139 Extra. Douglas Rushkoff
On grounding, mentors & fatherhood
Here’s a little over 20 additional minutes of ‘offcuts’ from my conversation with Douglas Rushkoff. It features a few of our more personal exchanges. The first seven or eight minutes delves further into the dangerous appeal Douglas is seeing in the thinking of some prominent people. Which leads to exploring some recent experiences of the over-culture in our respective countries, with community-based election successes. Then we share a few instructive thoughts about respective older mentors, in life and death. And we go out with Douglas offering one of the wisest articulations I’ve heard on being a father in these times.
“People just want dignity. And it shouldn’t be that hard to let them have it. When I hear the new Italian Prime Minister, fascist woman, saying we’re not consumers, we’re humans. We’re not numbers, we’re human beings. I know. It’s as if she’s quoting Team Human, she’s quoting my stuff. But we’ve got to help develop other ways for people to experience their humanity rather than through violence and assertion. It’s through care.”
0.00 Introductions
2.00 The danger in the appeal of some prominent folk
6.15 The value or otherwise of aspiring for exponential change
9.40 Experiencing the over-culture in our respective countries, with community-based election success stories and the ‘consumption thing’ wearing thin
15.15 Some personal exchanges on our respective older mentors
17.00 The universal need for dignity and how it can lead to fascism, or better places
19.00 Being a father in these times – back to polyvagal theory
This conversation was recorded online, with Douglas at home in New York City on 27 September 2022 (Australian time).
-
SPEAKERS
Anthony James (host), Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas 00:00
I'm Douglas Rushkoff, and I'm on Team Human playing for The RegenNarration podcast.
Douglas 00:05
People just want dignity. And it's not - shouldn't be that hard to let them have it. When I hear the new Italian Prime Minister, fascist woman, saying we're not consumers, we're humans. We're not numbers. We're human beings. I know. It's as if she's quoting team human, she's quoting my stuff. But we've got to help develop other ways for people to experience their humanity rather than through violence and assertion. It's through care.
Anthony 00:50
G'day, Anthony James here for The RegenNarration. If you're anything like me, you've been turning over last week's conversation a fair bit. It's partly why I held this over till this week to allow a bit of space in between. Here's a little over 20 additional minutes of off cuts from my conversation with Douglas Rushkoff. It features a few of our more personal exchanges. The first 12 or so minutes delves further into the dangerous appeal Douglas is seeing in the thinking of some prominent folk. Then we share a few instructive thoughts about our respective older mentors, Douglas on Tim Leary, and myself on Frank Fisher. Incidentally, I mention Frank earlier in this extra so now you know who I'm referring to. And we go out with Douglas offering one of the wisest articulations I've ever heard on being a father in these times. If you've come here, first, tune into the main episode with Douglas on surviving the tech billionaires and embodying the over culture. You'll find a few links in the show notes there too, along with the transcript, all on the episode webpage. Oh, and while you're there, you're invited to join me and a host of other terrific folk at the remarkable Haggerty farm here in WA on the 24th of October. Event Details are also on the website. The music you're hearing is Stones and Bones by Owls of the Swamp. My name is Anthony James. Thanks again for listening.
Anthony 02:22
Alright, a couple of key threads from there. One is that you mentioned Daniel Schmactenberger. So he's a good example. And even Ray Kurzweil is of someone who does find a progressive audience gravitate, you know, at some scale towards them, because they think, things like the blockchain and web three and so forth are gonna do it for us. In a world, I think where - I agree with you, by the way on your take, can we assume being the over culture? I think that's true. And I want to come back to that. But in that context, I think a lot of us - and I'm still overlapping this significantly, don't really understand what's coming down the line, again, don't understand where where Daniel's really speaking from - let alone a Jeff Bezos or whatever. Can you talk a bit about what is exciting people, with folks like that? How they are exciting some people and why it is such a concern for you?
Douglas 03:20
Yeah, I think they're exciting people, because many, many people, particularly thinking people, psychedelic people, people who are kind of aware of the end of capitalism and of neoliberalism and not knowing what's coming next, they feel destabilized. And here come people saying, we're going to help you make sense, we're going to help you make sense, just do like us. And the way they make sense, is through abstraction, and layering abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction. There's no ground, there's no feet on the ground, there's no embodied feet on the ground. They never talk about, I'm sounding Marxist here, but they never talk about conditions on the ground. You know, it's like, what, what is actually happening? And it's like, no, it's like, well, if you look at things like this, and you look at it like that, and what they do is they come up with a metaphor, every conversation starts with a metaphor of some kind. And what's a meta for really, it's to go meta, and then they use the metaphor and they go meta on the metaphor and meta on that metaphor. So you start, the most real thing they'll start with is like, okay, the Jedi Knights, you know, well, the Jedi are like this, but no, they're actually like that. And then if you do this, then a Jedi would do that. And it's like, wait a minute, there's no Jedi Knights. There's no There's no thing. And what I've noticed is, metaphors tend toward the fascist because they are so abstracted that in the end, when you do talk about ground, it's kind of blood and soil and based on strange mythologies, where Marxists talk about conditions on the ground. So, you know, the problem for Marxist sometimes is that conditions on the ground are so - dominate so much that it's hard, it's hard to use any imaginative creative capacity to imagine a different reality, because you're so concerned with conditions on the ground. But these guys are so in the imaginative, abstracted place in web three, or game B, or these fantasy futures, that this is why it's almost all white, educated, psychedelic men, right? Because there's too much soft and squishy, that doesn't fit that, you know, that they leave out of the metaphors. Metaphors are really are very gross. They're very crude approximations. They're like, almost like digital in that it's like, okay, this represents that. But it's not that - it represents what you care to represent about this situation. But where's the woman? Where's the black person? Where's the mud? Where's the complexity of life? You know? So it's back to instead of using empirical science to control, tame and dominate nature, we're going to use metaphors to you know, ignore the aspects that confuse or upset us.
Anthony 06:38
Yeah, it's so powerful. Because when we understand well, the power of metaphor and the basis of how we think in metaphor, because all we've got is representations of things we can't know in an absolute sense. But to be ever again, contextualizing it - it's like when Frank said, he wasn't interested in you know, systems thinking mark one where it was actually about the machines, it was systems two, where systems was understood as a metaphor, and then being able to understand that nature doesn't work in systems. That's our way of saying how nature works. Being able to always understand that we're humbly placed, I suppose, with how we construct these things. I find that's the dicey nature of even Ray Kurzweil with his exponential change stuff. You know, like, so much of progressive thought in systems thinking has been bugger incremental change. How do we get to transform because it's too late for the incremental change? But to be able to recognize, if we're recognizing embodied consciousness, as the way to connect to re inhabit the world, and with each other, then we can recognize when we abstract from that the layers we abstract, that's hedging towards the mindset, the archetypal mindset.
Douglas 07:58
The other thing is, you know, these metaphors. The metaphors work, like, a little bit like emergence theory, in systems theory, you know. That in systems theory emergence is the moment where a system leaps to the next level of complexity. And emergence is one big hand wave, you know, it's their version of transcendence - it's their version of Transubstantiation or, or the apocalypse, it's their substitute for religion because no one understands what emergence is, it's just this waaaaa. Now it's something else, you know. Blah! But, but there's this, it gets them high. You know, every time when you're talking about metaphors, there's that moment when well, this metaphor then opens to Well really, it's that metaphor. Then there's that little bit of dopamine or serotonin or whatever it comes out. It's a mental masturbation game. That because it makes you feel good in the moment you assume Oh, that must be truth. But it's just like watching a linguistic magic trick, or it's like a Christopher Nolan is that his name? Those Christopher Nolan movies like, the one with the dreams you go in this dream and then in that dream, and you go out a dream and out a dream, each time you transition from one dream to the one nested in there to the one nested in there, it's like opening another Russian doll. You know, it gets you high. So it's a very trippy, psychedelic fun, yeah man. You mean in the finger nail of the giant is an entire universe - a cosmos? Yeah. You know and you go you just blew my mind. Well, yeah, that was the point I blew your mind, now suck my dick right? And just where they go with it, you know and it's just come on! Buy my bottle buy my nutrient, my nutraceutical
Anthony 09:57
Yes. You know, you talked before about people coming together - the over culture. And I feel like in Australia, we had a national experience of this recently with a federal election that transformed our parliament. Did you get any wind of this Douglas did it reach your media landscape?
Douglas 10:19
Yeah, for about eight minutes. Until the next Trump fart. Yeah
Anthony 10:23
yeah. Right. We got a firsthand exposure to this, because our federal seat, was one of the ones that had previously been a safe, you know, Republican equivalent Liberal National Party seat here for forever effectively - 70 years or whatever that it had been in formation. And it elected a community independent MP. But this happened in like another seven seats, I think it was - to go with already the few that had broken mold and sort of set the template that people have jumped onto. And it was amazing to experience firsthand because you had people for whom even before the seat was one by Kate, the independent candidate, they were so happy for the revelation that finding each other had been. No one had been involved in political campaigning before, no one pretty much to a rule. And that community was actually the beautiful thing that had come out of it. And then what do you know, she actually got over the line as well. And the same thing happened in all these other seats. Then I hear there was actually a situation that I read is very similar in the states where Chloe Maxmin became what the first female independent senator in Maine, and again, a very red state, as it were, and wrote the book dirt road revival about it, which fascinated me, and it seems very similar dynamic. And that made me think wow I wonder if even in the States, even without compulsory preferential voting and all those sorts of things in a political domain, but is there the prospect for a shifting landscape that might actually be happening now? That is, has just bobbed its head up, and bobbed its head up in a bit bigger way over here, even in your neck of the woods? How are you reading all that?
Douglas 12:12
It's so hard to say. I mean, in America, things are happening so fast and kaleidoscopically. It's it's really hard, it feels it's being made intentionally difficult for people to know what the heck is going on. You know, it's just it's, it's almost too hard.
Anthony 12:38
Doesn't that emphasize the point that it's, it's with each other that we need to be?
Douglas 12:43
It's the only way to calibrate. The only way to calibrate is live with other people. Yeah, and doing so many even local things, you know, our townhall meetings and school board meetings, doing all those on Zoom, really didn't help generate that cohesion required to conduct local, local governance. And this really has eroded things even further. But I mean, that fascist lady got elected in to Parliament today, yesterday, we've got crazy ass candidates in the US, I mean, people who just believe crazy stuff. I mean, I could believe that our presidential election was metaphorically rigged, it is impossible for a true independent candidate to get to be president without somehow playing ball with the established, you know, political institutions, except when it does, when it does happen, which it did. But I get that, but then it's like, no, no, no, but the actual count of things. We got enough kind of trustworthy people watching everything. And there's 8, 10, 20 million more people voted for this guy than that one. No, that didn't really happen! You know, and that denial of reality from, you know, the inauguration day when he said there was a zillion people and they said that picture is not real, that the picture of people not there is not real, is like, Alright, we're going somewhere else. We're going somewhere else. So here it's quite quite difficult. But yeah, there's places
Anthony 14:22
But it still worked. She got in. Chloe got elected with a very grassroots - in an unsuspecting area,
Douglas 14:28
right. It should be a lesson that it can happen and you don't necessarily even have to be an AOC kind of radical gorgeous, you know, candidate you can be the kind of regular person who's like, alright, let me just try to take care of this in a normal way. So yeah, it could be that so many of us are so tired. That's what I was thinking was about 10 years ago, I was thinking that nausea would kill consumerism. You know, we're just like, I don't want another fucking thing. I don't want a thing, I don't want to go in virtual reality. I don't want another computer, if this one breaks then fine, then you're gonna have to get me one. Because I'm not doing this anymore. I am not going to support this habit. It's just, you know what I mean?
Anthony 15:13
I feel like that's still what's emerging under the radar and slightly coming up sort of a sense.
Douglas 15:19
It could be, we'll see. I mean, we'll see. I know, my vinyl record collection is worth more now than it ever was. Right? So people are longing for that sense of physical connection. So I'll just sell it and buy a good digital recorder thing!
Anthony 15:38
I have to ask you before we go, over your right shoulder, is that a picture with Tim Leary on the wall?
Douglas 15:46
Yeah, way back when - a picture taken by Lindsey Bryce. Yeah, I was young. He gave me those clothes actually, I was on tour for a book like Cyberia or something out there. And I was supposed to go on Bill Maher's show. At the time he was big in America. He had a show called politically correct. And I remember Timothy saying you're not dressed for television. He said, you know, Marshall McLuhan dressed me and I'm gonna dress you. And that was right after he gave me his clothes from his closet. Both wearing little red vests. And he had just been to the Pink Floyd show. That one of their
Anthony 16:26
Oh, the one you talked about with Marc Brickman recently?
Douglas 16:28
Yeah, so it's all ...
Anthony 16:30
Wow. You know, when you talked about tending Tim, in all the, you know, raw human functional ways, in those times, that really moved me mate. It's partly because I, I was around my old mentor, Frank is he died of a brain tumor. And he had Crohn's for 40 years prior to that. So it was a hell of a effort to live as long as he did. And it wasn't pleasant, as he was dying. But yeah, the beauty in that too, such that I've still got in mind, I ended up recording every conversation I could with him. You know, I had recorders on dinner tables, and as well as structured interviews and stuff to potentially make into a book of some kind, you know, last conversations with, or a Tuesdays with Morrie type of thing, at some stage. Which I'd still like to do. It feels like it's a nice way for his legacy to be honoured.
Douglas 17:22
Yeah, I mean, people just, they just, and this is why we have fascists, people just want dignity. They want an experience of dignity, you know, and it's not, shouldn't be that hard to let them have it. You know, when I hear the new Italian Prime Minister, fascist woman saying, we're not consumers, we're humans. We're not numbers, we're human beings. I know, it's as if she's quoting team human, she's quoting my stuff. But we've got to, we've got to help develop other ways for people to experience their humanity, rather than through, you know, violence and assertion. You know, it's through this other thing, it's through care, you know, you care for someone else. Or the bigger your ego, the harder it is to let someone else clean the shit off you, you know. At some point, you let go and you go, you know, this is - no one should have to, but boy, there's probably easier and harder ways to accept that that's where things have come to.
Anthony 18:34
Well, that's where Frank's great insight came to - was when he did develop Crohn's, but he was in Switzerland, and they thought it was cancer and started to cut his guts out progressively. So he was left with 15% of his intestines - so it was really malnutrition and everything that was his big, big thing for the rest of his life that expected him to be gone by the age of 40. But he lived to 70 purely on the back of the care of others. That was the insight for him that took him from actually being an electrical engineer working in nuclear power plants for big multinationals to what he ended up doing, becoming a bit of a legend in the, in this space? If you're happy to divulge as a father now with a young daughter, speaking of you know, the nature that you realize you don't have dominion over? In our kids. How do you broach fatherhood in these contexts?
Douglas 19:28
I'm like any father, I just do what my daughter says. Have you tried to control a 17 year old girl and tell her what to do? It's impossible. You have to be Francis Bacon. You'd need to hold her down by the forelock submit her to your will, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. No what I do - My only thing is I, I engage with her, honestly about whatever it is, you know, it's like, I go there - we go to dark places sometimes and, you know, it's just all what it is. It is what it is, you know. So it's like it's working. I mean, this is a very difficult environment in which to have a functioning nervous system. You know, because the inputs are really frazzled and sketchy. And I mean, imagine being a bee or a bat trying to, you know, or a whale in the ocean trying to navigate, you know, with all the sonic booms or whatever they're making with the submarines or the bees with the cell phones and everything else. Same thing for us, but with both actual content and the subtle content of the technologies. So I would say the only trick if I had one is to offer my nervous system to her, you know, to offer on a physical level, it's not my ideas or my rules, it's my nervous system, like, here's a spare - God, when I used to build kits, there's called heat sinks, you would put on a circuit board a heat sink, that prevents the transistors from getting too hot, you have a heat sink that absorbs some of the heat. So it's like - or a ground, you know, a ground for all those extra atoms and stuff. So she can cleanse, it's that - I feel like I'm more valuable to her as an open, accepting nervous system than I am, through whatever conscious thought constructs I can share with her. And when I do share thoughts with her, I try to share mechanisms more than ideas. Here's how I would work through that. Rather than here's my answer, here's how I would work through it. Because then it's like, at least I'm sharing a way of metabolizing whatever it is the difficulty.
Anthony 22:01
beautifully said and I relate to it - when you say it's working. I feel like that even with our eight year old boy, which of course, yeah, we calibrate to as appropriate as we can figure out and muster and guess at for that age for him. But I find, I would say it's working to. And I guess when I say that, I mean, mostly that we continue to relate well, and His disposition is open to people, and life and wonder and all that. And so yeah, that's beautiful Douglas and, you know, the way you described it, really maps over almost your last page in the book, I think. Which is where you brought in David Byrne's American utopia, and the lines he was using at the end of that. In fact, I love the metaphor you used, you said, our nervous systems are in concert with the other nervous systems around us, as if we share almost that collective nervous system - and then we're back to that polyvagal theory and, and it was interesting to read that too, because I just put out a podcast on soil that was saying the same thing. In a not abstract at all sence, you know, that soil is almost a single organism in earth, not to be thinking of it as individual particles. And here it was being expressed in that embodied consciousness way, as a collective nervous system, as living as one organism ... Anyway, there's our segue mate. What's the piece of music that you would send this out with if we could put one in a podcast?
Douglas 23:30
How about - I'm trying to think of what ... [tune into the main episode for more!]
Find more:
Tune into the main episode: ‘Douglas Rushkoff on surviving the tech billionaire mindset & embodying the over-culture’, with a few links in the show notes too, and transcript.
Music:
Regeneration, composed by Amelia Barden, from the soundtrack of the new film Regenerating Australia, available for community screenings now.