Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

For me, the very best Onion article of 2018 was this one about Jeff Bezos revealing Amazon's new headquarters to be the entire Earth,

as an Amazon branded glass sphere clicked into place, encasing forever

the horrified inhabitants of our planet. More than a grain of truth in that one, eh? At this point,

with all that's happened over the past few years, I think you either have to be delusionally

optimistic by nature or have strong vested interests in the tech industry to think that all is well

in our digital world.

Douglas Rushkoff has been looking at these problems with unflinching clarity and humor since

long before the rest of us heard the click of the big glass sphere. On his podcast, Team Human and in his

new book of the same name, he invites the rest of us humans to team up, find the others, and stand up for weird,

messy humanity against this anti-human agenda.

Welcome back to think again, Douglas.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Essentially, we sort of need to dismantle everything, right?

It feels as if our choice is to go back somehow, and if you go back, go back how far? So if we're,

if part of the problem is that we realize that media and technologies that we develop end up

being used against us, that we start out as the player and end up being the played, right?

We start out as the programmer and end up being the program. Then we want to go back. But say you go back when? To television? Well, television became programming radio. Well, that became, you know, Hitler and China. Do you go back? Or the invention of text. Well, text was used to categorize and quantify slaves. Right. So we go back to language itself.

Well, once we had language, we started to abstract things that things became nouns.

And once they were nouns, they were restricted.

So we're going to go back to grunt.

However, you can't go back enough.

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