Bay Guardain, "Will the Real Douglas Rushkoff Please Stand Up"
Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 4:00PM May 29, 1997
Bay Guardian: The first thing I want to ask you about is the novel...
Douglas Rushkoff: Something's happened that's gotten me kind of paranoid about reactions to it. There are all these people in the press -- who are basically my colleagues, you know; we're all journalists writing about cyber and culture -- and they all saw this New York Times piece that said I made all this money, and since then they've been really aggro. And it's gotten me down, to see this bi-weekly hit on me in Hot Wired, or the SF Weekly using the awful press materials that Harper Collins sent out with the book. The book is actually meant as a satire of the very naiveté they're accusing me of. Of course you can find quotes and sections that are over the top naive. That's what these characters are. That's the point. I think a lot of people are looking at it as trying to bring down someone they see as kind of a space popcorn character. That's not who I am at all.
BG: So people think that you identify more with the ideals that the Duncan character talks about?
DR: Yeah, exactly. Or they don't see that as an author, I don't believe these people were time traveling. They think I mean it as a straight-up science fiction adventure, rather than an exploration of just how insane people who are paranoid can get, which is what it is. This is a book that says: what if those Mondo-ish people went as far as they could possibly go in their thinking? I think this is where they'd end up. I was a bit of a raver in my own time. But I always wondered: all that rave philosophy, the stuff that's on the tags of t-shirts, what if you took that absolutely seriously? What if you dedicated your life towards the goals on a rave flyer? What would you get? I think [these characters] is what you would get. You'd have a set of euphoric experiences, and then real life would set in. There'd be competition for women and for money and for credit, and in the end people would become completely paranoid.
BG: I think if the character of Zach were not in the book as a counterbalance, it would be understandable if someone were reading the book that way. But Zach is in there saying, "Folks, hellloooo!"
DR: Right. And he's doing it to himself too. The thing that he's doing constantly is saying, "Well, looking back on it, it's easy to see that this was completely stupid. But at the time, you've got to remember that I was into this girl and into this idea, and I'd had this really rich experience." You know, you can have peak psychedelic experiences that make you want to pursue that great oneness of the universe. And I can't blame anyone who gets caught in that, whether they're a New Ager or a dedicated raver.
The other thing is that this is in some ways a very personal story about being a Jewish middle class person with high, lofty, idealistic, spiritual goals. And what I've experienced is that the further away I try to get from my own heritage in Judaism, the more it generally stares me in the face. So here you've got a guy, who wants to completely launch out of who he is and become part of this super rave culture, ending up being the most traditional Levite he could possibly be.
I also wanted to do a bit of a social critique on hype and spin. I think that if there is a simulacra in the Baudelairean sense, it's hype and spin. People are divorcing themselves from the moment by hyping the future and spinning the past. And it's a way, I think, that we as a culture are getting disconnected from the experience of life.
BG: A way of not living in the present, of living anywhere but the present.
DR: These kids were trying to divorce themselves from what they're calling the status quo mentality, the common set, and all that. But they end up isolating themselves from the very things that would bring them to the moment. Duncan would have Lauren abort her baby. They want to be away from business, away from all of these mundane concerns that in the end are the very fabric of life.
Oh my God! There was a review that said that I obviously copied this from the Heaven's Gate thing! That is so fucking funny.
BG: But you wrote the book months ago!
DR: It was done in August Œ96. The galleys were out to reviewers long before Heaven's Gate. Reviews were written before it happened. My God, if they think I'm jumping on that bandwagon, they've got another think coming. Right about when Miramax bought the movie rights to the book -- this is really sick -- the Heaven's Gate thing happened. I was still asleep. I didn't hear about until the next morning, and my phone rings at like 11 o'clock, and one of the producers is at the gym, calls up, saying, "Did you hear? Isn't this great!?" Isn't that fuckin' morbid?
But I was almost frightened by how parallel it was, that these people looked at an astronomical event, trying to find some sort of pattern and using that as a moment. That's exactly what Duncan, the Ecstasy Club cult leader, does with the USA Today story about that imploded galaxy.
BG: The book also speaks very much to the kind of culture we've gotten ourselves into: cyber-this-and-that. Everybody spends so much time on-line these days. We're living so much of our lives on-line right now that this book is a useful reminder that, hey, it's a lot simpler than that.
DR: I am so over things cyber. I can't even tell you. I mean, I was never really truly into things cyber. I got into the Mondo crowd and saw raves and psychedelia and the Internet of 1988-89 as a really cool thing, as sort of a new Beat society to write about. I wrote one fucking book, "Cyberia," and then after that I'm supposed to be some kind of cyberpundit. I get yelled at as though I'm some kind of cyberpundit, and I'm not at all. I really don't know about this stuff. I know how to do my E-mail. But I'm no fuckin' cyberguy.
If I have any expertise, it's in looking at the way culture responds to change, and the way media seems to affect the way we interact. That's why the main things I write about are the wired culture, the Mondo culture, the rave culture. I'm just looking at the way people are competing for the cultural spotlight.
BG: So much of what you're saying about who you are contradicts the things that I first heard about you. So I want to ask you: Who is the media virus called Douglas Rushkoff?
DR: The media virus called Douglas Rushkoff didn't launch really until the New York Times piece. The media virus Doug Rushkoff is some guy who knows nothing and didn't even write any books getting paid 75 hundred dollars an hour to fake out people. Someone selling a generation's secrets to the bad corporate people. And that's just like ... what!? Let me see some of this dough! If I'm going to suffer these attacks, then at least I want the wealth that goes along with it. You know? I'm not making enough to be this bombarded with anger.
The Rushkoff media virus that I would launch, or the one I've tried to launch in the past, is this: a guy who's been handed some of the robes of cyberpunditry, who is willing to say in public that the emperor wears no clothes. I'm willing to say that these robes mean nothing. I'm willing to say I don't know more than anybody, but that I know as much as anybody, when it comes right down to it. I'm willing to say that all this punditry is pure speculation, that everybody's a fake, and "cyberguru" is an oxymoron. Cyber, to me, is a completely populist, egalitarian place, where everyone is finally revealed as being as smart as everybody else. There's a lot of people, honestly, who think that that's a very dangerous statement to make. If there is any campaign against me in the conspiratorial sense, it's against that meme. It's against the meme that says: don't let any of these people take themselves seriously, because it's all a fucking joke.
BG: Because that would mean don't take them seriously, and there goes their bottom line.
DR: So instead they say, "Oh! Doug Rushkoff, the pot calling the kettle black. He's out there making $75 hundred an hour telling people nothing about nothing." When I go into a company -- which I've done maybe three times now -- and try to give them advice on youth culture and technology, all I do is tell them that the age of public relations is over, that these techniques don't work any more.
BG: The New York Times piece gave the impression that this was your main line of work these days. Out on the corporate lecture circuit and raking in the big bucks.
DR: All I've been trying to do is to make people less afraid of technology, less afraid of the future, and less afraid of cyberpundits who are telling them to be afraid. I really feel I that I was given a bum rap for having once gotten $75 hundred to do a talk.
BG: The book "Cyberia." You didn't have to be a cyberpundit to write it. Any journalist who did his homework could have written that book.
DR: Yeah, but not in 1990! The only thing that's special about that book is that it came out. I was able to convince, in 1989, a New York publisher that this culture was going to mean something. I was the guy being laughed out of every cocktail party in New York for telling people that they might be using E-mail someday. Telling people that something's going on in San Francisco that could get big. Telling people there's a kind of music called rave music, electronic music, that's actually going to catch on. That's all [the book] is. It's an introduction, a joy ride through a culture that most people had no idea even existed. Today it's just a relic, a document of a time. But it does capture the blind optimistic exuberance of a scene, and it ties together a bunch of different cultural different phenomena that hadn't been tied together before, from rave and Internet to Grateful Dead and fantasy role-playing games and Earth First.
BG: In your next two books, "Media Virus!" and "Playing the Future," you deal with about seventy different things that you unify into these two overarching ideas: the "media virus," and the idea that we need to be surfing the cultural wavelengths the way that kids do. That got me over my preconception of you as merely a media critic, and then I realized that you're analyzing a lot more than that, the way you can bring, say, animé and gun control into the same book.
DR: I'm kind of a cultural observer, I guess. People say, "Oh, trend watcher!" I'm not some fucking trend watcher. I don't even know what a trend is. If I'm teaching anything, it's teaching the process of pattern recognition. I think we live in a very chaotic age; we have a very chaotic media. And people will be less afraid of the future and of the changes that are happening if they can draw connections between things. I'm trying to say that there are patterns, and if you can recognize these patterns, you can be soothed and you can orient yourself to this bizarre terrain. But I don't just pick out random things and try to shove them in there. It's more like I'm thinking about certain things and noticing them in different places. "Playing the Future" in a way is an advertisement for channel surfing in life.
BG: Among the criticisms of you is that you don't really understand fractal physics, which is something you constantly refer to in your books.
DR: I wish I knew who really said that. Because I do understand, frankly. I understand systems math better than most people around. I did get in an argument at Interval with these scientist guys about how many possible kinds of answers there are for non-linear equations. I said there's generally three: you can reach a limit, you can go to infinity, or you can waver around. And they were saying, "Oh, that's not right! There's five!" Oh, please. Give me a break. They're people who have dedicated their life to some completely nerdy activity. Generally, people who are cyber people end up getting so hung up on the tiniest of points.
Yeah, there's problems with my work. "Cyberia" gets too trippy for the common man. "Media Virus!" starts to delight a little bit too much in its own intellectual twists. And I think "Playing the Future" gets a little too far into spirituality at the end, which kind of pulls the rug out from under some of my more important points. I think in "Ecstasy Club" I might have devoted too much energy to the conspiracy plot, which requires so much thought to figure out what's going on that it gets less funny.
BG: In "Playing the Future," you were able to bring a number of disparate things together...
DR: I even got Jesus in there!
BG: You got all religious at the end! I'm surprised the fundamentalists haven't attacked you.
DR: I've gotten death threats from them.
BG: Have you really?
DR: Yeah, but I don't mind that. The fundamentalists are the other side. So when they're upset with me or writing me letters telling me I've got to find Christ or I'm going to burn in hell, I don't mind that so much. What I do mind is the 17-year-old kid from The Well saying, "You fucker, you sold out. I hate you." That hurts me so much more.
BG: In the introduction to "Playing the Future" you wrote: "Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being and are equipped with a whole lot of new features." Latest model. Equipped with new features. What you really develop in the book is the idea that these kids have new abilities to perceive, not necessarily new faculties. It's like saying Michael Jordan is more evolved because he's unequaled at handling a basketball. But he still just has two hands like the rest of us. Are you really arguing that kids are more evolved?
DR: I tend to treat something like attention deficit disorder as an adaptation, an adaptation to too much media, too many billboards. But if an adaptation happens after a person is born, is that still evolution? I guess that's the question. I'd say yes. I'd say that our species evolved biologically, and now human beings are going to evolve culturally. Kids do have certain abilities that adults don't, but most of them are developed after they're alive. But no, they're not "new types." In that case it's really more of a metaphor. I was trying to show people that just because something is younger doesn't mean it's more primitive. A Honda Acura is a more advanced car than a 1945 Rolls Royce. It's newer. The car has more features. Kids actually don't, in that sense. They're just human beings. But they've got a longer history under their belt than we do.
BG: The history of all that road testing and development.
DR: Right. No, it really would be going too far to say that kids are actually being born with bigger heads or something. Although apparently they are. There was some study I was reading. ...
Randall Lyman's review of Ecstasy Club can be found in Guardian Lit.
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