Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

Today we have on Douglas Rushcoff to talk about a myriad of different topics.

Douglas Rushcoff is well known, academic, intellectual, author, media theorist, etc.

Doug, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe say a bit about your background for people who don't know who you are?

Sure, I'm Douglas Rushcoff and I write books about media, technology, culture, and change.

I was actually a theater director back then.

Then the internet happened and kind of blew open a lot of ideas about narrative and culture and stuff.

It was just too big a story, too big a phenomenon to leave to itself.

I kind of left the theater and got involved in that in the late 80s, early 90s.

That's really been the beat I've been covering since then.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you specialize in and what the primary focus of your more recent work is?

I know it's a thread through all of your work, but especially recently what you've been thinking about and talking about.

It's funny to me it doesn't seem specific, it seems so general or so wide when I try to describe it, but what I'm really looking at is human autonomy.

How much awareness and agency do we have as we move through our lives and are the technologies that we're creating for ourselves?

Are they increasing our facility and our ability to choose and actualize our intentions?

Or they are dictating to us how we should think about the world.

How do we even tell the difference?

Sometimes we have something we think, oh look at how empowering this is and how this is expanding my imagination.

When actually it may be just another ever tightening circle where you actually have less choice even though you may have more to do.

So recently we had on my friend Mike Rougie when we talked about your book, Team Human, and we did two people reading it and talking about its ideas and going off it.

You came across that somehow and you threw out some kind words on Twitter and so I was like you know what let's make this happen where I can actually talk to Douglas himself.

And just for people that might not have heard that previous episode can you just talk a little bit about your latest book, Team Human, sort of why you wrote it and what its core thesis is before we get into more questions.

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