Wednesday
Jan212009
Jive Magazine: I'm No Authority
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 10:24PM
I'm No Authority: Ten Questions with Altculture Spokesman Douglas Rushkoff
by Suzan Perin Eraslan
March 12, 2004
Photography: book covers and photograph from www.rushkoff.com
Douglas Rushkoff is an extremely busy man. “I'm fighting 6 simultaneous tax audits - none grounded in anything, of course, but requiring me to find records from as far back as 1994. Plus we moved to Brooklyn, the apartment is falling apart, I've got teaching responsibilities at NYU, writing responsibilities to pay for life, and an average of 800 real emails each day. And a couple of interviews each day, too!” Its not easy being an author, a full professor, and the voice of millions involved in cyberbased subcultures, but somehow he found time in his busy schedule to answer a few questions for JIVE.
JIVE: How did you come to be so interested in and such an authority on cyber culture of all types? Were there any specific people, events, or works which led to this interest?
RUSHKOFF: Well, 'cyberculture authority' is a bit of an oxymoron, really. For me, the whole point of cyberculture is that it defies authority - or at least it forces us to recognize that our authorities are just role-playing. Authority is a social construction.
And that's what got me interested in cyberculture. Honestly, it had most to do with the fact that the weirdest, most psychedelic people I knew from college - Princeton, of all places - were moving to Northern California and getting involved in computer programming, networking, and graphics. I was just working on a screenplay about some college kids who combine psychedelics and technology to discover some altered states and dimensions. So I began visiting my friends on the west coast, reading Reality Hackers (the forerunner to Mondo2000), and consulting with then-unknown psychedelic philosophers like Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake.
But it was those friends of mine who seemed to be on the tip of something big - or at least far-reaching. Early trials with the Macintosh interface, fractal generation programs, some virtual reality experiments at VPL and Intel, Leary's interest in computers, the emergence of fantasy role-playing games systems, an introduction to chaos math and systems theory, and my own luck at having been friends with people in college who happened to be developing these lines of thought and culture, combined to put me in the right place at the right time.
No one else seemed to think these were important stories, so by the time they were, I was the guy who had written the book about them.”
JIVE: The ACLU has called you in as an expert defense witness on the positive effects of rave and club culture. While those who are entrenched in the culture probably latently understand these positive effects, but how would you put them into words? Also, as the scene has changed over the last decade or so, which of these do you see falling away and what do you see the new self-referential "meta-rave" culture giving rise to? Does the scene seem more or less positive than it did ten years ago, or is it just different?
RUSHKOFF: Well, rave as an emerging phenomenon is over. It's still a valuable cultural artifact, as well as a technology through which people can engineer a particular kind of experience. So I think you have to distinguish between rave, the cultural movement (the reaction to the deadening influence of packaged corporate culture and the effort to generate new forms of intimacy between people living in a desocialized culture), and rave the repeatable consciousness expansion technology. It's the same as distinguishing between LSD and the hippies.
I do think that kids all over the world are still having viable rave experiences, even if they're purchasing things from the mall in order to have one. Rave exploited the detritus of industrial culture, anyway, so I don't think there's any problem with kids repurposing consumer culture to their own ends. It's not so different from repurposing an abandoned warehouse as a dance space, industrial noises for music, or kids' toys for magickal totems.
As for the positive effects, I'd say there's one main one: experiencing group cohesion and intimacy without losing a sense of individuality. It breaks the fascist paradox, letting you have a sense of total inclusion and total autonomy at the same time.
JIVE: A lot of your early works (GenX Reader, Cyberia, Playing the Future, etc.) seem written to help adults (those older than Gen X, anyway) and non-technocrats understand the various cultures that have sprung out of the technological revolution. When writing these, was it your intention to try to shed light on the reasoning and thinking of these various sub-, counter-, and pop-cultures, or merely to represent them? How does it make you feel to know that kids around the world have probably shoved these books into their parents' hands and that the result has been positive and enlightening?
RUSHKOFF: It's definitely been my purpose to give language to people and groups who hadn't yet articulated who they are or why they are. So, on the one hand, I've been critiqued for not having a critical enough stance towards the subjects I write about. But, as I see it, my job hasn't been to critique cultural movements as much as to articulate them - get inside and speak for them. Especially when they are underrepresented or misunderstood.
So, while I don't know that GenX is really (or was really) 'all that,' I do know that marketers and the mainstream had completely misread this segment of culture as somehow stupid, lazy, and disillusioned to the point of apathy - where all we'd really done is explore alternatives to the highly institutionalized lethargy of the overculture. And while I don't know that the neo-pagan revival really succeeded in overturning consensus reality - I am glad I was able to explain to people in the early 90's who it was that was designing the technologies that would change their world.
I was lucky enough, and cursed enough, to be born in a hinge generation. So I'm able to translate the experiences of one to another. My early books were mostly intended to do this. I wanted parents and teachers to understand that the kids are most definitely all right - more all right than the adults, in many cases.
JIVE: We here at JIVE are intrigued with what our publisher has termed "Geekology." Do you think that the term "geek" has become obsolete now that people are freer with displaying their geeky obsessions (gaming, programming, etc.) and since most of the Western world is now connected via some form of formerly geek technology? Has the definition become even more fringe or has it changed from an insult to a compliment?
RUSHKOFF: Geek is still self-deprecating. It's really just a way for some person obsessed with image to pretend that they have 'soul.' Geekiness is still antithetical to 'cool,' but it's what keeps a person from coming off like, say, Paris Hilton. I don't think it's particularly healthy for people to categorize themselves into types or amalgamations of types. It's getting in the way of letting them "just be," and reducing the complexity of their self-expression. There's only so many definable types, yet an infinite number of possible people.
JIVE: How do you feel about women in the electronic age? Is there more of an acceptance of the girl as gamer, programmer, and hacker, or have different kinds of sexism evolved in a more clever disguise?
RUSHKOFF: I love women. Always have, always will.
I don't know that there's more 'acceptance' of women in programming or gaming. I think there's just more women who want to do it. And that's why there's more of them visibly involved. Girls' online use exceeds boys' at this point - mostly due to instant messenging, but they're into programming, now, too. My only concern is that women in programming and cybercultures often tend towards the suicidegirls.com post-do-me-feminist self-exploitation thing. I remember the kinds of girls who got into fantasy role-playing, which was seen as a boys' world, and it was a very similar phenomenon.
Kind of like rock chicks, or any other kind of 'chick' in a boy's world, who needs to play up sexuality in a way that boys aren't required to. That is, unless they want to come off as an anti-sexual Lilith lesbian. And this just isn't fair.
JIVE: Your newest course at NYU allows for students from all places and all walks of life to be involved in the course without being enrolled at the school. How was this experiment played out thus far? Have you gotten a lot of response from people outside of ITP?
RUSHKOFF: We've gotten some response - but not quite as much as I hoped for. I think it's my fault - I just haven't had time to nurse the online audience because there's too much going on in my life.
So I'm snowed in, and unable to do as much as I'd like to online in that group, my blog discussions, my religion websites, or my media-squatters list.
But, so far, it seems like a good experiment. A couple of dozen people from the online world are writing the midterm paper, and the meat-world students are finally opening up to the idea of people participating for free in something that they have to pay thousands of bucks for. Putting the students in charge of the online conversation was a good idea - it makes them responsible for the discussion, which enhances their feeling of ownership. And it frees me up a bit to do all this other stuff.
JIVE: Speaking of ITP, how did you end up there in the first place? Your bio on your website says that your education background is in theatre-- do you have any formal education in modern cultural analysis, or have you learned it all just by observing?
RUSHKOFF: Well, I think theater is cultural analysis. I did English at Princeton, Theater at CalArts, and then Film at American Film Institute. I should have my PhD from Utrecht University once I get around to finishing this dissertation I've been working on in my spare time. So then the question won't be real anymore, right?
I learn the same way whether its institutionally structured or not: reading, watching, thinking.
JIVE: Club Zero G is coming out in its entirety soon. Is this comic aimed at your average sci-fi fan, comic book reader, newbie raver, or older ravers to look back on and smile wistfully? What has the response been like to the work thus far?
RUSHKOFF: I don't know who it's really aimed at. I don't know that it's aimed. I suppose it's for all these kinds of people - but not just ravers. In a sense, I was writing a fantasy about what rave could have been - but it's much more about breaking reality by breaking consciousness. It's about the consensual hallucination into which we are falling, and invigorating people's will to resist and build their own.
JIVE: Nothing Sacred angered many in the American Jewish community, while others within the same community felt that you were spot on. Was this the most controversial work you've yet written, or do you usually receive such polarized responses to your work? Did you find that certain areas of the country were more or less agreeable to the subject matter and your argument? Given that this book dealt with the religion in which you were raised, was it more personal than any other work you've done or did you feel as if you could better observe and comment on it than other subjects you've tackled?
RUSHKOFF: I always get this polarized response - though not usually as passionately or ignorantly expressed. People tend to be more stupid and superstitious about religion than they are about economics or technology. So this was the first experience of people writing fictitious reviews of my work in real, established publications - reviews that made up bizarre accusations that I was denying the holocaust or demanding that Judaism produce a socialist presidential candidate - which then led to boycotts and stuff like that.
I found that people in less progressive areas tended to be more open to these ideas than people in New York and LA. Weirdly, the progressive liberal people still hold onto some extraordinarily retrograde notions of racial superiority - they just hide it. But people in more rural areas seem to understand how communities based on race or religion are social constructions. They have proven, so far, more free to explore the ways that practices like Judaism can set us free of superstitions rather than just create new ones.
JIVE: Finally, Exit Strategy. Why did you make it available for constant commentary and then choose to put many of those comments in the print version? How did you choose which footnotes went into the book? And where did you come up with such a revolutionary idea?
RUSHKOFF: Exit Strategy is about freedom. It's meant as an allegory to the Exodus - except instead of escaping the idols of Egypt, they are escaping the idols of capitalist culture: the great pyramids of NASDAQ. The novel is about the possibility not only for open source programming, but an open source reality - where people become aware of the codes through which we live, and capable of changing them.
So this sort of story needed to be told in a new medium - one that allowed for the participation of readers. The idea was that the book was written in the near future, but then 'hidden' online, only to be released in 200 years. By then, corporate capitalism will have been overturned, and readers wouldn't know a lot of the references in the story, from 'profit' to 'Microsoft.' So I invited the online community to write commentary and annotations to the story, in the voices of anthropologists of the future, explaining the book to their own contemporaries.
It made for a terrific experiment, with several thousand additions to the text - only a couple of hundred could be included in the book. And it revealed how much more fun it is to work collaboratively. I ended up giving all the profits to the Free Software Foundation and the EFF.
For those interested in Rushkoff’s work, check out his website, or read any of his spectacular books: Ecstasy Club, a cautionary tale of the dangers of blind idealism, set in a warehouse club in Oakland, California; Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids, about the importance of the then-emerging subcultural phenomenons of the ‘90s (everything from how MTV has made a generation of kids quicker, smarter, and better multi-taskers, to the metaphorical signifigance behind Newtypes and Mecha in Anime); and his more recent works, the open-sourced Exit Strategy and the controversial Nothing Sacred, which challenges present-day Judaism to end stagnation and to continue the faith’s tradition of open-mindedness and inquiry, are just a few of my favorites. Also, you can join his e-mail lists to find out up to date news or to participate in discussion with the author—and if you’re really driven, you can take his most recent class, Theoretical Perspectives for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, for free over the internet!
by Suzan Perin Eraslan
March 12, 2004
Photography: book covers and photograph from www.rushkoff.com
Douglas Rushkoff is an extremely busy man. “I'm fighting 6 simultaneous tax audits - none grounded in anything, of course, but requiring me to find records from as far back as 1994. Plus we moved to Brooklyn, the apartment is falling apart, I've got teaching responsibilities at NYU, writing responsibilities to pay for life, and an average of 800 real emails each day. And a couple of interviews each day, too!” Its not easy being an author, a full professor, and the voice of millions involved in cyberbased subcultures, but somehow he found time in his busy schedule to answer a few questions for JIVE.
JIVE: How did you come to be so interested in and such an authority on cyber culture of all types? Were there any specific people, events, or works which led to this interest?
RUSHKOFF: Well, 'cyberculture authority' is a bit of an oxymoron, really. For me, the whole point of cyberculture is that it defies authority - or at least it forces us to recognize that our authorities are just role-playing. Authority is a social construction.
And that's what got me interested in cyberculture. Honestly, it had most to do with the fact that the weirdest, most psychedelic people I knew from college - Princeton, of all places - were moving to Northern California and getting involved in computer programming, networking, and graphics. I was just working on a screenplay about some college kids who combine psychedelics and technology to discover some altered states and dimensions. So I began visiting my friends on the west coast, reading Reality Hackers (the forerunner to Mondo2000), and consulting with then-unknown psychedelic philosophers like Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake.
But it was those friends of mine who seemed to be on the tip of something big - or at least far-reaching. Early trials with the Macintosh interface, fractal generation programs, some virtual reality experiments at VPL and Intel, Leary's interest in computers, the emergence of fantasy role-playing games systems, an introduction to chaos math and systems theory, and my own luck at having been friends with people in college who happened to be developing these lines of thought and culture, combined to put me in the right place at the right time.
No one else seemed to think these were important stories, so by the time they were, I was the guy who had written the book about them.”
JIVE: The ACLU has called you in as an expert defense witness on the positive effects of rave and club culture. While those who are entrenched in the culture probably latently understand these positive effects, but how would you put them into words? Also, as the scene has changed over the last decade or so, which of these do you see falling away and what do you see the new self-referential "meta-rave" culture giving rise to? Does the scene seem more or less positive than it did ten years ago, or is it just different?
RUSHKOFF: Well, rave as an emerging phenomenon is over. It's still a valuable cultural artifact, as well as a technology through which people can engineer a particular kind of experience. So I think you have to distinguish between rave, the cultural movement (the reaction to the deadening influence of packaged corporate culture and the effort to generate new forms of intimacy between people living in a desocialized culture), and rave the repeatable consciousness expansion technology. It's the same as distinguishing between LSD and the hippies.
I do think that kids all over the world are still having viable rave experiences, even if they're purchasing things from the mall in order to have one. Rave exploited the detritus of industrial culture, anyway, so I don't think there's any problem with kids repurposing consumer culture to their own ends. It's not so different from repurposing an abandoned warehouse as a dance space, industrial noises for music, or kids' toys for magickal totems.
As for the positive effects, I'd say there's one main one: experiencing group cohesion and intimacy without losing a sense of individuality. It breaks the fascist paradox, letting you have a sense of total inclusion and total autonomy at the same time.
JIVE: A lot of your early works (GenX Reader, Cyberia, Playing the Future, etc.) seem written to help adults (those older than Gen X, anyway) and non-technocrats understand the various cultures that have sprung out of the technological revolution. When writing these, was it your intention to try to shed light on the reasoning and thinking of these various sub-, counter-, and pop-cultures, or merely to represent them? How does it make you feel to know that kids around the world have probably shoved these books into their parents' hands and that the result has been positive and enlightening?
RUSHKOFF: It's definitely been my purpose to give language to people and groups who hadn't yet articulated who they are or why they are. So, on the one hand, I've been critiqued for not having a critical enough stance towards the subjects I write about. But, as I see it, my job hasn't been to critique cultural movements as much as to articulate them - get inside and speak for them. Especially when they are underrepresented or misunderstood.
So, while I don't know that GenX is really (or was really) 'all that,' I do know that marketers and the mainstream had completely misread this segment of culture as somehow stupid, lazy, and disillusioned to the point of apathy - where all we'd really done is explore alternatives to the highly institutionalized lethargy of the overculture. And while I don't know that the neo-pagan revival really succeeded in overturning consensus reality - I am glad I was able to explain to people in the early 90's who it was that was designing the technologies that would change their world.
I was lucky enough, and cursed enough, to be born in a hinge generation. So I'm able to translate the experiences of one to another. My early books were mostly intended to do this. I wanted parents and teachers to understand that the kids are most definitely all right - more all right than the adults, in many cases.
JIVE: We here at JIVE are intrigued with what our publisher has termed "Geekology." Do you think that the term "geek" has become obsolete now that people are freer with displaying their geeky obsessions (gaming, programming, etc.) and since most of the Western world is now connected via some form of formerly geek technology? Has the definition become even more fringe or has it changed from an insult to a compliment?
RUSHKOFF: Geek is still self-deprecating. It's really just a way for some person obsessed with image to pretend that they have 'soul.' Geekiness is still antithetical to 'cool,' but it's what keeps a person from coming off like, say, Paris Hilton. I don't think it's particularly healthy for people to categorize themselves into types or amalgamations of types. It's getting in the way of letting them "just be," and reducing the complexity of their self-expression. There's only so many definable types, yet an infinite number of possible people.
JIVE: How do you feel about women in the electronic age? Is there more of an acceptance of the girl as gamer, programmer, and hacker, or have different kinds of sexism evolved in a more clever disguise?
RUSHKOFF: I love women. Always have, always will.
I don't know that there's more 'acceptance' of women in programming or gaming. I think there's just more women who want to do it. And that's why there's more of them visibly involved. Girls' online use exceeds boys' at this point - mostly due to instant messenging, but they're into programming, now, too. My only concern is that women in programming and cybercultures often tend towards the suicidegirls.com post-do-me-feminist self-exploitation thing. I remember the kinds of girls who got into fantasy role-playing, which was seen as a boys' world, and it was a very similar phenomenon.
Kind of like rock chicks, or any other kind of 'chick' in a boy's world, who needs to play up sexuality in a way that boys aren't required to. That is, unless they want to come off as an anti-sexual Lilith lesbian. And this just isn't fair.
JIVE: Your newest course at NYU allows for students from all places and all walks of life to be involved in the course without being enrolled at the school. How was this experiment played out thus far? Have you gotten a lot of response from people outside of ITP?
RUSHKOFF: We've gotten some response - but not quite as much as I hoped for. I think it's my fault - I just haven't had time to nurse the online audience because there's too much going on in my life.
So I'm snowed in, and unable to do as much as I'd like to online in that group, my blog discussions, my religion websites, or my media-squatters list.
But, so far, it seems like a good experiment. A couple of dozen people from the online world are writing the midterm paper, and the meat-world students are finally opening up to the idea of people participating for free in something that they have to pay thousands of bucks for. Putting the students in charge of the online conversation was a good idea - it makes them responsible for the discussion, which enhances their feeling of ownership. And it frees me up a bit to do all this other stuff.
JIVE: Speaking of ITP, how did you end up there in the first place? Your bio on your website says that your education background is in theatre-- do you have any formal education in modern cultural analysis, or have you learned it all just by observing?
RUSHKOFF: Well, I think theater is cultural analysis. I did English at Princeton, Theater at CalArts, and then Film at American Film Institute. I should have my PhD from Utrecht University once I get around to finishing this dissertation I've been working on in my spare time. So then the question won't be real anymore, right?
I learn the same way whether its institutionally structured or not: reading, watching, thinking.
JIVE: Club Zero G is coming out in its entirety soon. Is this comic aimed at your average sci-fi fan, comic book reader, newbie raver, or older ravers to look back on and smile wistfully? What has the response been like to the work thus far?
RUSHKOFF: I don't know who it's really aimed at. I don't know that it's aimed. I suppose it's for all these kinds of people - but not just ravers. In a sense, I was writing a fantasy about what rave could have been - but it's much more about breaking reality by breaking consciousness. It's about the consensual hallucination into which we are falling, and invigorating people's will to resist and build their own.
JIVE: Nothing Sacred angered many in the American Jewish community, while others within the same community felt that you were spot on. Was this the most controversial work you've yet written, or do you usually receive such polarized responses to your work? Did you find that certain areas of the country were more or less agreeable to the subject matter and your argument? Given that this book dealt with the religion in which you were raised, was it more personal than any other work you've done or did you feel as if you could better observe and comment on it than other subjects you've tackled?
RUSHKOFF: I always get this polarized response - though not usually as passionately or ignorantly expressed. People tend to be more stupid and superstitious about religion than they are about economics or technology. So this was the first experience of people writing fictitious reviews of my work in real, established publications - reviews that made up bizarre accusations that I was denying the holocaust or demanding that Judaism produce a socialist presidential candidate - which then led to boycotts and stuff like that.
I found that people in less progressive areas tended to be more open to these ideas than people in New York and LA. Weirdly, the progressive liberal people still hold onto some extraordinarily retrograde notions of racial superiority - they just hide it. But people in more rural areas seem to understand how communities based on race or religion are social constructions. They have proven, so far, more free to explore the ways that practices like Judaism can set us free of superstitions rather than just create new ones.
JIVE: Finally, Exit Strategy. Why did you make it available for constant commentary and then choose to put many of those comments in the print version? How did you choose which footnotes went into the book? And where did you come up with such a revolutionary idea?
RUSHKOFF: Exit Strategy is about freedom. It's meant as an allegory to the Exodus - except instead of escaping the idols of Egypt, they are escaping the idols of capitalist culture: the great pyramids of NASDAQ. The novel is about the possibility not only for open source programming, but an open source reality - where people become aware of the codes through which we live, and capable of changing them.
So this sort of story needed to be told in a new medium - one that allowed for the participation of readers. The idea was that the book was written in the near future, but then 'hidden' online, only to be released in 200 years. By then, corporate capitalism will have been overturned, and readers wouldn't know a lot of the references in the story, from 'profit' to 'Microsoft.' So I invited the online community to write commentary and annotations to the story, in the voices of anthropologists of the future, explaining the book to their own contemporaries.
It made for a terrific experiment, with several thousand additions to the text - only a couple of hundred could be included in the book. And it revealed how much more fun it is to work collaboratively. I ended up giving all the profits to the Free Software Foundation and the EFF.
For those interested in Rushkoff’s work, check out his website, or read any of his spectacular books: Ecstasy Club, a cautionary tale of the dangers of blind idealism, set in a warehouse club in Oakland, California; Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids, about the importance of the then-emerging subcultural phenomenons of the ‘90s (everything from how MTV has made a generation of kids quicker, smarter, and better multi-taskers, to the metaphorical signifigance behind Newtypes and Mecha in Anime); and his more recent works, the open-sourced Exit Strategy and the controversial Nothing Sacred, which challenges present-day Judaism to end stagnation and to continue the faith’s tradition of open-mindedness and inquiry, are just a few of my favorites. Also, you can join his e-mail lists to find out up to date news or to participate in discussion with the author—and if you’re really driven, you can take his most recent class, Theoretical Perspectives for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, for free over the internet!
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