SPOS #850 – Douglas Rushkoff On The Harmful Effects Of Technology On Our Future

October 23, 2022 Laura Bosch 87 Views

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Welcome to episode #850 of Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast.

Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast – Episode #850. I’ve said it before… I will say it again: Douglas Rushkoff is – without a doubt – one of the smartest humans beings on this earth that I get to call a friend. Douglas is back with another compelling book about technology and how it could impact us (in a very negative way) if we don’t start making serious moves… right away. The new book is called, Survival of the Richest – Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, and it goes well below the depth of bunkers that these tech billionaires have built to save themselves should everything sideways. In this book, Doug traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters — master programmers who want to remake the world from scratch as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced that incentivized capitalism is the solution to environmental disasters — Doug explores why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Doug is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He hosts the popular Team Human podcast, Rushkoff has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Team Human, Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed. He is also the person who made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like and The Merchants of Cool. Douglas coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. Let’s dig into the present and future of tech. Enjoy the conversation…