Archive

The Conversation #61 – Rainey Reitman

As we’ve moved into increasingly digital spaces, so online worlds, we’re moving away from your traditional physical spaces where you have public streets; where you have public squares; where people can go to protest, and into areas, if you would call them that, that are entirely controlled by corporations.

Douglas Rushkoff’s Advice for the Next President

I think it would be interesting if the President had to be a minister for a day and actually engaged with people’s spiritual bankruptcy, and think about, “Do I want to solve this by lying to them with another myth, or do I want to help them confront the truth?”

Institutions in the Age of Algorithms, and Why We Still Need Them

If you look at human history all the way through, we organize ourselves in different ways. Tribes, religions, guilds, states, more recently companies and networks. And what these institutions do is they sort of codify values and beliefs, and they they transport them across the generations. So we see this phenomenon that when you codify values in institutions, you give those values longevity.

Douglas Rushkoff WebVisions Portland 2016 Keynote

Google just has to grow. It has to keep growing. But Google grows at its own peril. Google grew so much that what happened? It outgrew Google. Google had to become what? Alphabet. Now what is Alphabet? Alphabet is not Google. Alphabet is a holding company. So Google’s new business as Alphabet is to do what? It’s to buy and sell technology companies. So, once a company becomes just too big to flip anymore, it becomes a flipper of other companies.

Mindful Cyborgs #54 — A Positive Vision of Transhumanism and AI with Damien Williams

I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily a problem within the next five to ten, fifteen, to maybe even twenty years. But my perspective on it has always been, because I am more philosophically focused in these things, why not try to address the issues before they arrive? Why not try to think about these questions before they become problems that we have to fix?

Mindful Cyborgs #55 — Magick & the Occult within the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams

We can see the hidden, occult operations of programmers, of people who are seeking to get very specific outcomes by operating on very particular components, ritually operating within very particular symbolic frameworks. People who are using particular coding languages, people who are using particular setups of hardware because for their purposes, for their end goals, these are the things that get the job done. These are the things that have the resonance and the capability, the power, the efficacy, to do the work.