Douglas RushkoffBesprekingen

I really wanted to like this book. I'm all for being on "team human" and being the master of our digital world (not the other way around). But ... this book felt more like an angry old man groaning about how terrible those computer-machines are.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good points in here and several concepts and ideas I highlighted to remember. But the weight of "here's why everything is terrible" to "here's what we can do about it" was so off-balance it made it unenjoyable to read.

I like Douglas Rushkoff's ideas around civilization and human-ness. I agree with him in general about the isolating effects of the way we "connect" today. What I didn't love about the book is that so many of his 100 "statements" just say things as if they're obviously true. I wasn't always so sure. I also think I could have gotten as much out of watching a few more of his videos on YouTube.

La élite tecnológica tiene un plan para sobrevivir al apocalipsis: dejarnos a todos atrás. Cinco misteriosos multimillonarios convocaron al teórico Douglas Rushkoff a un resort desértico para una charla privada. ¿El tema? Cómo sobrevivir al «evento»: la catástrofe social que saben que se avecina. Rushkoff llegó a la conclusión de que estos hombres estaban bajo la influencia de «la Mentalidad» («The Mindset»), una certeza al estilo de Silicon Valley de que ellos y su cohorte pueden romper las leyes de la física, la economía y la moral para escapar de un desastre de su propia creación, siempre y cuando tengan suficiente dinero y la tecnología adecuada. Rushkoff rastrea los orígenes de la Mentalidad en la ciencia y la tecnología hasta su expresión actual en las misiones a Marte, los búnkeres insulares, el futurismo de la inteligencia artificial y el metaverso. A través de personajes fascinantes, explica por qué quienes tienen más poder para cambiar nuestra trayectoria actual no tienen interés en hacerlo, y nos muestra cómo trascender el paisaje creado por la Mentalidad —un mundo vivo con algoritmos e inteligencias que recompensan activamente nuestras tendencias más egoístas— y redescubrir la comunidad, la ayuda mutua y la interdependencia humana.

sustainability and reasonable profit over unrealistic growth objectives that largely benefit the 1%

Probably you only need to read his essay about this, https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1, to get the key point: Today’s billionaires are using the fantasy of escape to explain why they should be continuing doing the things that will destroy the world for most of us and require an escape in the first place. But they can’t outrun climate change (or solve worries about keeping their security forces in line, perhaps with control collars or control over the food, or both), so we should probably use their fantasies as further reasons to stop allowing them to make things worse.½

Ein sehr spannendes Buch um begleitend zum BWL-Studium einen anderen Blick auf das Techno-Wirtschaftssystem zu erhalten. Rushkoff stellt vor allem The Mindest vor, eine Einstellung die im Silicon Valley entstanden ist und von vielen UnternehmerInnen aus der Techbranche geteilt wird. Dabei geht es darum, mit technischen Lösung den Problemen dieser Erde zu entkommen, ohne zu berücksichtigen, welchen Weg man dorthin nimmt und dass man viele dieser Probleme durch seine Lösungversuche selber verursacht. Der EInblick in die Welt der Reichen und Superreichen, die in erster Linie sich selbst und ihren Luxus im Falle einer Katastrophe schützen wollen, ist ernüchternd. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass aus ayuvasca-Zeremonien oder privaten Selbstversogerbunkern (deren größtes Problem die Loyalität des Personals ist) eine Lösung, die für die Menschheit und nicht nur das reiche Individuum sinnvoll ist, entstehen soll, ist äußerst fragwürdig. So ist das Buch auch ein Aufruf zu mehr Zusammenhalt, Zusammenarbeit und dem Hinterfragen und Überdenken der aktuellen System und eines auf unendlichem Wachstum basierendem Wirtschaftssystem.
Sehr anschaulich ist, dass Rushkoff nicht nur theoretische Beispiele nennt, sondern mit vielen der Personen direkten Kontakt hatte und anhand bekannter Persönlichkeiten die Phänomene erklären kann.½

This was really cool. The interpretation of the historical facts and the framing story were fascinating, and the art was astonishing. I got the library to buy this, but now I want my own copy.

This is a tough book to rate and I ended up giving it 4 stars but it is probably a 3.5. I liked a lot of it and felt very challenged by the ideas, but I do not totally buy into his ideas and in the end I felt like it was more of a lecture than instruction. I do not respond well to lecturing. I definitely like the idea of getting away from the "extraction economy" we currently live in and hope that we can get to a place where instead of horrible companies like Uber (with no employees but lots of "free lancers") we can get to where the drivers can directly sell their services and thus take all of the money they have actually EARNED. I doubt we will ever get there though, people value convenience way more than doing the right thing. Myself often included I must say.

I found the topic of this book fascinating, but struggled to get past the first hundred pages.

Factual inaccuracies aside, how can a person be this one sided? Of course there's a lot of scamming and bullshit in general in the modern world but when you support your arguments with farcical claims like how people were better off in the 10th century without any caveats do not expect anyone to take you seriously. You are blinded by your hatred. At one point the author claims corporations were the cause of witch burnings and the plague. A lot of mental gymnastics, all so as to avoid any responsibility for your actions. For shame.

Interesting ideas, somewhat overoptimistic and gets a bit repetitive driving home the same point over and over. Like many idealists whilst imagining the future world of plenty he assumes that everyone on the planet is as nice a person as he is. It's like those people have never seen a bell curve or experienced a prisoner's dilemma situation in real life.

This is a nitpick but it sometimes gets a bit new-agey with all those homely, artisan, hand-made, heirloom, tactile things and at the end goes off the rails pointing at the pope, the Amish and aboriginal farmers as sources of knowledge. I assume we should learn how to treat women from the Amish and how to profit from money laundering from the pope. The author's rose tinted glasses just don't do it for me.

This has some interesting points but is very hard to read. The author comes across as paranoid and smug and a conspiracy theorist. Do not recommend.

With a nod to Alvin Toffler, Rushkoff speaks to our relationship with time, one that has been shaped by both culture and technology. He denotes a marked shift in our focus from futurism to presentism, and while upon first blush this sounds like a vast improvement - evoking the ideas of Eckhart Tolle and The Power of Now - Rushkoff points out that the now we are chasing in our Facebook updates and Twitter feeds is a moment that has just passed somewhere else.

This book is a little old now, probably belonging more to the 2005-2015 era when we were still defining the "Web 2.0" trend. Still, I thought it had some lessons for 2020, primarily to slow down and breathe where you can, because humans aren't being blessed with more resources to handle the increasing glut of information and events happening to us. The author's jargon was original, if a little too precious.½

I enjoyed it, but not as much as I was hoping to.

The first approximately 150 pages detail the many, many problems with our social media platforms, and what they're doing to us and to our societies. None of them get a very in-depth treatment; while I learned some interesting new facts (eg. that not only do algorithms exist to better predict us, but also try to get us to behave in line with their predictions, which is a bit creepy), nothing was really outside of my expectations. Really if you understand why FaceBook and Twitter are bad for democracy, you won't find much to shake you.


What I wanted from the book was more about its premise: how we can join and support Team Human to overcome our collective problems by doing what we do best: cooperating. But that part of the book was too short to permit much depth.


There are some inspiring bits and pieces. I'll leave one here:

"We mistakenly treat the future as something to prepare for. Companies and governments hire scenario planners to lay out the future landscape as if it were a static phenomenon. The best they can hope for is to be ready for what is going to happen.

"But the future is not so much something we arrive at as something we create through our actions in the present. Even the weather, at this point, is subject to the choices we make today about energy, consumption, and waste.

"The future is less a noun than a verb, a thing we do." (p. 214)

I prefer Rushkoff's non-fiction, but I always feel the need to check out what he's doing with his comics work.

Mostly excellent, but badly let down by a couple of weaknesses. I got the feeling that Rushkoff was starting to get tired of writing these, so in a couple of places he started to spell out the 'rules' a little too explicitly for my liking, as if he was grasping for a way to bring it to a close. And then the ending itself was horrible! I understand the desire to have modern humans overthrow the gods, but the way he did just didn't add up. If one of the major themes of the series is the constant danger of slavery to greed & materialism, that ending was a triumph of those things presented as a triumph of humans.

After dipping with Vol 2, I think the Testament series hit its peak in Vol 3. The Job story struck me as particularly well done, both as a dramatic story in itself and as the best-working correspondence between ancient and modern timelines. The rest of the book comes pretty consistently close to that standard.

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

I found this the weakest of the four books in the generally impressive Testament series, mainly because the technobabble that is a minor irritant in Vol. 1 picks up in intensity, to the point of actually being quite distracting. Some of it's just that a little mysteriousness is just fine, especially in a book based on religious scriptures (some of the tech reminded me of midichlorians...), and some of it's that the specific things the tech was given credit for just don't make sense. I suppose I was hypersensitive to it because what Alan Stern is depicting as trying to do at the start is more or less the grotesque version of what my PhD was going to be all about, as perceived by people who don't understand the work and fear things they don't understand....

I found this the weakest of the four books in the generally impressive Testament series, mainly because the technobabble that is a minor irritant in Vol. 1 picks up in intensity, to the point of actually being quite distracting. Some of it's just that a little mysteriousness is just fine, especially in a book based on religious scriptures (some of the tech reminded me of midichlorians...), and some of it's that the specific things the tech was given credit for just don't make sense. I suppose I was hypersensitive to it because what Alan Stern is depicting as trying to do at the start is more or less the grotesque version of what my PhD was going to be all about, as perceived by people who don't understand the work and fear things they don't understand....

Mostly excellent, but badly let down by a couple of weaknesses. I got the feeling that Rushkoff was starting to get tired of writing these, so in a couple of places he started to spell out the 'rules' a little too explicitly for my liking, as if he was grasping for a way to bring it to a close. And then the ending itself was horrible! I understand the desire to have modern humans overthrow the gods, but the way he did just didn't add up. If one of the major themes of the series is the constant danger of slavery to greed & materialism, that ending was a triumph of those things presented as a triumph of humans.

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

Dan Dreiberg: What happened to us? What happened to the American Dream?
Edward Blake: "What happened to the American Dream?" It came true! You're lookin' at it...
- Watchmen (Allan Moore) - 1999 directed Zack Snyder.

Doug Rushkoff's premise cannot be more pertinent than now - very thought provoking , warning us of the pitfalls of technological advances which can end up becoming an existential threat to humanity itself . However the problem does not lie with technology i.e robotics , machine learning etc which is tipped at eliminating 40-50% of all jobs by 2040 affecting blue collar to executives ; but rather in the way current financial systems operate where near term profits trumps longterm sustenance .

Behemoths like amazon,facebook etc which started or at least claim to be forebear's of egalitarian , altruistic views of "bringing people together" eventually end up eliminating people all together and reducing them to data which can be mined by algorithms only to be sold to the highest bidder and creating a alternative economy of "likes","tweets" which do not create any value to human-life but rather perpetuate a quasi realistic realm of equality and connecting people .

I knew certain aspects like the concept of the modern day worker's alienation from production was something Marx had theorized centuries ago and eventual pathological neurosis with symptoms from apathy and lack of accountability , since the current "worker" has no real stake other than paying mortgage debts and keeping his head above water .
However Rushkoff's sites some important differences eg. how the operational model of Uber and SideCar differs and how to keep investors and general populous engaged meaningfully in the future , since we are no longer battling scarcity anymore - we have an abundance and but cannot profit from it .

Although I've been meaning to read Rushkoff for years, this is the first one of his books I've gotten around to. I had recently watched Adam Curtis' "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (a documentary in a similar vein), and had this book recommended to me by a friend.

The book is divided into 100 short sections. Although this format likely simplified the writing process, it tarnished readability by fragmenting the story arc.

With such a title, you might wonder—who is the other team? Rushkoff is careful not to choose just one, using the title more to evoke a "we're-all-in-this-together"-spirit. But if I had to choose just one, I would call it the machine. By no means is this a new analogy; the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff was fighting the machine within each of us a century ago. Familiar threads weave together the tapestry of this book; Rushkoff is aiming to create memes (even devoting a section to them), and prefers to rely on familiar concepts that will lend themselves to mainstream adoption, instead of seeking out new metaphors.

The book follows a familiar structure—speaking in the beginning to the conception of humanity and our tribalistic nature, moving into the forces shaping our societal moment (economics, artificial intelligence), concluding with a call to arms. During this circuit he touches on some issues close to my heart, such as alternative economics and regenerative agriculture. Many a reader will likely find issues to which they can relate.

For those of us shaping the world with our work and participation in larger systems (which is, all of us), this is a great book to get you thinking about ways that we can bring humanity back into our lives, before it is too late.

It's worth noting that this book is only the latest installment in Rushkoff's "Team Human" project, having produced a podcast featuring over one-hundred guests over the past few years. It will be interesting to see where he takes the project next, and how many team members he can recruit.