capitalist and anti-communist, because as he explains at the start, the way he uses these terms is *totally* different from the way you do. #DougRushkoff presents pretty much the same criticisms of the effects of #VentureCapitalism on digital tech in his 'Throwing Rocks ...' book, but with a pro-business, anti-corporate framing.

@pho4cexa As #DougRushkoff points out in 'Life Inc', corporation have only existed for a few hundred years, out of thousands of years of human history. The idea they will continue to dominate forever just seems ... far-fetched to me. Plus, as #DavidGraeber lays out in 'Debt', the corporation, like the net, is the amalgamation of many different technologies; cash, code of laws, money, double-entry book-keeping, limited liability, sharemarkets, etc. As tech keeps moving, they will be obsoleted

@ohyran "I think the impulse to save the world is quite sincere. But people get the impulse to save the world and the impulse to do well for the company a bit tangled up with each other. Of course, that's an old Protestant tradition."

He even (almost) diagnoses the disease correctly in this bit, although #DougRushkoff diagnoses it with much more clarity, details, and examples, in 'Throwing Rocks ...', and without the weirdly misplaced reference to Calvinism (that's not the problem here).

Rich from #Loomio interviewed by #DougRushkoff. Some good background about where Loomio came from and some great insights about how practical consensus decison-making works
http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-41-richard-d-bartlett-there-is-no-enemy-team/

“Indeed, just as the Renaissance retrieved the values of empire from ancient Rome, and re-birthed them as capitalism and industrialism, might the digital era constitute a renaissance of its own? And if it does, what values will it retrieve?” - #DougRushkoff, #OursToHackAndOwn