#124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/399bae4ff478cba2

We contaminated Twitter. The internet. We contaminated the internet.
These were play spaces. You know, they they built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like stories.
fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and took a network where every node is going, Hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural. And my advice to the regular listener reader person, the person like me is
Honestly go to real
media for your information. Go to social media for your play.
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Douglas Rushkoff is here today.
Dr. Rushkov is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways that people, cultures,
and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values.
He's the professor of media theory and digital economics.
At C U N Y.
Queens.
Where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism.
Rushkoff was named one of the ten most influential intellectuals by MIT.
I wanted to talk to him because I wanted to explore some of the ways that we are shaped by technology and also the ways that we're shaping technology.
As you can imagine, we talk about media, culture, misinformation, and technology. I don't always agree with him, but we have a pretty good conversation.
It's time to listen.
And learn.
Well first I I want to start with what are you obsessed with right now?
I'm
Obsess with what feels like
A a totalizing polarizing
Fascistic environment.
Right, politics aside, whatever people's views, I feel like there
Getting so
Bizarr entrenched.
Everyone.
You know, has this sort of uh
Almost as might makes right.
Uh
enforcement of values and ideologies. There's a
Uh
Stiffness.
to everybody's approaches and whether it's their business plans or their social agendas or
I I used to think, oh, you know, when when when I'm kind of on this side of things, I look at oh look at that other side, they're being all stiff. Or if I'm on that side, then I look at this side and go, Oh, they're being all stiff. Then when I get
kind of more McCluin esque about it.
You know, McClure used to write a lot about media environments that we kind of live. Neil Postman did too, the idea that culture is like the the medium on which the bacteria grows, that somehow we're in an atmosphere.
of this kind of uh extremism and polarization. And then I I'm obsessed with how do we engender a more
human softer more flexible
Empathetic.
approach to living
when we're in an environment that's this
Rigid.
And whether or not we'll be able to do that, or whether humanity itself is just gonna succumb to this to this kind of bizarre operating system.
Talk to me about that extreme polarization. Like is is technology creating that or is it amplifying something already within us? Or how is that happening?
You know, it's hard to know whether the the the media and technologies that emerge
uh emerge and and are successful because of a pre existing cultural
Affordance.
For that thing.
or whether the new technology or medium comes and then makes us all like that.
So you could say the printing press and the book led to
All the sorts of
uh individual perspectives and individualism that then characterize the Renaissance.
Or you could say people were kind of getting into the idea of being individuals and they made things like the book and the printing press and perspective painting popular because that's what they were ready for.
Or you could say television was a global medium and brought everyone together, and that's why we got that kind of Oprah Winfrey like hands across the world crashing of the Berlin Wall.
Or today.
You could say digital technology is a one zero yes no, you know, right, wrong.
Uh uh choose one of the above cookie cutter
uh medium so
uh people's lives and politics and approaches end up getting that way.
Or
Were we already kind of in a technocratic scientistic culture that had killed God since Nietzsche, and the computer comes along, and of course, there we are. There's the realization of that.
So I would say it's like both kinda
affect each other. But what you have to do then is like with so you get
We we get what we asked for, right? We got our post God Nietzschean computer automated soul killing auto tuning technology. And now we okay, how do we uh mitigate some of that? How do we retrieve that which is being left behind in this new environment?
Talk to me a little bit about that. How do we do that? How how do we use these tools to
not only have autonomy, but also create a better empathetic understanding of alternative points of views and an interdependency with other people.
Well, I would say first by not insisting that we find the answer to these tools in these tools.
every conference I go to now is that how are we going to kind of retrofit the blockchain to solve the problems of the internet? Or what wellness apps can we create to help people manage their screen time? And it might be that technology's
Digital technologies are not the solution for digital technologies. It may really be as simple as Sabbath, you know, having having a day when you're not plugged in. Not to be anti tech, but
We can bring our technologies along with us in certain ways, but not in other things. I was I was just watching, you know, my daughter got home from this party and
all people were doing at the party.
was, you know, typing into their phones and taking Instagram pictures and all that. And it used to be you'd go to a party, I mean in the old days, even a big important party, and there might be some press there.
or a photographer there. And that was like they were working.
They were working the party. They had to cover the party.
for their medium, you know, because Madonna showed up or, you know, whoever some person so they're they're there, you know. But now I look and I see
Wow.
All these kids are working journalists in their life. They're reporting. And I get it. And then you go to your device because you want to know what's happening, I guess, but you're not in touch with what's happening. You're reading reports from amateur journalists.
on their day, on what's going on. It's this this I'm talk about obsession, this obsession with recording everything, but they're not they're not even and I wrote about this, you're not even
uh living in living in the present. So I I I'm really looking forward to a day when people start
appreciating their experiences for their own sake again and realizing that if you're reporting on the party, you're not at the party. If you're reading about the party, you're not wherever you really are, that that there's there's this, and no one thinks of it this way, but it's like everyone's become a
journalist. Either when they're in an experience, they're writing about it as a journalist. And when they're not somewhere, they're reading the journalism, the diaries,
Of everybody else. And that's it's fine. I mean, spend an hour reading people's diaries, but then
You know, what do you want to do?
Uh I wanna go to that comment you made on journalism.
and everybody sort of being a journalist and how that relates to the information we're consuming about misinformation and facts and uh our perception into the world.
Like if if we're consuming information by amateur journalists or people who believe that they're journalists,
And they're all reporting something and
They're reporting through their lens, uh, you know, without sort of any training and and obviously bias and we're existing in this world of sort of, I would say, misinformation, uh, which is intentionally possibly misleading, but there's also all of this information out there that is sort of
uh generally irrelevant or high noise to signal. How do we filter that? How do we think through that?
One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own
expression. You know, I
I remember when Blogger came out and Blogger was like the first
one of the first web blogging platforms. Evan Evan Williams of later of Twitter did it.
And
I was t I was at a conference talking to Evan about it. It was just a baby platform and he's like, Oh, are you gonna use this? And I was like, Wow.
I don't think I should use it. I'm already a journalist. I've got you know, I'm on the New York Times syndicate. It wouldn't be fair for me.
This is
A play space.
You know, it's for it's for, you know, amateurs in the best sense of the word, for them to do it and talk. It's a social network. It's not for some professional journalist to be
You know, I have a platform. It's not right.
And he was like, No, no, it's for everybody. It's for everybody. You could use it the way you use it.
And you know, I I played around with it some and I mean I ended up with a blog somewhere on my on my website, I guess. But what I started to feel like was yes, it's great for everyone to be able to type what they're feeling and stuff, but just because you can type doesn't mean you can write.
Right. And just because you can write doesn't mean you should write. It was like in the old days, the old days of the late eighties, early nineties, the only people who could write a book
Were the people who were willing to sit and type.
Oh book.
You know, when it was hard.
You couldn't just cut and paste things and
was a whole big thing. Uh or even on a Commodore sixty four, it was still a whole big thing. Uh and and it's like the tools made it really easy for people to type lots of words, but that didn't necessarily make them
uh writers any more than, you know, Adobe Photoshop makes somebody into a graphic designer. Yeah. You know, an amateur can now do some cool effects, but when you look at something that's really done by a real
Art, you can see, oh, that's design. When you read something by a real writer, you can go, oh, well, that person knows how to write. The same thing is true of journalism. There's this stuff that you learn either in a journalism class or in journalism school about sourcing.
And what does it mean to have two sources for everything? And what is it, what is off the record, what is on the record. How does all that work?
And
Uh
I I remember in the early days of the net, I would go and talk at high schools and colleges and the question I would
Always get was you know.
What makes what makes your journalism any better than my journalism?
Why should you have all these readers and I don't?
And I'm like
fucking sophomore in college just spouting off. You know what I mean? And and I've worked at this. You know, I didn't answer it like that, but that's the real thing. And and the the tools create the illusion that that what we say matters or that because our text
Can look all like it's in a sub stack, that means it has equal value to everything else that's up there. And it just doesn't.
Um the the thing that's gonna happen, I guess, is as deep fakes and other
other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish between what is being said and what is not. We're going to again, just as we did before any video existed, we're gonna rely on the integrity of a journalist and the integrity of a publication.
for uh to to measure the reality level of something. And we're not there yet. We're still just looking for the opinion that that makes us feel
you know, the most delightfully angry than we are, whatever the hard truth might be.
Well, it used to be that we held up organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as arbiters of sort of fact from fiction, and that seems to be coming
Increasingly hard as
the media landscape for how we tell stories and the attention culture.
um sort of pervades. How do you think about that?
Yeah.
I mean
As a uh someone who's been traditionally
Um progressive.
I get really upset.
When I see
The way
M S N B C or CN
Will even slightly slant.
or misrepresent a story in order to get the most impact.
Because once they or the times are doing it.
Then
Where are you supposed to turn?
You know, so when I see a piece in the New York Times that
You know, the headline and the first few paragraphs are arguing that, Oh, you know, when Israel opened up its schools
it's elementary schools, uh covet rates went up.
And then you finally read all the way down and you go to the links and find the studies and it's like okay, when Israel opened its bars, its restaurants, its theaters, and its public schools, COVID rates went up.
Like
'Cause they're playing into the schools open, schools closed, schools masked, schools not. That's a bigger headline. It gets more clicks, but you've ended up for whatever reason, whether it's your politics or your need to get clicks, you've misrepresented a story. And once you do that once
How do I trust them? No, to does it mean that I'm gonna go to, you know, Rand Paul or whoever's his, you know, or or Alex Jones site about, you know, and I can read about
There's there's one
website that was talking about the these doctors were talking about how the
Covid vaccines have these
Eg in them that hatch aluminum parasites.
that replicate and they had they held up a model of what the aluminum parasite looks like and how it swims and it's not really alive, but it it's kind of alive. It was like
Man.
And people, you know, there there's people are sending me this. They're sending like like look look oh my God, you've got to talk to them on your podcast. This is really important. You know, don't get the vaccine. It it's hard to then have
Actually, you should be reading this instead. So now it's like I'm telling people to watch um News Hour with Judy Woodruff.
They're they're pretty
Normal.
You know, N PR
Stays stays kinda.
uh uh as centrist as it can right now. You know, there's some places uh BBC is pretty straightforward
But
You know, if I'm telling people or tell uh uh tell the times.
That's
That's a scary moment. So so what's the argument on behalf of the times? Like we have to exist as a business in a in a changing environment, and in order to compete, we have to be more sensationalized than we used to be and maybe sort of like take
positions or slants that we never had to, otherwise we'll go out of business.
I don't know that that's I think their argument the only valid argument is look, we got really big
And
We're we're throwing so many articles into the fire in order to keep this going, that that the New York Times used to be able to write one paper a day and now we're writing the equivalent of like five papers a day because of how much we have to update the site in order to get stuff that we're have less adequate
uh uh monitoring and control over stuff.
And
Just like anybody
our journalists get whipped up into a frenzy by COVID denialism and vaccine rumors that
They end up trying to promote whatever it is the CDC
is trying to say, and the CDC has its own problems'cause the C D C is not thinking in terms of
giving the public accurate information, the CDC is like our doctor trying to tell us the things that they need to tell us to get us to take our medicine. And that's different
Then
journalism. You know, when I look at Fauci
He's looking for
Patient compliance.
So that's what he's saying. He's not a journalist. Go deeper on that about the CDC and sort of like their sort of maybe institutional bias in terms of how they're communicating. And they were wrong at the start, right? Like they were quick and wrong.
Well they were right. What they were right about was
They look so so the C D C's job
is to reduce the transmission of a virus through a community.
By whatever means necessary.
They looked at the situation at the early
moments of Covid and thought
You know, masks.
may or may not be of some minimal help.
And
uh the general population.
who may or may not be even coming into contact.
with any Covet. There's like, you know, three hundred cases or a thousand cases in the whole country where meanwhile there are healthcare workers who can't get
the equipment that they need.
So
If health workers
Are
Exposed.
They have a higher likelihood of getting the thing. If they get the thing, then our hospitals are crippled and can't take care of people and the virus becomes more rampant. What we have to do is let people know, look, the general public right now
You don't need masks.
Who does need masks right now.
А зелк провадверс, со
Don't use masks.
You should be okay.
And these people will use masks.
They're managing the disease. It is true. If you're wealthy, if you're Steve Jobs and you've got all the money in the world and you could live an ideal life.
Wear a mask, of course, right now. You know,'cause who are you coming to the past? How do you trust them after that? Like how do you as a a a an average citizen, how do you trust
uh them to give you
Proper information.
Based on what you just said. I I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying.
What they should have said was right now we're in a mask triage situation.
And just like you're running
To the
store for toilet paper. You could be running to the hardware store
and taking all the masks. But that would be a really bad thing to do.
That would be really bad.
for the community. You've got to right now.
Think
Of
this disease and the whole country rather than this disease and you right now.
Um, we want you to have resilience and have water in your house and food and be able to live for a week or two, but
We really need these masks.
You've got'em
Get'em to the hospitals, we're gonna produce more, and hopefully by the time this disease is rampant in the country, if it gets that way, we'll have up the production on masks, so then you can have them when you need them.
And what do you think would have happened if they did that? Do you think that's panicked and run out and bought the masks. Of course. Totally. So what are they looking at? So then they have to think, all right, we have to manage
this disease. It goes all the way back to the first public relations people. It was like um Walter Lippman and Ed Bernays and those folks around World War One.
And when they came up with the idea of public relations, basically of in some ways
manufacturing consent for certain things.
Using whatever means and stories you have. What they believed was
You know, there's they th they they're their ideal government.
was there would be this kind of council of experts and scientists who would be in a big building next to the White House somewhere, and they would figure out what is it that we
need America to do.
And they would say, Okay, the scientists go, Look, we've only got thirty
thousand masks and we've got thirty million people.
We've gotta make Americans give the masks to the hospitals because that's
And we know that's what's right.
Right now.
How do we do that?
Then they hire
Bernays or Lipman or public relations people to come up with what's the very best way to do that.
The CDC
didn't have the very best people, right?
They were thinking like a doctor. How does the doctor talk to the patient? And what do we have to say? And, you know, uh, what do you do if you miss a dose? And why do you have to take this? Why do you have to take all the antibiotic and all those things that doctors tell you.
And
Yeah.
They try to treat
the American population as the patient.
You know, that you can kind of not lie to, but but do what you have to to manufacture their their their
uh uh compliance
And
You know, in this environment when you have
A a political faction
Who's who's
Strength.
and power is based on delegitimizing
anything to do with with organized government.
Um that's a really
difficult environment.
in which to play fast and loose.
With facts.
Kee keep going down that path in terms of delegitimizing when you have one
Party.
sort of interested in that, perhaps, but you also have organizations that are um
You know, arguably making that a bit easier too, with with what you just talked about, right? Not giving accurate information because you're trying to create a behavior. So maybe you're withholding some information that you shouldn't be withholding, which feeds into this sort of like delegitimization. Right. I mean the question is, does fake news
Genuinely derive
More traction.
From
each
Error.
made by government or major news media.
In other words.
When there are real gotcha.
Does it work or would they still
I mean, would it still be
That
Yeah.
COVID vaccine puts something in you that then 5G Towers activates, and that's why you can't see it when you look in the
vaccine, but once it's in you and they put a spoon on your head and everything's gonna get prosthetic. Right. Once they're doing that, d does that story gain more power because the New York Times has
slightly misrepresented
Um the real
Take away.
of an Israel
Covid study.
Ultimately, yes.
Once you start playing that game
You're gonna lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly.
You know, if you're gonna be on the side of supposedly factual, evidence based reality.
You gotta stick with that. And it doesn't mean you can't
believe in the soul and astrology and everything else that you want to. You know what I mean? You could I'm not saying you you've got to be a
Staunch.
Atheist scientistic
Uh
uh extremist.
But
You know, you're reporting.
Yeah, it has to be news that's fit to print.
You know, that if you're the paper of record and you wanna stay the paper of record, you gotta be
Gotta be careful about that.
You know, shit happens, right? The Gulf War and bad reporting or whatever name was that said there the wrong things about the Gulf War and got us in. That happens.
Um, but you want that to happen, you know, once a decade, not
You know not.
Daily. And you've you if you you're gonna play that game
on cable news if MSNBC and CNN and whatever are gonna put on, you know, newscasters who are
Oh pining.
Throughout these uh
You know, broadcasts and
They're gonna be seen as a opinion opinion news.
Wha w what's the like how do we get out of this? I don't I don't see a legitimate path to sort of like how we return to a more
centrist, fact based, you know, not left or right leaning in any sort of way, let alone the extremes. How do we
Ninety nine percent of us.
Really don't need to know about any of this stuff.
Honestly.
You know.
I I don't consume the news, like I gotta be honest. Like I I don't follow a lot of it.
I don't e I mean, a lot of people were asking me a few weeks ago, you know, what I was thinking about
Joe Biden's
Afghanistan withdrawal strategy.
Right. So for people who don't know, US had been in a war in Afghanistan for like decades, and then Biden said, enough, we're just gonna let's just take them out.
And basic and left and then everything went nuts and everybody was running to the airport and it was this whole big horrible scene with you know Taliban and
And and the people who helped America and all that, it was just awful.
And it's like
I don't know. I I honestly I've got so I've got very little training.
in Middle East withdrawal strategies, whether you bring planes or boats, do you tell the enemy you're gonna do it? Do you not? Do you bring generals and I just I just
Don't know about that. Not only do I not know about that, but I don't even know whose story about what is happening there.
Is true.
And I don't even know where they get their information from. It's like something happens.
Right, something happens in Israel, say some bomb happens, and then some other bomb happens, and then Netanyahu says this, and then Biden says that.
And it's like
It could
B
Anything. I don't mean like false flag crazy attacks or whatever, but it could be that, you know, Netanyahu says
Whoever's in charge there now says they want to go and bulldoze the West Bank, but they don't really want to. They're saying that so they get votes in support of some horrible faction in the Knesset that wants to do that. And they've already called Biden before they announced that. And they say, look, I'm gonna say this. I want you to say we're not allowed to do it, or you'll pull support. Okay.
All right, we'll do that. You know, so they set this thing up and then you report on it, and then I read about it in the times. Oh look, Netanyahu's really bad. Thank God we've got Biden holding him down.
It may be that, it may not be that. I'm not there. I don't know. And frankly
What I think about this does not matter. It doesn't matter. Instead, if I took all that time
That that I'm spending trying to understand these giant issues that that are operating at a scale and behind closed doors that I have no access to. If I rolled up my sleeves and helped my neighbor figure out how the old lady's gonna get her
food now that she broke her friggin' hip and no one else is going down there to deal with it. Or the the people who just moved in who's got a um differently able
child who needs community support. You know, all of these things that we could be doing for each other in our communities with all that time we want to spend screaming about shit on Twitter. If we spent that time helping other people in our communities, it would relieve
The central governments and the state governments of so much stress.
You know, you you don't need as much welfare, you don't need as much planning, you don't need as many programs when you have neighbors taking care of neighbors. You don't need as much climate change remediation. If people are doing less crazy stuff, if they're sharing lawnmowers rather than everyone buying their own lawnmower. If they're if they're
Playing with each other and doing local entertainment rather than flying around the world to do all sorts of crazy stuff. It's like
If you engage locally with the people around you and actually help real people, which I got to do now, we got flooded terribly in the last hurricane Ida.
Uh when you do that
You don't need as much FEMA, you know, it's like federal emergency management money. You don't need as much of that stuff. And it's it's easy. Become less dependent on central government, central news, national stories, and all that, and and and more uh more self sufficient. That's
It's more sustainable, it's more resilient.
Uh it it's less
Uh uh um
Brittle?
And it makes you less enemies. I mean, I'm side by side with Trumpies digging people out of the mud, having a discussion where I'm saying this is what's gonna start happening a lot. They're saying, Don't be crazy. This happens once every 10,000 years. I mean
Let's see. Let's you know, but we're actually talking about an arm in arm, handing buckets to each other rather than through Twitter.
Th there's sort of three thoughts I have out of that. One one is a question, I guess, about why we think what we think about foreign policy matters. Is it just because we have access to platforms now?
I think we always cared about these foreign matters, but we weren't uh as immersed in them.
And we weren't
expected to have something to say about them.
At least Walter Cronkite.
Was like he was this journalist guy.
He went all the way over there and saw the war and talked to the soldiers and they had people talking to the generals and then this whole sort of news agency kind of went, ah
This is really awful. You know, and and and their approach to it
did seep out to America. But there were others. There was NBC News. There was ABC News. There was, you know, the New York Times. There was a lot. And but yeah, the Cronkite might have had influence, but
Yes, it was a different media environment, but one in which we weren't being trained to respond in a moment to moment way to every
Ebb and flow.
In the news to everything.
that was happening. That's not just the internet. I remember I
wrote this piece back when, when um remember Britney Spears
I mean there's the current story with her now, but I remember
There is this
moment when she had some kind of a breakdown and like shaved her head and they took her to the hospital and all.
And all the sh news channels had it. Everyone had it. You know, the even the tiny little TMZ kind of news channels, whatever they were. But I saw this picture from far of her mansion.
And there and I counted.
And this is just in what I could count. There were twenty different satellite dishes.
Around her house.
twenty satellite dishes beaming the thing, you know, those vans that the news people use. And I was thinking
Could that story have been covered
With just three satellite dishes.
With three live satellite feeds.
Of the ambulance outside Brittany's house be enough.
To somehow
Feed.
the news the global news media. And then what if we took the other
Seventeen of them. And like
Put one in Rwanda, maybe, you know, one in Iraq, you know, in places where
There's actual stuff. Places where there's eight hundred thousand people dying in a genocide, you know, in in in Rwanda. I mean, the answer to that though is like people generally uh I mean, despite what we would state as our preferences when it comes down to it, we care a lot more about what Britney Spears is doing than what's happening in Rwanda.
Yes, but
We can still see it.
With just three satellite dishes. There's still it would still it would still have worked. If even if it was the most popular story in the world, it was still a misapplication of precious technology resources.
I mean, and this happened, you know, uh uh really in the nineties. We shifted news from in the United States anyway, news was a requirement to have an FCC television or radio license. You had to do a certain number of hours of news as part of your public affairs.
Obligation.
Right, when we took that away.
Then news was no longer a mandatory obligation. And it turned into if you're going to keep any news.
It's for money.
It's for profit.
That's when you start hearing all the music and all the coverage. That's when when news became so much more sensationalist because now it was part of the the competitive enterprise rather than the public service uh mission.
of these of these companies.
Going back just to orient people, I I said I sort of had three follow-ups. The second one was around how would we teach someone to sort out what's relevant from irrelevant? Like how would you go about teaching somebody
How to sort out essential from non essential information.
Honestly, I would say only go on social media.
To socialize and think of it as socializing.
If you really like it.
Make it part of your your entertainment day, you know, and look at it for that. I mean, it's so funny. People used to joke that on Twitter, uh, you know, I go on Twitter and someone tell me, you know, what they just ate for breakfast or where where their favorite pecan pie is located.
That's what Twitter is for. Sorry, that's what Twitter is for. It's not for the president of the United States to communicate policy to the American people. That's not
Where you do it.
Wait, why? Why? Go deeper on that. Why is that not the form for Because the president of the United States has access to real media like television and newspapers and press conferences and real things. But that's saying Twitter's not real media, is that No, we contaminated Twitter. The internet. We contaminated the internet.
We shouldn't have put banking on the internet either.
These were fun places. These were social media. These were play spaces. This is where a guy could pretend he's a girl and a a girl could pretend she's a a robot and
These were play spaces. You know, they they built the internet, yeah, for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like stories.
fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and telling what we used to call blonde jokes and like people did with fax machines. It was not
And it's not even secure for business. That's why all these companies are getting hacked and frozen and and ransomware and all that. He took a network where every node is going, Hello, who are you? Let's play. Hello, let's play. Let's play. It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And
Sure. So you've got blogger and Twitter and Facebook. Oh, look at grandma. Grandma wants to look at the pictures of of baby Norman. Oh, we want to play a game. Oh, let's do a survey. Who likes astrology? I like astrology.
Now it's in that same space. Who really has authority over the West Bank? What are you doing? And now everyone, cousin Louis, and this and that and gonna argue on an international platform about who has the ownership of the West Bank? Now let's have our senators and our presidents and prime ministers go down into that.
bizarre random public square and
and delegitimize themselves and the authority they have as our representatives in Washington by going into a generic No, you wanna you go to your district, go home to your district and talk to the people there. You do that live. You know, that's
You know, it's not a three days carriage ride away from DC anymore. You can get hop on a plane and go back and talk to people. Go on your local PBS channel. Um, go on your your cable, go on C SPAN.
You know, you have the platform, the the social media are for people without.
The platform.
So the my my advice to the regular listener reader person, the person like me
Is
Honestly go to real
media for your information. Go to social media for your play.
D d doesn't social media in a way allow us to filter out
uh, people who know what they're talking about from people who don't as well. Because now it gives it gives credible people a platform.
that they can sort of put their ideas out there and then get feedback on them in a way that was difficult before without running for office or being an elected official or sort of working your way up through the bureaucracy.
I think I don't see it. I mean like isn't doesn't it act as a check and balance in a way, or is that the promise of technology that doesn't fully mute itself? You can, if you're really tough skinned, you can post something.
To the public.
Knowing.
There are hundreds of thousands of people and bots on there who are going to use your inquiry.
to hurt you. That that's their intent.
Right? To make you feel bad about yourself, to undermine your sense of authority, to get you to join something that's terrible, to militarise you, to s make you more cynical. As long as you understand that, right? That the vast majority
of people replying to you and looking at you and using the information you're putting out are using it to hurt you.
To reduce your autonomy.
Um, to make you feel bad about yourself, to create mental illnesses, to distort your perception of reality. As long as you know that.
Then sure. So you know, I got um I got invited this week.
to be on uh Steve Bannon's podcast.
Well, everyone, even the publicist who sent it to me, said look at this for a laugh. Of course you won't do it.
Um
Part of me was thinking
Well, my whole thing, my whole team human motto, everything is find the others.
Right?
And here's one of the others asking me what
To engage.
Right.
Right.
There's a pros and cons. I mean because I'm going on his podcast adds legitimacy to Marjorie Taylor Green and everybody else going there, and I'm not gonna have control and he can edit me to say anything he wants. And you know, is the fact that I went on it going to outweigh anything good that comes about?
You know, from I am I really gonna take him down in like a John Stewart way that when John Stewart went on Fox and you know expose what they are? Can I maybe turn him and help him see
How some of what he sees about the Catholic Church and subsidiarity and distributism is good, but his approach is too is too violent and and destructive. Can I can I get through to him? You know, and so I was debating it in my head and I thought
Maybe I should tweet.
Should I go? I just got invited to go on Steve Bon Bannon's podcast. Should I do it?
And then I realized going and me tweeting that would just create
Bad.
It would just not because it's not there there's there's so such a small percentage of people would engage with that in good faith.
Um, that it would be too it's not the forum to have that argument. Luckily, I have friends, I have students, I have faculty, I have
A a a world of people I do trust.
That I could ask about that, that I do not need to ask that question. The only reason to ask that question on Twitter would be to show off.
Hey, everybody, I got invited. I'm Steve Bannon. That means I've arrived. I'm not gonna do it. So this way I can still leverage.
The
fame value of having gotten invited without taking any of the risk of actually going on. So it's or what? Or I want to socially signal that I'm too
SJW to go on those bad people show and look at me. I get some, what is that called? Uh signaling. I get some of that social signaling value from it. Now these ones are gonna love me instead of hate me. And it's like it's all a fucking game on there. So it's like, no, I don't use it. I
All I use Twitter for is I post link.

That's it. Figuring that people who do follow me on there I don't want to get in conversations on there. It's just
When the people say the really mean things or when something is intentionally misconstrued and then
people start piling on without even reading the article that they think they hate.
because someone has said something totally wrong about it.
It feels bad in my body. It makes me not sleep as well. It makes me not write as well. It's not good for my my metabolism, my system, my psyche.
I so
Th there's definitely a ton of signaling on uh social media from all all sorts of people. Uh and I I wanna sort of go to the third point that I had uh as we were talking and you were talking about sandbags and sort of being beside
um your fellow humans in a way. And I I think one of the things that we miss with technology
Is that we get so
uh pigeonholed in a way to get reinforced with what we think that we don't get exposed to the community in the way that we used to get exposed. And I think part of living a meaningful life is actually that exposure and that exposure to other people being a sense of something larger than yourselves that is a community or a tribe of people.
That you may or may not.
agree with, but you're a part of a a bigger tribe than just your particular view of the world.
is what we're missing. And I I I think that that's one of the ways that we
Learn to empathize with other people and learn to to see their view. I'm curious as to your take on that.
I remember when when
AOL was just emerging and it had these various um
kinds of groups so that you could find your tribe of people and be in conversations with them and chat rooms and things like that. They divided it all up into what looked to me like consumer categories.
Like are you a what's your are you a car lover? Are you a book reader? Are you a this? Are you a that
And
I got worried and people kept calling the Oh, those are my online communities.
And I was always careful to say that's not your online community, it's your online affinity group. Right. And there's a real
There's a difference, you know, and of course the internet is going to want me engaging with.
Other
middle aged mini cooper driving people because
If the Mini Cooper is what we have in common, that could be monetized, as opposed to
people who like sunny days or something, you know, that's like wait a minute, but how
How do we advertise to them? You know, it's like everything falls into those kind of those kind of categories. And
Uh
The technology is really good, obviously. It's a database technology, the whole internet. So it's really good at breaking us uh it's optimized for breaking us down that way. And it's not optimized for the
The heterogeneous community thing that you're talking about. The heterogeneous community really only works.
And
real life where you have a broad enough bandwidth to engage with people who are really different from you.
online it works really better to go find that group of people that you can't find in real life. So I live in Hastings on Hudson, New York, where there's really only
two people I would consider legitimate
manga anime fans here. Right. Right.
And the I could talk to the two of them, but if I want to really engage with the manga anime crowd,
Who knows my kind of manga and anime, the real shit, I gotta go online and find the you know make a gundam uh evangelian subgroup, subreddit, you know, and find that there's my others. There's my
That's
what the internet is really good at. Or if I've got a rare disease, I mean people always use that example. You know, if I got a rare disease or a a a rare handicap or something that there's not other people in my community that really get it, I could engage with those people and they understand what I'm going through in a way that that other people don't. But
But
It's not good, as we see on Twitter, it's not good for creating communities of people with diverse perspectives. In order to engage with people that have diverse or diametrically opposed perspectives, you have to be
live next to them when I'm next to uh uh the the volunteer firemen from my town who believe who voted for Trump and believes that this won't happen again for another thousand years and it became funny.
It became he looked at me like, Oh my God, you really think the world is ending, don't you, Doug? And I'm like, Oh my God, you really think it's not. You know? And it was just but we drink together. We
We lift like you say, we carry sandbags together.
I think at the end of the day, like it if if you get down to a level where you can see humanity, we all have more in common than we think, right? We all wanna be loved. Uh mentor of mine told me this. We all wanna be loved, we all wanna be respected, we all wanna be listened to, we all wanna contribute to something.
larger than ourselves and and and that
That avoids sort of political issues and and there's nobody that can really disagree with that. We all want those things. And so if we can offer them to other people, it's a way to connect to the You would think, you know.
You would think and then
You look at at
If they didn't believe in stuff, um, churches and synagogues and stuff would be such
For me, such great places to go. I just have like believing things and worshiping and stuff. Talk but talk to me a little bit about that.
what do you think the role of religion and culture has been in sort of curbing human behavior? I mean it depends. Uh I feel like most religions
Have these
It's almost like most bands.
They have this
Period after their emergence.
When
Right shortly after their emergence, where they're trying to really do the right thing.
You know I mean I know Judaism better
than than most of the others. But you know, Judaism really emerged as
A
system of thought and behavior for the recovering cult addicts.
of the Egyptian death cult. But they come out in the desert, they're like, Oh
Shoot, that didn't work. What do we do? And say, okay, let's not worry about so much about believing in God and having an idol and all that. Let's focus on community and law and labor and have a Sabbath and let's try that. You know, and it kind of worked for a while, and then you know.
Eventually, you know, they get persecuted, they get a piece of land, and they're fighting for survival, and they go, okay, you know, and it all deteriorates, and then people become you know worshiping at a wall and
one one God and one God alone and God gave us this piece of land and we're special. And all this stuff happens and it's like, oh no, you became a religion too. You know, and it wasn't. It wasn't Judaism until way late in its career. And I feel like, you know, and and and Christianity had that too, this sort of insight of
Um, all right, there's all these laws, and you're getting ever more granular, trying to code reality, trying to optimize reality with all this law. And it's like you're getting so granular, you're never gonna get there. In the end, the law is just kind of training wheels for
um something more intern. You just gotta be nice. Be fucking nice, you know? And the law can support you in that. And again, then that loses itself too, and it becomes about this, you know, Messiah guy and and and becomes this other religion and it keeps that Muhammad tried. Everybody keeps trying Buddha even. Even even that be that
Many sex of it became
Uh the thing and that's partly because people have this
uh longing to believe in something that you know, mommy and daddy
failed me and and this new mommy daddy thing is gonna be
The thing.
You know, is gonna be what mommy and daddy really couldn't be. They couldn't anticipate my needs. They couldn't see inside my soul. And right now, oddly enough, I feel like our technologists, they're looking at technology.
To be that.
You know, I had this great experience with uh Timothy Leary when he had just read he had just read Media Lab
By Stuart Brand, it was the book about Nicolas Negraponti's lab. It just opened at MIT and
And he it he, you know, we used to just sit and read together and then he
Had been reading this book for like two days and circling things and felt a pen. And then I thought, Oh my God, he must love this thing.
Yeah, Stuart must have written a great book. And he closes it at the end and he flings it across the room.
Like in horror.
And he said only three percent of the people in the index are women.
That goes to show you something.
And I'm like, What? What does this show? He says, These are all g these are all men trying to use technology to recreate the womb.
You know, their mothers couldn't anticipate their every little desire. So now they want to build technologies that are going to bring them, you know, whatever it is to create a little bubble around themselves and bring them everything they want and before they even know they want it.
And he was really right on a certain level. That's what, you know, with anticipatory algorithms and all that. But but
It it was it struck me as so sad, too, that that
I get it. The world is scary and wet and dark and female and unknown and unpredictable and all that. But you don't want to compensate for that with a uh
More with with
predictability and insulation.
What you wanna do.
Is is enhanced your resilience and your wonder and your ability to tolerate and metabolize.
a dwellth of novel experiences, which is what that that makes life s it's so much more fun. You know, it's fun and alive. But technology became oh I mean here is technology became that other religion.
You know, oh the blockchain that will solve for, you know, as I went to this conference, and they did they were building a blockchain, they're calling it Project Liberty, and it's going to solve for
Multi racial liquid democracy.
You know, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
In an email to me before this, you said you were sort of in an anti business, anti self optimization mood these days. Why?
Because I feel like we're trying to auto tune ourselves.
You know, we're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. You know, it's it's either here or there. You're on this
It this node or that node.
And
uh our value system accordingly is to get people either
You know.
Up to the C or down to the B, but not
In that weird squishy place in between. You know, fuzzy logic is about reducing. It's not about maintaining the fuzziness, you know, it's about you're here.
Or you're there and you've got you need more granularity, okay, we'll give you a half step. You're here, here, or here.
Here or here. All right. You don't like that, we'll give you six. We'll give you eighths, but you're still always on
The mark. And what we do by doing that is is
We make a judgment as to what is signal and what is noise. You know, if you're gonna auto tune James Brown.
Right? James Brown reaching up for the note or coming.
in over the note no no you're gonna auto-tune him he's not reaching he's on the note
On the note, what have you done? You filed off the soul, the signal in a James Brown recording. The actual signal is the is his soul reaching up for that note. That's why they call it soul. It's that reaching that we're hearing. That's what makes his interpretation of the song.
different than Britney's, different than Ariana's. We auto tune everybody.
in our music, we're we're tending toward auto tuning everybody.
uh uh in in their lives. You know, the metric, and this is all the metric you put on the wall is the metric that you're gonna get.
You know, and it it may not be an ideal single focus for more than just some provisional fun experiment.
I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you some more personal questions. This was pretty personal. When do you feel the greatest sense of peace in your life? Honest on a daily basis when my when my wife and daughter have gone to bed.
And it's like
Yeah.
That's like on a daily basis, that's sort of my my moment of peace.
Um, piece is particular though, I guess. You know, I feel then
Or when anything's been put to bed, you know, like an article or a book is finally approved. Ah.
It's done. Now,
There there no more comments. No more
No more drafts. It's in
To the press.
You know, but because I'm writing, I mean it's what I do. I'm writing all the time. So it's like oh shoot, is there another email coming back from that editor on that thing?
That for me is is is peaceful.
You know, or after
After the talk or the panel or the thing.
You know, especially if it was a risky one or in front of a new kind of audience.
Like
When do you tend to get emotional?
I get most emotional now.
Uh
small acts of kindness.
The smallest things.
I uh saw this uh Broadway show. It must have been over a year ago now,'cause it was pre-pandemic, called Come From Away.
Uh it's about the Canadian island where a lot of the planes had to land for nine eleven.
And
It's about this town.
That then
Sort of uh uh
Takes, right?
Yeah. They take in all those uh
People who are on the planes and whatever.
And Canadian of us. Very peace, order, good government. I love you guys. You know, and there's all these very touching scenes and all that, and people crying and whatever. And I'm watching it, and then this woman's like, Ugh we've got to find
We're gonna have to find sanitary napkins and pamperers.
For
These people.
And I started crying.
From that.
So what's how does that make you cry?
It's the small considerations.
When people do th when they when they do that, it's the little it's the littlest things that move me the most. The person who will get up in the subway for someone else to sit down.
Um the the
a neighbor who knows, you know, that my wife went in for a surgery and comes, Can I bring you a chicken or something? It's that
It's that.
Very human scaled.
you know, acts of of kindness, particularly in the face of adversity, you know, that
That brings it out.
What habits are you trying to break right now?
I'm trying to break uh
Email.
Which is a hard habit.
Um,'cause I get like a thousand of these things a day.
And what am I supposed to do? You know, and I'm I feel really guilty if I don't.
Answer them all.
And I feel like some kind of an asshole that is like, oh well, I get a thousand, so I don't have to.
Um
Because they're real human beings who read maybe read something or spent time
And
And um
On the other hand, a lot of the emails will be like
Oh.
I'm in high school and they assign me your book Team Human.
Uh for a book report. Please tell me, what is your book about?
I'm like, oh fuck you, kid. You know No, you don't. You don't get that. Um
I d I've decided I'm entitled to food and drink.
before
email. You know, I'm aware and I'm not, you know, all Tim Ferrissy about stuff, but I know that like when someone says something bad or there's more stress in an email, I know it's activating hormones and endocrine systems and all that that need
calories and and food and water and buffers. There's probably not enough oxygen or hydrogen or molybdenum or whatever it is that I need in my bloodstream to absorb
All that so
I'm I'm
Trying to to
limit that emails email's my my bad thing. I have no problem with the social media. You know I mean it's not like oh I gotta check my
my thing. I don't have those kind of um those kind of habits. So it's it's that and then sort of deeper deeper uh uh overdetermined sense of responsibility
For others.
I have a habit of not establishing any boundaries at all.
Which served me well as an unpopular person before the internet, but doesn't work well.
As a uh
slightly popular writer in an internet world.
You know, people will not
If you don't put up boundaries, people aren't gonna put them up.
For you.
Talk to me about those boundaries that you've put up.
Well, I haven't. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Um the the boundary it's it's it's gonna have to come from
I'm going to have to develop.
a an underlying assumption that
I don't necessarily owe everything to everybody all the time. You know, and right now I kinda feel I do. I feel I don't know, I kinda feel like I arrived here.
In this dimension like with a deficit.
That I've gotta somehow pay back.
I don't know if there's other people walking around like that, but it's like oh, like I didn't pay the price of admission or something.
And and
certainly to the extent which like people have bought my books and paid attention, now I owe them
I owe the world
A payback.
for all that. You know, as if oh you read my book, so now I owe you
Equivalent.
Hours.
of time that you just spent
With my book.
And that's tricky because if like a thousand people read a book and that took them four hours each, there's four thousand hours I have to find somewhere. And that's
you know, ten hours a day for more than a year.
When you're stressed, what's the most important thing for you to keep in mind?
You know, I mean this sounds so stupid, but it's it's new to me, so it's true.
Breathing is like really important.

If you don't breathe, you you s fall down and die really quickly.
But I I tend when there's a stressful thing, I've noticed
I stop breathing.
And then
It gets worse and worse the less air there is, and then I almost have to remember, oh right.
You breathe a little bit and
At least my body feels like it's a little bit better. I feel a little bit armed.
But yeah, that's that's um that's my big one is learning is is breathing.
And understanding that I don't
Have to react.
to everything that that immediate reaction is not necessarily
Better
than a considered response.
What are you most optimistic about?
Young
People's
Uh

Two
Pass through.
The fame obsessed.
Decades.
into
Things mattering.
to them on a on a local and felt.
level.
You know, I think
That there's there's
I mean they still do it, obviously, but there's I feel like there's growing dissatisfaction.
uh among them for
This this
You know, influencer culture.
You know that that
That that living your life is some sort of an infomercial.
is not
Satisfying.
And that they're that they're gonna move on. And as they do
You know, like I was saying before, as they return to a locally scaled level and start looking in their towns and cities.
For that
The stuff that excites them, it's gonna take such a burden.
Uh
you know, this giant planetary brands and and all that stuff. You know, I'm optimistic when I see the ports
failing in Los Angeles and the
boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal and
Of people saying, you know.
Is it really genuinely long term cost effective to have
Slaves in China making all our stuff.
You know, we we fish for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico.
We
Transport those shrimp.
all the way to China and Vietnam where they get deshelled and then put them on other boats and ship them all the way back to us.
Could that possibly be better?
Uh in in the big sense, could it be, or is it just some business hack? You know, yeah, it's a business hack. So I've I've I've got faith that these kinds of of
uh uh scaled foolishness, these that these very non commonsensical
Approaches.
Two to
uh uh civilizational stewardship will become apparent.
So I guess I have faith in a new era of common sense shepherded by young people who get nauseous.
Uh
everything being done to scale and more interested I sound like Bannon here, but but in subsidiarity and distributism and the commons and local um small local business.
What do you know about decision making that most people miss?
I took est in the seventies.
Remember asked it was like Werner Earhart did this thing. They call it landmark for him now. It was one of the first kind of culty self help.
things that came out of California. And you know, you do these long seminars and whatever.
And
Like Tony Robbins kind of stuff.
And what they said in it that stuck it's the only thing that I remembered from it was they they
Distinguish between a decision and a choice.
And
I real that that that like a decision is the process of
I have this decision to make. It's the unresolved thing. The decision is more like the question, the the weighing after this decision. But choice is what you autonomously
Choose
to do without sort of an evaluation or a rigorous process.
Well there can be you can do the evaluation and then make a choice.
But
Once I make the choice, what I've learned now is to stop.
Second guess is to stop going back to decision.
You know, what a woulda coulda. What about that one? What about that? I chose
This one. This is
What's what I chose. I chose a f
Froca Mapa Chipo Macanina from you know, whatever the thing is at Starbucks. Yeah. I just choose black coffee, but whatever. I chose that one. Oh, I could have got the decaf latte choppa chocolate chicken. Yeah, you could've.
You could've.
But this is
W you're here now.
This is your house, this is your car, this is your wife, this is your shirt, you know
That's it.
And I and I feel like
it benefits uh advertisers and certain companies to get people second guessing all their choices so put them back in decision mode so they buy more stuff. And it's like, you know, you really don't
You don't need it. You don't
Yeah.
It's it's really fine.
I think we're wasting a lot of time and energy re choosing things.
That don't
matter. It really doesn't matter which shirt you're wearing.
It's which you know, it uh get out of the house, alright.
And final question that I I I wanna end with. What do you want other people to say about you when you're gone?
Really? Isn't it great that we live in the world
That rush cough.
Predicted where

We got over all these tragedies and started just getting along with each other. You know
I I'm I'm so much less concerned that they talk about me than that they talk
At all.
I I I'd much I'd much prefer to influence
Their
They're
Bearing.
their their comportment than the content.
You know, whatever they're saying. I'd rather them be saying it
In the way that I
Try to speak.
You know, which is
In a in a a loving
Open, engaged, responsible.
uh responsible way. I want them to engage with each other, uh feeling responsible for one another.
And whether or not they credit me with that by by uh uh by name, it doesn't matter.
Thank you so much for taking the time for this engaging conversation, Deckler. Thank you, Shane. It's good to meet you.
The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street.
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