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.