Team Human

Playing for Team Human today: Penny Abeywardena.In part one of a two-part live Team Human show, Douglas is joined by New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs, Penny Abeywardena. Penny’s work looks at the synergies between local and global issues. Guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Penny is helping make New York City a significant player in global efforts to solve humanity’s most pressing issues of immigration, poverty, climate change, injustice, and inequality. In an era of virulent nationalism, racism at the border, and national disfunction; can cities like New York lead the way in solving global crises? Penny shares her insights and experiences, recorded live at the Civic Hall in Manhattan.Learn more the Mayor's Office of International Affairs here as well as programs discussed on the show; Global Vision | Urban Action and OneNYC. Douglas opens the evening with a monologue questioning the very concept of the nation state. Rushkoff asserts that community, rooted in soli

Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it’s not as simple as just “going offline.” How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology? Today’s show reaches back to the origins of what became known as “tactical media” — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.Team Human the manifesto is hot off the press! Order yours here. Ships in January. We've come to the end of the Team Human year! We are grateful for an amazing season

Playing for Team Human today: media and technology scholar Jamie Cohen. Jamie will be helping us understand the commodity of authenticity. His work looks at the ways authenticity is quantized and codified on media platforms such as YouTube. It’s a process through which trust and connection become instrumentalized as tools for the monetization and manipulation of audience attention. Jamie warns how, coupled with powerful algorithms, the gaming of authenticity threatens serious social consequences. Jamie joins Douglas to discuss his research, including his case studies of famous YouTubers like Tyler Oakley and Casey Neistat. Together they dig into the promise and peril of "populist" digital technologies; blogging, VR, and beyond. Jamie Cohen Is a professor at Molloy College where he started the New Media Program. He researches social media, memes, digital culture, and virtual reality. Learn more about Jamie’s work at http://www.jamesncohen.com/Douglas opens with a monologue on how we all became Russia

Playing for Team Human today: business reformer and the author of Reboot: A Blueprint for Happy Human Business in the Digital Age, Jason Stockwood. Jason will be showing us how to minimize the negative externalities of big business. It all comes down to the bizarre idea of providing goods and services that people actually need. Could such a radical business concept catch on today? Jason is striving to use business and technology to be part of the solution, rather than an extractive, negative force. Is there still room in capitalism to embed social justice?Rushkoff opens the show thinking about algorithms. What if we thought of algorithms as a kind of distorted biofeedback? What can we learn about humans from the ways in which algorithms fail?Music Credits: Opening the show, we're trying out a new Team Human original, recorded and performed by TH producer Stephen Bartolomei. Mid-show transition music thanks to Herkimer Diamonds and outro music thanks to the mighty Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-

Playing for Team Human today: activist, professor, podcast producer, journalist, and musician Chenjerai Kumanyika. Chenjerai joins Douglas in the basement Media Squat at CUNY Queens College for a conversation about why studying history matters more than ever as we fight for a just future. Chenjerai also shares a bit of his own unique personal history; how he went from working in an emergency room to a touring as an international hip hop artist, to his most recent work as an activist/journalist and now, college professor at Rutgers University. Drawing from these diverse contexts, Chenjerai helps us understand media and activism in a time of renewed racism and repression. A spirit of deep conviction and empathy animates Chenjerai’s work and shines through in this conversation with Douglas.Check out Chenjerai’s Peabody Award winning podcast, Uncivil, from GimletListen to Things I've Seen featured in today’s show, from Chenjerai’s group The Spooks."You won't believe the things I've seenFar beyond your wildes

Playing for Team Human today: Susan Basterfield and Anthony Cabraal. Susan and Anthony share the open secrets of bottom-up collaboration as we celebrate the publication of Enspiral’s book, Better Work Together. It's a conversation about the power of working together, building on ideas “good enough to try,” and creating a space where it’s “safe to fail.”Looking for collaborative and participatory ways to create social change? Enspiral has collected and opened up its learnings for all to replicate.Douglas opens with a monologue about moving beyond “master plan” interventions. What does democracy look like on a human scale?If you enjoy this episode, check out Episode 23 with Enspiral teammate Silvia Zuur:https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-23-silvia-zuur/And Episode 41 with Richard Bartlett:https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-41-richard-d-bartlett-there-is-no-enemy-team/You can find Team Human episodes and more from Douglas at Medium.com/@Rushkoff Music Credits: Mike Watt: beak-holding-letter-man , 

Playing for Team Human today: Jason Schmitt. Jason looks at the big business of for-profit academic publishing in his new documentary Paywall:The Business of Scholarship. Should the the world's research be locked behind closed doors? Jason makes the case for open access on today's Team Human.Opening the show, Rushkoff offers a monologue on the state of democracy. While our politicians and their propagandists have lost faith in our ability to vote purposefully, Team Human knows better. There has never been a more crucial time to get involved, not only at the polls next week but in civic life and community action beyond.Versions of Douglas's monologues can be found at https://medium.com/@rushkoff. We'll also be posting the entire back catalog in a new Team Human Collection at Medium.Visit Teamhuman.fm for complete access to the shows and patreon.com/teamhuman to sustain this show.Today we opened with intro music thanks to Mike Watt. The midroll featured Team Human Ep.31 Human Guest and friend R.U. Sirius. The s

Playing for Team Human today is playwright, actor, director, writer and teacher Jessica Blank. Jessica shares her insights into the process of building empathy through story. Through works such as her documentary plays the Exonerated and Aftermath, Jessica’s characters stare their audience directly in the eye, reach out to their heart, and open a pathway for transformation. This, Jessica explains, is the magic of being in shared space with people embodying real, human stories.Learn about her creative process, how she finds that opening for empathy, and how we might retrieve those human scale stories that are charged with the empathic power to bring about social change.Douglas opens the show with a monologue asking, "Is the nationalist, xenophobic, inward-turned America we’ve been projecting to the world as of late the real US?"On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro, Herkhimer Diamonds “Xmas Underwater” midway through, and our closing music is thanks to Mi

Playing for Team Human today is Fred Turner, professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Fred will be helping us recover the countercultural roots of digital media, while also imploring us to look toward the mundane, existing ways of staking our claim to authority over the world in which we live.Turner has done extensive research into the countercultural and even psychedelic roots of cyberculture, culminating in his extended biography of Stewart Brand titled From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner’s writing and research reaches even further back into the history of cyberculture with The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties where he explores and exposes the deepest origins of our touchscreen society. In this conversation, Fred and Douglas use these works as a jumping off point to a wide range of topics including a

Playing for Team Human today is systems thinker, writer, and filmmaker Nora Bateson. Nora will be telling us how to stop looking at things as objects and begin seeing the spaces and connections between them. It’s not too late to bring our species back from the brink! This conversation was recorded backstage in Palo Alto at the Institute For the Future's (IFTF) 50th Anniversary Gala.I first met at Nora Bateson at a general semantics conference where she was screening her then brand new film An Ecology of Mind about her father Gregory Bateson, one of the principle developers of cybernetic and systems theory. But as I got to know Nora and her work, particularly the book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, I realized she was taking what we think of as systems theory to a whole new and intrinsically human level. I ran into her again at the fiftieth anniversary conference of the Institute For the Future in Palo Alto where she gave an entirely optimistic yet grounded talk on how to bring an awareness of the limi

Playing for Team Human today a double header of people trying to effect real cultural change in very different ways. Up first is cultural anthropologist, host of the 2 Dope Boys podcast, and consultant Philip McKenzie. Philip makes the case for injecting corporate america with the values of social justice by subverting the machine from within. Following Philip is founder of Front Porch Forum, Michael Wood Lewis. Michael shows us how the net can be used to turn residents back into neighbors. It’s a story about the transformative power of witnessing everyday acts of neighborliness. For more on Philip McKenzie, visit https://philipmckenzie.com/Check out Philip’s podcast 2 Dope Boys. Episode 26 features Philip's conversation with Douglas Rushkoff! http://www.twodopeboyspod.com/blog/2016/9/1/on-point-26-douglas-rushkoff-throwing-rocks-at-the-google-busLearn more about Front Porch Forum and Vermont’s “Quiet Digital Revolution.” Visit https://frontporchforum.com/and check out this trailer for a new documen

Playing for Team Human today is platform cooperative activist, journalist, and author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, Nathan Schneider.With contemporary examples and historical context, Nathan makes the case that the co-op movement is not mere utopian idealism, but a very real and vital economic shift that is being harnessed for social good. It’s a conversation that embraces the co-op transformation as a path to a more just and equitable society and a more participatory approach to life overall.Douglas opens the show with a reflection on the limits of both our communication technologies and language itself. On Team Human, what matters is not just the content, but the context. Team Human is the “sound of engagement,” the “sound of solidarity.”If you enjoy this show, you might also like these episodes from our archive:Episode 68 on the P2P Foundation “The Commons is the Glue” w/ Stacco Troncoso. https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-68-stacco-troncoso-the-commons-i

What happens when our past becomes indelibly fixed in the online databases that shape our digital identities? Is there ever escape from the internet’s permanent memory for our blemishes and increasingly public misfortunes? Sarah Lageson studies the serious social ramifications and new forms of “digital punishment” meted out by the growth of online crime data. On today’s episode she discusses this topic, the focus of her forthcoming book, Digital Punishment - Uses and Abuses of Criminal Records in the Big Data Age. Her work looks at the way bias and errors in the criminal justice system become embedded within these digital records and how this is exploited by private data brokers. Lageson and Rushkoff then turn to the very human question of how we should treat each other in a society where every mistake or brush with the law becomes glued to our digital identity. At the very least, it’s a future where we’re going to have to cut each other a little slack.Guest Bio:Sarah is an Assistant Professor at the Rut

Playing for Team Human today, technology and social media scholar, founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, danah boyd.On today's episode, Douglas and danah talk about stepping outside of our narrow worldviews. How does technology amplify our biases? Where does human agency lie in complex, networked systems? What is the distinction between a "network" versus a "community?" These and many more questions explored in this deep-dive into social media and the relationship of digital technology to our everyday lives.From Douglas: "This week, my journey to make sense of digital society - and to challenge my own underlying assumptions about the promise and peril of social media - I visited my friend danah boyd. We met up at The Data & Society Research Institute, which she founded in 2014 to explore the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric and automated technologies. What makes her work unique is that it’s based less

One of the lies many of us have bought over the years is the American Dream. It seemed to work - at least back in the day of the GI bill and guaranteed mortgages. You work hard, go to college, and things will work out. You’ll be okay. And now, a lot of us who were privileged enough to be able to follow that path, are finding ourselves unable to reach that place of security anymore. It’s a new precarity - shared by almost everyone in America today - and what our guest Alissa Quart has beautifully documented in work at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and in her new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. In today’s conversation, Alissa deconstructs the individualist, pull yourself up by the bootstraps myth, and looks at the way the system has failed so many Americans. “It’s not your fault,” emerges as the theme from Alissa’s eye-opening research and reporting.Today’s show begins with a monologue from Douglas on how the dynamics of cult thinking might help us understand the seem

Team Human celebrates its 100th episode with this special “double feature,” recorded live before an audience at Civic Hall in Manhattan. Joining Douglas on the stage is writer, artist, and journalist Molly Crabapple. With just “compressed ash and wood pulp,” Molly brings to life images of injustice and makes visible that which is too often rendered invisible. Her paintings from Guantanamo, Istanbul, Syria, Puerto Rico, and recently immigration detention centers in Texas bear witness to the struggle of humans suffering under the oppression of empire. Molly explains how being an artist has afforded her unique access to these places otherwise closed off to cameras and reporters. “The best thing about being an artist who is a reporter is that you are constantly underestimated,” Molly explains. Molly and Douglas discuss both the subversive and connecting power of art in this thought-provoking Team Human conversation. Molly’s latest book is Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian Wara collaborati

How might altered states of consciousness deepen our empathy, imagination, and lead us find the other others? Writer, thinker, and explorer of consciousness, Eliott Edge looks at the ways in which virtual reality and psychedelics can create new frames of reference and enhance our connection to each other and the planet. In his latest book, 3 Essays on Virtual Reality: Overlords, Civilization, and Escape , Eliott engages with the ethical and existential questions of reality as a simulation. "If reality is a simulation, then we were born into this 'video game' to participate." It's a conversation on the future of media literacy how it must evolve to include "virtual reality literacy."Douglas opens today's show with an open letter and offer of service to Google. In wake of the recent news that Google employees refused to build censored search for China, what better opportunity to reevaluate its total mission and practice? Why not bring Team Human on board for guidance?More on Eliott: Eliott Edge is a multidiscip

Playing for Team Human today, “The Most Connected Man on Earth," author of Don’t Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours, Chris Dancy.Dancy has “pushed through” personal surveillance technology and has come back to teach us the lessons he has learned from years of intense firsthand engagement as a “mindful cyborg.”In this episode, perhaps the most candid and open conversation on Team Human to date, Dancy shares his personal story. He explains how technology saved his life, not by shielding him from nature and the body, but by amplifying the natural cycles with which he had lost touch.And while Chris’s journey offers both hope and wisdom, we also learn why sometimes you just need to place yourself in “Airplane Mode.”Learn more about Chris at http://www.chrisdancy.com/In this episode, Dancy and Rushkoff mention inspiration from Team Human Episode 58 guest Amber Case, author of Calm Technology.Douglas opens with a monologue on the power of true interactivity and feedback. This show feat

Special Announcement and Invitation! Free Show. Limited Tickets Remain.Details and Tickets:https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jace-clayton-and-molly-crabapple-with-douglas-rushkoff-team-human-live-tickets-48339958116?utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=new_event_email&utm_term=viewmyevent_buttonNext Thursday, August 16th, Douglas will be joined live on stage at Civic hall in New York City by two incredibly talented, powerful, and thoughtful human beings; artist, journalist, and author Molly Crabapple as well musician, artist and writer Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture.Molly latest published work Brothers of the Gun is an illustrated collaboration with Syrian War journalist Marwan Hisham. Jace Clayton, whose work as DJ Rupture has received international acclaim, is the author of Uproot Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture.It’s sure to be an inspiring evening of conversation and audience Q&A with these boundary pushing artists.Visit teamhuman.fm and click on live events fo

Playing for Team Human today, actress, movie star, visionary of the human-centered future, and — perhaps most importantly - Gracie the Wonderdog’s human partner, Parker Posey.Parker will be sharing what it’s like to play a supposedly evil character like Doctor Smith on the Netflix series Lost in Space, as well as some of the experiences, insight, and love of life that went into her definitively fabulous new book - You’re On An Airplane.Today’s show comes to you, ALIVE, from the headquarters of the inspiring charity Gods Love We Deliver in the otherwise too-expensive-for-actual-human-residents island of Manhattan in New York City.Team Human Patrons and Drip Supporters enjoyed reserved, early access tickets via Drip and Patreon. Go to TeamHuman.fm/support to support the show. There you’ll also find many member exclusives, including a limited time offer for Rushkoff’s forthcoming book, Team Human.Please review us on iTunes or on your favorite podcast player. Our intro music comes thanks to Discord Records and Fu