CBR - Shaun Manning's Interview and Review of A.D.D.

By Shaun Manning -  In a near-future world, a select group of teenagers are chosen to beta-test revolutionary video games full time, living in a lavish dormitory that provides everything they could ask for and enjoying celebrity exceeding that of today's most famous athletes. But what makes this group so special, and what does the corporation behind it all truly have to gain from the teens' skills? In "A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division," noted media theorist Douglas Rushkoff turns his attention to the world of video games and the potential for good and ill contained within something as simple as play. Rushkoff, whose previous comic book work includes the "open-source Bible" series "Testament," is joined by artist Goran Sudžuka. The book is in stores now from DC/Vertigo.

Comic Book Resources and Rushkoff had a candid discussion of "A.D.D." and the ideas behind the book.

"Most simply, 'A.D.D.' asks, 'what if Attention Deficit Disorder were not a bug but a feature?' What if the things that we're seeing emerge from our very media-connected kids, what if these weren't illnesses or pathologies but rather adaptations? What if the abilities gained by the Newtype children of manga and anime, what if some of the things we're considering disorders are actually adaptations or reactions to the media environment in which kids are living?" Rushkoff told CBR. "We sort of asked the question, and then the story grew out of that. Ok, if ADD is a feature and not a bug, it means that someone made it happen, someone put it there. Who would do that, and why? I built a world around that 'what if' and wanted to get to the place of asking, 'what would constitute resistance in a world where corporations are trying to program us into submission?"

Rushkoff, who has published several books on media culture including the recent "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age," told CBR that in "A.D.D.," he wanted to examine such ideas in "a very human way," expressing his views in comic book form rather than a non-fiction treatise. The choice of artist, then, also became important, and Goran Sudžuka provided what both Rushkoff and the Vertigo editors were looking for. "Jonathan [Vankin], who was the original editor on this book, decided -- and I agreed -- that we wanted a simple, accessible style, focused on the acting rather than the environmental style," Rushkoff said. "At this point, it seemed less important to depict another version of the external media circus panoply of marketing imagery and all that -- which would be the obvious place to go -- and instead look at these kids in their starkest, most human reality you could, so you identify with the kids and their struggle. Goran's really good at the acting, at making their faces and body language exude what they're actually going through. We wanted to make these kids as human as possible so they're not just little game pieces."

Video games provide a useful context to explore Rushkoff's vision of modern society due both to the elements of play and because games are a constructed world -- much like our own, in Rushkoff's view. "A lot of these ideas occurred to me while I was in South Korea doing a television documentary that was largely about the pro gamers of South Korea. Spending time with them and seeing their world, it was so bizarre. It was such a bizarre existence that they had. On one hand, it was the idealized existence for any 14-year-old gamer, but on the other it was sort of this self-contained nightmare," the writer said, describing what is clearly a real-world analogue for the live-in game testing facility of "A.D.D." "Also, I've always been interested in gaming from the perspective of the playability of the world we're living in. Most people don't seem to recognize that we're living in a constructed world, that a whole lot of the things we take for granted as the given circumstances of nature are actually very specific creations of people, of man. And they're playable. The economy can be played with, the media can be played with. These are not laws of nature written in stone. These are very virtual worlds. We're living on top of operating systems, however much they try to hide that from us. You know, central currency is an operating system. It was developed in the 1200-1300s by specific people with specific goals. Now, we go around thinking this economy is some natural thing, this economy is the way all economies work, and it's not. Even this idea of free market -- we don't live in a free market. The extent to which this market is free is the extent to which we agree to play by the rules that were set in place by the people who invented the market that we're living in right now. Gamers, it seemed to me, especially good gamers, are people who have the ability to see beneath the rules to the actual 'who wrote this game' and 'what do they want this game to actually do.' How is this game rigged, and who rigged it, and why?"

 Pages from "A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division"

While the gamers of "A.D.D." are all teenagers, there are, of course, no no small number of adults playing video games. We asked Rushkoff how these older players fit into his view of games in society (or gamesas society), to which he responded, "I do think that there's a developmental period. There's something going on between 12 and 21, that isn't when they're older. What's happening when you're young is, you're kind of a native of that environment. Your neuroplasticity is at its height, the degree to which you are shaped and formed by the world that you're in is really heightened," Rushkoff said. "Whatever TV you're listening to between 12 and 20, whatever music you're listening to, whatever clothes you're wearing, whatever technology is around, those kind of come naturalized.

"I think it was Alan Kay who said, 'technology is whatever was invented after you were born.' But there's that sense that, to a kid 12-20, the newest thing that might be in a game is just the way things are. Whereas to us, it's sort of this newish thing," Rushkoff continued. "You and I might look at 'Farmville' or 'Mafia Wars' as, 'oh, those are the little social games that were built on top of Facebook,' always from outside in. But to a nine-year-old who plays 'Farmville,' it's part of their formative experience of this space. I think they think of that as a classic! They think of that the way we think of 'Asteroids' and 'Space Invaders,' as these sort of archetypal experiences. People who were in their 30s and 40s when 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids' came out probably looked at it as some weird, new-fangled thing."

Of all the teen gamers of "A.D.D.," there is only one female at the testing site -- and there is a very specific story reason for this, as readers learn. With the ongoing discussion of women in comics and video games -- particularly, the scarcity thereof -- CBR asked Rushkoff for his thoughts on the causes and effects of women being sidelined in some popular media. "I think to some extent it's harder for the forces that be to hypnotize women the same way they hypnotize men," Rushkoff said. "Women were just as susceptible to the marketing of objects. In the 1950s, when they started marketing to women in America after World War II and trying to increase consumption, that's when kleptomania was first diagnosed -- and it was a women's disease, because they were so marketed to that they would go in and steal stuff from the department store. I'm not saying women are not programmable and susceptible, they are. But it tended to be more for 'the real.' I'm finding, at least, that boys and men are more susceptible to the attraction and hypnosis of 'the virtual,' whether it's pornography or video games or ideas. They seem to be more susceptible to these abstract forms of manipulation. Maybe men are more visual and less tactile; there's probably some old evolutionary biology reasoning for it. Men were hunting, so they had to stay at a distance; women were gathering, so they had to feel the berries in their hands. Who knows what it is, but it doesn't seem, for the most part, that these worlds are quite as compelling in the same way to women as they are for men. They are compelling -- now, the numbers are changing, and I think the number of women involved in social media is greater than the number of men. As the applications change, certainly the gender biases change as well. But this ADD video phenomenon thing does seem to be more boy than girl."

As technology has expanded what is possible in the real world -- events like the Arab Spring and Occupy movement would likely be impossible without the democratization of media made possible by smart phones, social media, and the like -- Rushkoff cautions in "A.D.D." that the very tools we perceive as liberating can also be dangerously limiting. "I wrote this 'Program or Be Programmed' book to give people commands through which they can orchestrate their media and digital experience, rather than just having them orchestrated for them. But the big one that I've been thinking about lately is not to mistake choice for liberty, or choice for freedom," he said. "A choice is not a choice if you're obligated to choose. If you're obligated to choose, it might as well be 'Sophie's Choice' or forced choice. You know, which of these detergent strategies do you want to use to clean your linen? Well, I don't want to use any of those, I want to use nuts or something -- which apparently you can use, some kind of nut shells that you stick in the wash. It's the sense of being bombarded by choice and then equating all of this increased choice with autonomy. It's just not. Every time you have to choose, you are submitting to the obligation to choose. And you're breaking your flow, you're breaking your concentration, you're breaking whatever it is you're doing to make that choice. 'Do I take this call waiting, or not?' You don't have to choose. That's a choice -- 'none of the above' really is a choice. And it goes beyond Coke or Pepsi, McDonald's or Burger King, to the fabric of reality, which is not this leaping from choice to choice but the existence that happens between the choices."

"A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division" by Douglas Rushkoff and Goran Sudžuka is available now.

  

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=36683

NPR TheTakeAway Interview: Will Facebook IPO Change Soul of the Company?

When Facebook becomes a publicly traded company, it will have a duty to its shareholders to maximize company profits. As it traverses from social media start-up to massive, publicly traded company, one media theorist says the company will have to battle to maintain its identity.

Facebook filed the first papers for it's Initial Public Offering Wednesday afternoon, just before the business day ended.

According to Bloomberg, Facebook has chosen Morgan Stanley to lead their IPO efforts, which are expected to generate $5 billion to $10 billion for the company and give the company a valuation of perhaps as much as $100 billion.

The IPO is expected to be one of the largest in U.S. history, certainly larger than Google and rivaling many of the largest on the global stage as well.

But the IPO will bring big changes for Facebook as well and will challenge the company to try and keep its own engineers and leaders from seeing this as the perfect time to cash in their stock shares and try to do something on their own.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age," said the more money Facebook takes on, the more like money it will become. In other words, when a social media company is a social media upstart, it will have vastly different motives than the motives it has when it's responsible for acting in the best interest of its shareholder — a requirement for being a publicly traded company.

"The more public company you become on a stock exchange, the more really business-as-usual you become," Rushkoff said. "The more like corporate capitalism you become."

And, Rushkoff points, out that could mean some changes for Facebook users. Because profits for Facebook don't directly come from users — but rather from advertisers and social marketing firms — to maximize profits, Facebook will have to look for ways to improve that are in the best interest of advertisers and marketers.

"Rather than us, who are the people who are using this service for free, in exchange for surrendering our data," Rushkoff said.

To some extent, Google's IPO provides at least an indication of how Facebook will respond to becoming a publicly traded company, Rushkoff said.

"When Google became public, they had much more of an obligation to prove their devotion to their shareholders' interests," Rushkoff said. "They did that. They cut programs. They have to show earnings growth. They have to show focus. The got rid of Google Labs. You don't see Google talking so much about how every employee is going to have 20 percent of their time to do what they want."

In essence, Rushkoff said, the Facebook IPO isn't so much about social media taking over the economy, but rather about how the economy forces a tech start-up, a social media company, to adapt to the economy.

http://www.pri.org/stories/science/technology/will-facebook-ipo-change-the-soul-of-the-company-8242.html

CNN: Facebook's IPO - Zuckerberg Faces reality

(CNN) -- We all knew he'd eventually get around to it: Mark Zuckerberg is expected to finally bring Facebook public. The company is reported to be preparing to file for an IPO -- initial public offering -- through which anyone will be able to buy shares of the social networking company on an open stock exchange.

As a media theorist, I used to ignore these business shenanigans. Who cares if these companies are private or public, profitable or in the red? How many non-Wall-Street-Journal readers even knew what an IPO was back before the Internet created the likes of AOL, Netscape, and Google?

But the fact is we do now think about the stock market. Many of us are aware that Apple's market capitalization is fast approaching half a trillion dollars, making it either the largest or second-largest company in the world behind Exxon Mobil - depending on the week. So when we hear that Facebook is preparing for an IPO that will likely dwarf Google's entrance to the public markets in 2004, particularly considering that the company doesn't sell tangible goods or services in the traditional sense, we can't help but wonder what this will mean for the future of Facebook, its users, its competitors, and the greater economy.

The way it appears at first glance - particularly for those who have been following Mr. Zuckerberg since he launched "The Facebook" from his college dorm or, better, those who have seen the movie "The Social Network" - is that the Zuckerberg juggernaut is continuing unabated.

This new form of media -- social networking -- will not only redefine the Internet, change human relationships, create a new marketing landscape, and challenge Google, but it will now rescue and alter the economy itself. Like virtual kudzu, it will infiltrate the financial markets, creating new sorts of opportunities for this peer-to-peer "social" economy to take root. We will all make our living playing Farmville, or designing new versions of it, or investing in companies that do.

In reality, however, I don't think we are witnessing Facebook's victory over the financial markets as much as its acquiescence to them. Yes, Apple challenged Microsoft for software supremacy, just as Facebook now challenges Google for Internet supremacy. But there's another operating system churning away beneath all this high tech activity, and it's called corporate capitalism. If a company is big enough -- and that means simply holding enough money -- then sooner or later that money influences the rest of the company's activities.

In Facebook's case, it meant approaching the legal limit of 500 investors, which triggers a requirement to open the books to regulatory scrutiny. It also meant dealing with a few thousand coveted employees who took jobs at Facebook instead of Google or Apple or anywhere else because they were hoping to get in on a big thing. The promise of cashing in a few million dollars worth of stock options helps many a programmer make it through a late night of coding.

The same goes for those who invested in Zuckerberg five or more years ago and want to cash in before the "social web" bubble pops, if it's going to. Facebook was taking so long to get to market that many people had begun selling their shares privately on what are known as secondary markets, putting Facebook's valuation even further out of the company's own hands.

Simply becoming a multi-billion-dollar company changes the essence of its goals, activities, and purpose. Its bloodstream becomes filled with cash, and cash has its own agenda. For just like print, TV, or the Internet, money is a medium, too. It has biases, or tendencies, programmed right into it. The kind of money we happen to use -- bank-issued central currency -- is biased toward lending. That's why we call our system "capitalism." It's about the capital: Our money is designed to favor those who lend it to others who actually use it to build companies or create value.

The more money a company takes in, the more obligated it becomes to function in accordance with the properties and rules of money. For example, since becoming public, Google has had to prove its devotion to its shareholders' interests by cutting pet programs, showing earnings' growth, and demonstrating focus over big dreams. Out with public experiments like Google Labs, in with products like Android try to compete with Apple's iOS and G+ to compete with Facebook. No more touting that employees get 20% of their work hours to do whatever they want. It's a real corporation, now, and has to behave like one.

By all accounts, Zuckerberg was trying to delay this eventuality as long as possible. He knows that becoming the CEO of a public company will not be nearly as much fun, or as free, as running an Internet startup. However much we may not like his vision for our future, his primary purpose was to change the world. He wanted to create the operating system on which human social activity took place.

What he has ultimately succumbed to, however, is the fact that Facebook was running on top of another operating system all along. Instead of revolutionizing our reality, by filing an IPO Mark Zuckerberg is finally getting with the program.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/31/opinion/rushkoff-facebook-ipo/

ADD Reviewed...and liked!

I've been doing lots of interviews for ADD lately, and they're starting to come out along with reviews and commentary.  

"It's a great read and a startling look at a reality that is already all around us. It works on every level, as a fascinating graphic novel, a biting social commentary, and a warning to get our act together." -- Huffington Post Review and Interview

"There’s something strangely hopeful about the level and quality of thought that went into Douglas making this work of art. Like we’ve stepped into the middle of a great cultural shift, like we’ve caught Superman in that supply closet, changing back into Clark." -- PopMatters Review/Interview

CNN: Why I am learning to code and you should, too

(CNN) -- This week, New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted his intent to learn computer code by the end of the year. He joined about 300,000 other people who have signed up at CodeYear to receive free interactive programming lessons each week from theCodecademy, a web-based tutorial. I am greatly relieved.

It's time Americans begin treating computer code the way we do the alphabet or arithmetic. Code is the stuff that makes computer programs work -- the list of commands that tells a word processor, a website, a video game, or an airplane navigation system what to do. That's all software is: lines of code, written by people.

We are socializing, working, consuming, and living in a world increasingly defined by programs. Learning to code is the best way to understand what all those programs do, or even to recognize that they are there in the first place.

Just a couple of years ago, I was getting blank stares or worse when I would suggest to colleagues and audiences that they learn code, or else. "Program or be programmed," became my mantra: If you are not a true user of digital technology, then you are likely being used by digital technology. My suggestion that people learn to program was meant more as a starting point in a bigger argument.

No, I did not expect American adults to take the two or three weeks required to get their heads around programming, much less the months of effort they'd need to become proficient. But I wanted people to at least become aware of the digital systems on which we are conducting so much of our activity -- and the sorts of thinking and behaviors those systems have been programmed to encourage.

Most adults realize that, say, Facebook is engineered to increase the value of our "social graphs" to its customers, the corporations and research firms that buy this data. We understand that we're not the customers, but the product. The more critically we engage with all of the iPhones and Google searches in our lives, the better we can tell what they want from us.

But I no longer think that's enough. It took a few centuries after the invention of text for regular people to learn how to read and write. The printing press, which democratized print by reducing the cost of manuscripts, certainly helped. Now that we live in a world with newspapers, road signs, package labels and drug inserts, almost no one still questions the idea that teaching kids to read is a good thing, or that basic literacy makes us more likely to create value for ourselves or our employers.

Well, we now live in a world with apps, networks, and stock market trading algorithms that we use, even though desperately few of us understand how they work. And while learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.

How can it be free? Is this a charity? No. It's big business. As my friend, Jason Calacanis -- CEO of Mahalo and founder of the startup showcase LAUNCH conference -- explained it to me, "The HR cost of landing an individual programmer might be $50-100k for a large company. That's taking into account advertising, headhunter fees, interviewing time and internal staff."

Still, competition for the few programmers out there looking for work is very steep. So few Americans know how to program that firms like Google and Facebook are actually buying whole companies just for their code-literate employees, in what are known as "talent acquisitions."

According to Calacanis, each employee who understands how to code is valued at about $500,000 to $1 million toward the total acquisition price. One million dollars just to get someone who learns code.

Firms' other strategy, of course, is to import Chinese and Indian programmers, through a costly and often only temporary visa. (That's because, unlike those countries, we don't teach programming to students in the United States. At best we teach kids how to use programs that are already on the shelves. But that's another article.)

All Codecademy needs to do to make bank is connect those of us who complete its courses and are looking for work with the companies paying good money to find us. It's a model that takes the cumbersome costs of education off the students, and puts them onto the companies benefiting from the skills we have learned. And it's a model that could be applied to many other fields.

So to anyone out there who says you can't get a job: You can have one. A fun one. Learning code is not about numbers and mathematics. It's more like architecture, where you are presented with a puzzle problem such as "How do we get all these cars from this highway to that one without having to build a bridge across this river or putting an overpass next to the hospital?"

Learning to code means being able to imagine a new way of using the camera in your iPhone, or a new way for people to connect to each other, and then being able to bring that vision to reality.

If you know how to code, you can likely get a high-paying job right now, or - better - make valuable stuff right now. You will understand more about how the world works, and become a participating member in the digital society unfolding before us. You will be enabling America to compete effectively on both the economic and military frontiers, where we are rapidly losing our competitive advantage due to our failure to teach ourselves code. We should not have to wait for the NYSE to be hacked by kids from Asia to learn this lesson.