The Two Doug Rushkoffs

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REWIRED

JOURNAL OF A STRAINED NET:
every monday: what it is, the web and beyond

WebFlashes:
"It is a myth that people hate me."
Rebecca Eisenberg spoke with Douglas Rushkoff.
Not all of it made it into The San Francisco Examiner.

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The Two Doug Rushkoffs
by Rebecca Eisenberg

June 30th, 1997

Last Sunday (June 22), The San Francisco Examiner ran portions of Rebecca's interview with Douglas Rushkoff, somewhat "featurized" as It's All The Rave. Click on that title and read the piece immediately for context, especially if the name "Rushkoff" rings a bell but you can't quite place it or if you weren't aware that his new novel, Ecstasy Club (HarperCollins), about a group of ravers in Oakland, California, that devolves into a cult has been optioned and will most likely be coming soon to a theater near you.

Btw, you've just gotta love this from the blurb page for the book: "A darkly comic contemporary fable: a brave, very funny, very knowing trip through the neo-psychedelic substrate of the wired world." --William Gibson

"Yeah, what Gibson said." --Julian Dibbell

At any rate, as Robin Miller is fond of pointing out, it's Webzines like REWIRED that allow for content that needn't struggle for column inches or present its most pleasant face. Rushkoff clearly has a few bones to pick with his critics, and he does his picking here.

So read It's All The Rave, read a few of the more eyebrow-raising comments below, and if you still haven't had enough, I've added a few of my own thoughts on the Board, and as always, encourage you to do the same... /dwh]

DR: When I get attacked from the right, it's people saying, "Wait a minute, this guy is advocating media literacy; kids aren't going to believe what they see on TV; they aren't going to have heroes any more; they aren't going to believe in their religion any more; this is evil; this is Satanism; this must be stopped." I can respect that. They are attacking my ideas; they disagree; they think it is dangerous.

When the so-called left attacks me, they say, "This guy is making a lot of money; he is a sell-out; don't buy his stuff any more." That is a very dangerous attitude to have; it will keep the left mired in its own conspiracy of failure and conspiracy of defeat. Because if someone from the left, someone from "our side" starts to do well, starts to have people listening to his ideas, and starts actually to penetrate this massive media monolith, and pierce the invisible veil and get some of that gold dust to start falling out, actually create a leak and subvert the system; if everyone who does that is then attacked by the people rather than saying, "Great! He found a way to poke a hole in the system! Let's do that! Let's spread this around!" -- they are doomed, doomed to failure.

And originally, I think, because of the types of critique I get from San Francisco and nowhere else, I viewed this as a San Francisco problem -- this inability of the left or "good" to get their act together, especially in the face of right-wing types like Wired to organize and get so much power so quickly -- but now I see it more as a "left problem", and hopefully, as Generation X moves through the system, we won't be as victimized by our own fear and paranoia.

RLE: What do you mean by the "left" here?

DR: By this, I am really referring to the left media. People who write for so-called left-wing, alternative, "progressive" papers. Because I am a media person, that is the left that I think of.

You know, I was hearing stories about Hunter S. Thompson, back in the sixties, when he was starting to get all this money for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that all of these people were saying, "Oh my god, he has sold out now, this is awful!" And he went on TV and said, "What the hell is your problem? I just took these bastards for half a million dollars!"

And the other thing I realized is that there are really two Doug Rushkoffs. There is this real person that writes these books and has these feelings, and then there is this media entity that was really created by the New York Times article and then Wired/Hotwired jumping onto that article.

And what was happening was that I had been out there for four or five years already, with what I think is a very progressive and populist view of the way new media can and should and will be used. And there are a lot of people that not only disagree with that point of view, but are deeply threatened by that point of view -- the "mainstream" media for one, and "cyberpundits" for two. Because here I am saying, "There is no such thing as a cyberpundit; you don't need an expert to tell you how to go out and use this stuff, just go out and do it." And if they can somehow concoct a story, that Doug Rushkoff is actually making $7500 an hour, doing the most evil kinds of consulting that you can imagine, then they can pull out a rug from the idea that there is no such thing as a cyberpundit.

RLE: Your opinions often resonate with more than a tad of conspiracy theory.

DR: Well, an unconscious conspiracy. The same conspiracy that, at Time Magazine, compels their first Internet cover to be about Cyberporn. Why does Time Magazine think that the biggest issue about the Internet, the most important first thing to raise to the American and world public, is that their children are going to be molested online? Because Time Magazine naturally sees the Internet as a threat to their authority as the exclusive distributors of news and information. Was it the editors saying, "We've got to stop this Internet thing"? Of course not. But it is very easy for them to take that point of view because it is in their interest to.

RLE: Not to wander too far off the topic, but don't you think that they used that Cyberporn cover merely because a mention of porn sells magazines?

DR: You are right. But that is the process by which top-down media perpetuates itself and tries to destroy other things. That is the way that the mainstream church perpetuates itself: "Sex is fearful. Don't take drugs; don't get involved in pagan rituals. Come to this nice clean church and listen to these father figures talk to you. When people get in touch with real spirituality, they run from organized religion as fast as they can. It is just the nature of the media establishment, the religious establishment and the government establishment to try to quash things that are "alternative" -- new political parties, for example -- because the system naturally resists.

RLE: You obviously are very cynical of mainstream, "establishment" culture. But your book, Ecstasy Club, is very cynical of "alternative" culture.

DR: It is cynical of both. It is cynical of alternative culture and of the people who would defend mainstream culture. The joke of this book is that the people who dedicate themselves so interminably to promoting evolution at all costs end up developing something that is much like fascism. And the people who are trying to prevent the development of human evolution at all costs end up fostering novelty. What I am trying to say is that any ideal carried out to an extreme that denies our natural human functioning is going to be detrimental, dangerous.

I see so many examples, all over the place, of people grabbing an ideal and just closing their eyes to everything else. I think that I am guilty of that to some extent too. I mean, in Playing the Future, where I am saying, "Look, the kids are okay; let them go with it; let them go with their joysticks," and all that, yes, I do think that, but also, kids are kids,and there is a limit. I look at cyberculture, especially at places like the Well and in San Francisco, and I see people taking their own point of view so damn seriously.

Whether it is the Wired people taking their point of view about business so seriously, or the rave kids saying, "This is what it's all about!" or all the paranoia from the subcultures, and I wish that people would just recognize that this is not brain surgery -- this is meme wars, just chill with it. So I wanted to write a comedy to pop the balloon that was building up. Look at the Church of Subgenius. They have the right idea with their insistence on humor -- when everyone takes all of this so damn seriously, look what happens!

RLE: So why did you decide to focus on the rave culture, and was it based on any personal experience of yours with raving?

DR: I wanted to focus on rave culture as a milieu because it is where I see most of the progressively evolutionary conscious forms of spirituality today. It is the current horizon of current spiritual culture. It's not the New Age anymore; it is the rave. It is a place where science, technology, global culture and youth culture meet as a spiritual pagan ritual. It's a really cool thing.

These come up every 20 or 30 years; these things happen -- it happened in the sixties, in the twenties -- there will be these places where people drop the role models, drop the institutions, and decide that they are going to create something new. And you experience that great clear light -- whether it is the LSD light of Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, or the ecstasy group-mosh light of a great rave of ten thousand kids in the nineties.

But when you experience that, it is really hard to hold onto that consciousness without grounding it in something. In the 1960's, they grounded it in Eastern Gurus and the New Age movement. And here, in the nineties, it ends up getting grounded in conspiracy theory and paranoia. After you have the peak of an acid trip, you can then move into paranoia, get freaked out by something. And that is because your brain is looking for some kind of rationale for it all.

Ideally, you can say, "There is no rationale; it is all arbitrary," and you can ride that great existential wave, like Buddha. That's cool; ride that if you can. But most people cannot. And like with any great ritual, you are very vulnerable to anyone who then comes in and says "It is actually about this," or "It is actually about that," or "Don't you see, this is what is happening! We must stop them!"

RLE: So, is this based on personal experience?

DR: Yes and no. I dated a woman who was pretty much married to a pop culture guru who had sex with many women, mainly housewives, and talked about himself as being a "doorway to other worlds." And I was very interested in the step-by-step process by which he got these people to really do this crazy shit -- to go against their own judgment.

So, I was really interested in the way that people get involved in cults, whether it is a cult like the AMA, or a cult like Wired, or a cult like a real cult. And I am pleased to be able to answer the question for people, "How does someone get into a thing like Heaven's Gate and then kill themselves? I wouldn't join something to kill myself!" Well, yes, you wouldn't join it on the day that they decided to kill themselves, but six months before that, it may have looked very different, before it got to that point. So I wanted to have a story of a guy who knows what is happening, but still ends up going along with each thing with his actions -- he goes and gets a tattoo, goes step by step into it.

RLE: Do you basically believe that psychedelics can help people evolve as individuals in order to promote general evolution of the species?

DR: Well, I think that having a psychedelic experience can be very provocative. I don't think that the psychedelic lifestyle is one that offers continuing revelation or personal progress, but I do think that the psychedelic experience can serve as a travel movie in that it gives you a glimpse into some alternative ways that things could be. I don't think that it empowers you at all to implement those changes. I don't think that it gives you at all a clue as to how to make this a better world, but I do think that you can have an experience -- and not everyone does -- that shows you a worldview that is beyond what we are experiencing today -- how things can be.

RLE: So do you think, then, that we are evolving towards groups rather than evolving towards individualism and diversity?

DR: No, I think that people have a hard time understanding how people can come together as a group but also maintain their individuality. And that is what the kids in this book experience -- they want to come together as a group, but end up surrendering themselves to one specific individual.

RLE: But that is nothing new ...

DR: Of course not, but there are alternative ways of coming together. Look at natural systems. Take, for example, the experience of six individual women who move into an apartment together and their menstrual cycles link up. Does that turn them into robots, less individualistic? No. When their cycles align, they are more sensitive to each others needs, and each individual actually has more influence over the whole rather than less -- because you can tell when one person has fallen out of sync -- it affects them all.

Look, also, at a coral reef -- the actions of one animal can have profound affects on the group. I think that there are certain ways that we can network and also preserve our individuality and our individual consciousness, and there are other ways that we can network that end up decreasing it -- monolithic, fetishistic, goose-step things.

To me, with the rave experience, when it is working right, there is a great feeling of individuality, but also a great feeling of group consciousness. But, when you try to hang onto that, after you are off the drug, and you want to continue it, it is gone. Why? Because psychedelics are a temporary thing. Because they give you a temporary, drugged, artificial glimpse of something that could be real.

That is why I set the book in 1995, after the initial burst of rave was over, because, like with an acid trip, if you had the peak and then try to hang onto it, you can't. That's how you get a bad trip. It's over.

RLE: Especially with ecstasy, it seems, since so often when people are on ecstasy they seem to behave like they are all such best friends.

DR: Yes, and call that kid the next morning, and he'll say, "Who the hell are you?" That, to me, is where it comes around to San Francisco. In San Francisco they experienced something here in sixties -- something magical, something real. They launched the counterculture. And now, they can be overly hostile to anyone else they view as trying to define the counterculture movement. But that is group think; that is cultism. The whole is, that if this is a global movement, you should be able to write a book from anywhere -- from Korea, from Brazil.

The book is about how the whole cultural war, and real wars, too, between counterculture and the overculture is just mankind trying to make love to itself, but it doesn't know how. So it does it in this mock war, where we, in the countercultures, like to think of Gordon Liddy, and Bush, as all those guys as the mean angry white male monkey rapist, and the counterculture as the good, feminine, Ghandi-ish, passive, we-are-getting-raped.

Meanwhile, they think of us as the evil counterculture communist acidhead, tyrannical, out of control, anarchist females, cursed, bleeding, paganized, who are trying to disrupt and contaminate their good, Christian salvation-culture. We just drew up these sides, but they are arbitrary. There is no all good or all bad.

RLE: Who is the "us" you are talking about there?

DR: I have always considered myself part of the counterculture, part of the Electric KoolAid Acid Test junkie-freako kids. The "left", as it were. But you can call it left/right, you can call it counterculture/overculture, you can call it pro-evolution/anti-evolution, which is why the right-wing is creationist and the left-wing is very evolutionary-theory.

RLE: But isn't the whole "counterculture" very much a part of the institution?

DR: They are just a much of a part of the institution as anything else. If you are really smart, you can disengage from that wheel.

RLE: So, are you authentic?

DR: People cannot understand that a person could actually have a successful book, make some money, and still be a good person. I don't make a lot of money, but let's say that I did. Would that change the ideas in my books? If my books are advocating something positive, like media literacy, isn't it a good thing if more people buy them?

No matter how much money I am or am not making -- and trust me, for a while I was making no more than eight thousand a year -- I have been out there doing the same thing. I am looking at what I consider to be the hinge points and the cracks in our culture, digging my little ax in there, and cracking them open. I may make some money this year, with the movie and the novel, but so what? It doesn't matter how much I get paid to give a lecture. What is important is what I am saying to these people. And what I am saying is that the age of media programming is over.

I am talking to people who make advertisements, who try to use media to program our culture, and what I tell them is that programming is over -- that their audience is too smart for that. Stop it. It's bad. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel guilty. Why don't you want to go home at night and feel good about yoruself? Why don't you just create products that people like, tell us what they do, and charge a good price for them? And for that, the left gets upset because they think that I make money.

RLE: So you think that the age of programming is over -- that the media does not influence culture? Isn't there a contradiction in terms somewhere in there?

DR: I think that media does affect culture. But, if what I am trying to do is promote the idea that we can wake up, then I am going to present a picture of the media consumer as the most empowered smart person I can. And I think that kids, for the most part, are waking up. This whole "screenager" thing is really about media literacy. I think that media literacy should be taught at school.

I even think that it is a myth that people hate me. It is just a small group of people, really, because most people don't even know who I am.

But I think that there is a real problem -- and I tried to write about this in Ecstasy Club -- with people who are overly dedicated to certain "countercultural" ideas. I think that they are the people who live in that constant state of vigilance and paranoia are in a way stunting their own growth.