Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 172. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And, um, and, uh, and, uh, In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we sit down with one of the

original cyberpunk's, the famed journalist, documentarian media theorist and all-around

technology superstar weirdo Douglas Rushkoff he will talk about his new book

Team Human.

Rushkoff coined the terms viral media,

digital native, social currency,

and he is currently a professor of media theory

and digital economics at the City University of New York.

He's a titan of talking about technology.

Team Human is his tenth book and it's about, well, it's a bit of a manifesto. In it he makes a case for returning

to the Cyberpunk ethos, which is in a way the psychonaut ethos.

Today the counterculture he imagines would revolt against the algorithms that are slowly

altering our behavior for the benefit of shareholders mainly and he urges us to instead build a

digital psychedelic substrate that embraces the messiness of human beings our

unpredictability our pursuit of novelty and innovation, and our

primate animals social connectedness. The book is presented in a series of aphorisms that add up to a rallying cry for building communities outside of what the algorithms might suggest we build.

And as the title suggests, he wants us to turn our attention to teamwork. Rushkoff says in the book

that any technology whose initial purpose is to connect people will

eventually become colonized and repurpose to repress and isolate them. But over time we've seen

this pattern so often we can build something else. And in this interview you will

hear his thoughts on this, the book, and so much more.

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