Ruskhoff is in a privileged position – He makes his living as a speaker (let’s face it – books are publicity for the speaker circuit) – and he’s established himself as a “thought leader.”
While the book is a bit of ramble – it reads like blog postings or bits of a Ted talk – it’s clear that he’s a voracious reader, and he absorbs concepts and streams of information to synthesize and develop persuasive arguments that skirt the edge of radical recommendations that might get him voted off the Marketworld acceptable speaker’s list. A lot of what he writes seems kind of “insider-y” for those of us who have been in the tech world (at the Commonwealth Club, he and the moderator chuckled about the wonderful days of Well.com, for example).
Rushkoff has made a living doing what I wish I had the guts to do since college when a respected sociology professor discouraged me from applying to a MA program in Chicago focusing on pop culture and media as “a fad.” In the first dot com boom – my inner sociologist was totally wigging out on the possibilities of technology and the strangely predictable boom and collapse, increasing bureaucratization and specialization and efforts to “monetize” everything and to “gamify” things to trap users into addictive and exploitive behavior patterns.
I almost have to say that I enjoy the end notes more than the book itself – unfortunately, he doesn’t use any sort of citations in the text to link users back to these notes which would improve the experience a lot.
He makes a lot of generalizations but since he’s going for a visionary approach – I think that’s acceptable. Some of what he says strikes me as overly cynical (you can see that in my notes) and I don’t agree with all of his assessments. He has a fairly linear, causal chain assessment of developments in human society and communication. Hindsight, as we all know, is 20-20.
For example “Before language, there was no such thing as a lie.” Really? So, we’re to believe that pre-language cave drawings were entirely accurate? Some cave artist never fudged a few extra kills or such?
Again – as with “Winners Take All” – this author is focusing on a process of co-optation that is inherent in the development of non-distributive, hierarchical human societies. Of course, web technology has been co-opted to commerce – that’s what commerce does. We’re so immersed in the pursuit of the success and ideals of Capital that business language and processes are saturating all spheres of our lives.
While I don’t necessarily believe his dark vision – that computers are programming us to learn how to replace us – but he says some interesting things and overall the book is very thought provoking. He encourages us to look at the underlying forces and ideologies driving and shaping the requirements of the world around us: “Technology is not driving itself. It doesn’t want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology.”
“Human ideals such as autonomy, social contact, and learning are again written out of the equation, as the algorithms’ programming steers everyone and everything toward instrumental ends.”
Ruskhoff made a great argument somewhere in this book as well as an NPR interview about education for education’s sake – it’s necessary for people to learn, explore and get exposure to a wide range of ideas and to have the space to experiment intellectually and develop their own perspectives about things. This is a similar argument to “The Coddling of the American Mind” – and Ruskhoff takes this a step further, eschewing the push to make education a place where people are trained to join the corporate world and to be “useful.” Education is meant to make you interesting, to make you a human, and to teach you how to interact with adults who have different ideas. Education is also not meant, as detailed on “Coddling,” to protect you from ideas you find offensive or “triggering.”
Finally – he gets around to the meat of his arguments and his recommendations. He talks about how capitalism as it is implemented is the enemy of commerce because it extracts value and gives it to remote shareholders. The solutions for underemployment revolve around “getting everyone ‘jobs,’ as if what everyone really wants is the opportunity to commodify their living hours” and punishing the hungry or homeless for “not contributing” even though we don’t really need everyone to be working full time with the abundance we have in our society and economy.
“We must not accept any technology as the default solution for our problems.” And – further – question everything around you: commercial media, mainstream diversions – what are the values they are promoting? So much of the models around us leave us unable to cope in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty – but increasing our prosocial behavior and interdependence can give us the resilience and resources to solve so many of our contemporary problems.
“Transcending the game altogether means becoming a spoilsport – someone who refuses to acknowledge the playing field, the rules of engagement, or the value of winning” – much like the shaman (or hermit) who lives apart from the tribe. Delete the app, leave your phone at home, connect with people because “Weirdness is power, dissolving false binaries and celebrating the full spectrum of possibility. Eccentricity opens the gray area where mutations develop and innovations are born.”
Finally, Rushkoff’s key recommendation: “Just as we can derive an entire ethical framework from the single practice of veganism, we can apply the insights of permaculture practitioners to education, social justice, and government: look for larger patterns, learn from elders, understand and leverage natural cycles.”
“The greatest threats to Team Human are the beliefs, forces, and institutions that separate us from one another and the natural world of which we are a part.”
“We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe.”
“Find the others.”
REVIEW: Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff
RATING: 3-stars
© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.
