What is a robot? Are robots our friends? Does the term “friend” even apply? So begins this week’s episode of Team Human with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case . Amber and Douglas look at how algorithmically programmed systems of automation and control might just be turning us into the robots. Case’s recent book, Calm Technology Design For the Next Generation of Devices proposes another way. How might we flip the script on systems that compress and atomize our every move? How might we use our tech...
Oct 11, 2017•54 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That . On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change. Richard’s work calls on us to look at the fundamental ethical problems underlying climate issues such as overshoot, unsustainable growth, and inequality. Heinbe...
Oct 04, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Professor Steve Fuller. Fuller teaches Sociology at the University of Warwick. In his recent book, Humanity 2.0 , Fuller embraces a future vision in which technological and medical advancement will enable humans to evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations. Steve will use this concept to teach us what distinguishes transhumanist from posthumanist projects, and why such thinking should be taken seriously. While Rushkoff and Fu...
Sep 27, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this week's Team Human, Douglas is out on the road in Austin, Texas where he caught up with longtime friend and cyberculture pioneer, Jon Lebkowsky . Jon and Douglas first look back on the promise of the early cyber revolution, and then look forward to the ways in which those quirky fringe elements might be folded back into the work of promoting justice, solidarity, and even a bit of ambiguity... Whether manifested in platform cooperatives, consensus building tools like Loomio , or in the sp...
Sep 20, 2017•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast When was the last time you found yourself truly bored? Have you forfeit those nooks and crannies in the day when you used to let your mind wander aimlessly in a daydream? On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Manoush Zomorodi , host of the popular WNYC Studios podcast, Note to Self . On Note to Self, Manoush initiated a series of listener experiments aimed at breaking the influence of our digital devices and networks on our lives. Those social experiments led her to u...
Sep 13, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week is a special episode of Team Human. We are sharing an excerpt of a panel discussion recorded on location at IBM Watson in New York from August 2015, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff and produced by our friends at Virtual Futures in London. Douglas was joined by philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller, tech entrepreneur and ethicist Martine Rothblatt, IBM Watson researcher Michael Karasick, and philosopher of technology, Dan O'Hara. Patreon subscribers have exclusive access to the full, unedited...
Sep 06, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Consider a text message in which you are deciding where to meet for dinner with a friend. As you go back and forth in that stream of abbreviated communication, you suggest, “Let’s eat Italian,” to which your friend responds “Fine.” The one-word text sends you into a state of alarm. Did they mean “fine” as in “great,” or “fine” as in “Fine, you win , we can eat where you’d like”? Somewhere in this chain of communication trust, has been lost. Playing for Team Human today are William Softky ...
Aug 30, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Elizabeth Stewart, founding executive director of Civic Hall Labs , empowers technologists who put people first, amplifying the “civic” of civic tech. On today’s show, Stewart joins Douglas Rushkoff for a conversation about technology innovations whose value is measured in their contribution to the public good. It’s a type of thinking that asserts the means of tech innovation to be just as important as its ends . We’ll learn about Elizabeth's work and how Civic Hall labs is fostering participato...
Aug 23, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is Alexandra Juhasz. Juhasz brings her extensive and diverse work as a filmmaker, media critic, and feminist activist to the Team Human round table. On today's show, Douglas and Alexandra explore the dangers of a media landscape that amplifies the grotesque and sensational. They also look at how human agency and autonomy are threatened on our hypercommercialized media platforms. Drawing on her commitment to feminist values, Alex encourages an embrace of the "situated...
Aug 16, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Think back to the last time your eyes were opened wide, your mouth agape, and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end as you took in a profound or inspiring sight… On today's episode of Team Human, Douglas is joined by Michael Frederickson, lead technical director at Pixar Animation, to talk about this deeply human experience of awe. It's a conversation that spans the “awful” to the "awesome" and all those ambiguous spaces in-between. Rushkoff and Frederickson dig into questions of techn...
Aug 09, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human is systems thinker, currency designer, and social hacker Arthur Brock . Art joins Douglas to talk about how currency is less a thing you own and more a way of sharing. It’s a conversation that poses a crucial question of both money and cryptocurrencies alike–how might we design new exchanges that embody values of social and environmental betterment, rather than extraction and exploitation? Rushkoff begins today’s show with a monologue about Instagram’s recent additio...
Aug 02, 2017•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the birth of the internet and advance of digital networks, we’ve been promised everything from creative cooperation and digital democracy, to the end of work and a new abundance of leisure time. It’s a promise of a techno-utopia that persists today. Playing for team human today, Dr. Richard Barbrook challenges this imaginary future by unearthing the neoliberal underpinnings of Silicon Valley’s vision of progress. Rushkoff and Barbrook engage in a conversation that both uncovers the ec...
Jul 26, 2017•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on Team Human, the conclusion of Douglas's soul-searching conversation with friend and author Walter Kirn. Together, Kirn and Rushkoff explore how disingenuously promoted concepts such as “creative destruction” are used to replace human civilization with a business plan. What would it mean to maximize human virtues of compassion or intelligence instead of machine virtues like speed and extraction? Is there a higher power, and do we need one in order to value one another? Check out Walt...
Jul 19, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today, author and social critic Walter Kirn. Walter and Douglas engage in a two-part conversation that questions the so-called “evolution” of technology. Just how much of our humanity are we willing to surrender to our devices? Why do we deem our own replacement by computer programs to be the inevitable path of progress? And whose progress are we actually talking about? We’ve broken this conversation into two parts. Tune in next week for Part 2. Visit walterkirn.com to lea...
Jul 12, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, a special holiday episode featuring conversations with Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective plus worker cooperative organizer Esteban Kelly. We launched Team Human a little less than a year ago with little fanfare or promotion. Steadily we’ve assembled a formidable team of listeners via word of mouth, retweets, and person-to-person conversation. We’d like to take this week to introduce our more recent listeners to two conversations that set the tone for Team Hum...
Jul 05, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is permaculturalist Adam Brock, author of Change Here Now . Adam joins Douglas for a conversation about how humanity is integrally connected to natural ecosystems. “Nature is a textbook,” Adam explains, and so by paying close attention to ecological systems, we can better understand ourselves as part of a greater whole. It’s a theme that serves as the springboard into a conversation not only about the ways we grow food, but also about community, trust, and the deeper...
Jun 28, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human is Ramesh Srinivasan, professor and author of Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World . Today, information travels around the globe in an instant, and connection to far away people and places is merely a click away. Yet the prevalence of filter bubbles, the rise of political extremism, and the consolidation of network power into the hands of behemoth companies like Facebook and Google portend a growing dis connection in society. Ramesh Sriniv...
Jun 21, 2017•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today, master of human connection and consensus, Loomio co-founder Richard Bartlett. Bartett, hailing from New Zealand, stopped by Douglas's home studio while on a community organizing workshop tour of the US. Bartlett and Rushkoff discuss the challenges of building consensus in an all too often top-down, winner-takes all society. Together we'll learn how Loomio, inspired by the general assemblies of Occupy Wall Street, strives to amplify collaborative power and foster mor...
Jun 14, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is Daniel Berninger. Berninger is a communications technologist who brings his unique, behind-the-scenes insight to a discussion about what distinguishes human-centered technological advancement from today’s all too prevalent machine-focused visions for the future. Berninger, who played an instrumental role in the creation of VoIP, or voice over internet communications technology, offers a critique of systems whose power is inflated by machine agendas. Berninger also...
May 31, 2017•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Just getting a thousand humans into a room together to sit and watch other humans act out something on stage is the miracle. Playwright J.T. Rogers understands why the very act of doing live theater is so hopeful, and applies this hope to intractable problems like the Middle East conflict - with surprising, and Tony-nominated results . Also, a monologue from Douglas Rushkoff on the Manchester bombing, and what it means when a fatal stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati can be considered the go...
May 24, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s Team Human, we discover one of the reasons why knowing history matters. William Hogeland , author of Autumn of the Black Snake , tells the story of how and why the US Army was created - not to defend our borders, but to wipe out indigenous nations. And all that, in an effort to satisfy the growth mandate embedded in our economy by heroes of the neoliberal left like Alexander Hamilton. Make no mistake: Hogeland is a live wire. The show opens with a related monologue from Rushkoff a...
May 17, 2017•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human is Micah Sifry. Next month Micah will host the 2017 Personal Democracy Forum . On today’s show, Micah and Douglas discuss how the stakes are higher than ever for bringing people into an active civic life and engagement with democracy. Looking beyond the 2016 electoral postmortems and whodunits, Micah and Douglas talk about the power of humans breathing together–conspiring–in real space and time, while also leveraging technologies of connection, to build an actionable progr...
May 10, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is musician Tessa Lena . Tessa's music explores the tension between technology and human agency. In her songs and in this interview, Tessa playfully challenges robotic conceptions of humanity. Tessa offers a compelling argument for power of music to call us out of those automatic, quantified notions of self and society. Both Lena and Rushkoff pose essential questions; Is technology being used to extend our human potential? Does the embedded economic agenda driving te...
May 03, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is Pia Mancini. Pia is a visionary democracy activist who co-founded the Net Party in Argentina and DemocracyOS . Today Pia joins Douglas to talk about her new project Open Collective . Open Collective is platform that helps small, non-traditional organizations to collectivize, raise funds, and manage expenses in a networked and transparent fashion. Open Collective is a useful resource for listeners who are trying to build sustainable funding for their local co...
Apr 26, 2017•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is author and Bloomberg Businessweek and New Yorker columnist David Sax. Sax’s latest book Revenge of the Analog, Real Things and Why They Matter explores the resurgence of the tactile, human-to-human, brick-and-mortar encounters that characterize the analog experience. How might our rekindled love of vinyl LPs, local book stores, and face-to-face interaction help reground society to the physical realities of land, labor, and our fellow humans? Sax and Rushkoff explo...
Apr 19, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today, memeticist and social change agent Laszlo Karafiath Ph.D. Laszlo, memetic engineer for Culture 2 , shares his analysis of the weaponized media now paralyzing so much of our thought, and tells us what we have to do - collectively - to build our immunity to thought viruses. Together Karafiath and Rushkoff look at the ways we might redeploy memetic power to foster positive social change. You can learn more about Karafiath's work at www.purposeandplay.com or follow...
Apr 12, 2017•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast A unique episode of Team Human, on today's show Douglas Rushkoff is joined by longtime friend and counterculture legend R.U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), founding editor of Mondo 2000 . R.U. will help us evaluate the place of the counterculture in the digital landscape. Is counterculture even possible today? Is humanity itself the counterculture as we resist increasingly quantified and abstracted lives? Together R.U. and Rushkoff playfully and thoughtfully examine these questions while asserting th...
Apr 05, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is Bas van Abel. Bas is the founder of Fairphone, which began with the radical idea that technology should be built without exploiting human laborers and destroying the planet. Van Abel's experiment of building a "fair" phone has taken him around the world to witness first-hand the lives made invisible in the digital supply chain. Bas and Douglas talk about how putting people first requires both a redesign of economic systems and a reshaping of our individual perspec...
Mar 29, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is media historian and theorist Caroline Jack . Caroline is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Data + Society Research Institute . In today's episode Caroline and Douglas explore how powerful people and institutions shape networked civic life through media and communications technology. Caroline has us think deeply and broadly about corporate personhood, imagined machines, epistemological chaos… in other words–media and persuasion. You can find more of Caroline Jack’s wo...
Mar 22, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Playing for Team Human today is digital media artist, activist, and filmmaker Alex Rivera. Known for his acclaimed 2008 feature film, Sleep Dealer , Rivera's work explores the contradictions of a free-flowing globalized economy and the simultaneous stigmatizing of immigrant laborers and erecting of border walls. Together, Rivera and Douglas Rushkoff interrogate the rhetoric of the digital "global village." We'll learn about what Rivera calls "Dronification," a highly connected, yet ever-mo...
Mar 15, 2017•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
