Team Human

"Doug Rushkoff has been a friend and wrote the foreword to my book. Team Human is a pretty well known—and growing—podcast where he has interviews with people. The book and his podcasts are focused on one major theme: reminding us—and this is his motto, so I’m just going to quote it—that “being human is a team sport.” So let’s now apply that logic to thinking about technology, which is what his book does. What we find is that technologies are designed in an individuated manner. So say you and I were very similar demographically, politically, etc., and we both logged onto YouTube or we went on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. We could be presented with completely different worlds, which may have very little intersection with one another. Why is that? It’s because the algorithmic systems, the computational systems, are built on the logic of feeding, controlling (or at least shaping and influencing) the individual user. The effect of that at scale is massive amounts of polarization and actually us forgetting that our lives are deeply interconnected, on the level of family, of community, of neighbourhood, of nation and society and of the world, which faces common challenges like climate change. “We have to carefully investigate monopolistic forms of behaviour” Doug Rushkoff makes the point that this idea of collectivity and communality was an early part of the internet itself. The early internet was comprised of a lot of hippies and get-back-to-the-earth, community-oriented people in the Usenet newsgroup world, but what the internet has turned into is a set of fragmented, individualized, hyper-inflammatory at times, spaces. Rushkoff is saying, ‘Let’s get back to the logic of thinking of ourselves as interconnected and as a team. Only as a team can we create technology that helps us come together and only as a team can we solve the major challenges that we face and become more humane as human beings.’ That’s what that book is about and he also makes the point that communality is a fundamental aspect of nature itself. Trees have underground internet systems that they communicate through, mycelial networks and rhyizomatic networks. I love that he makes those kinds of points. So I appreciate his work and this book. I’ve been a guest on his podcast as well."