Episode 404 - Douglas Rushkoff
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck missions?
Marc:I think I just made that one up.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:We're past that.
Marc:We're almost past that entire intro.
Marc:It's just a consistency thing.
Marc:You know, I'm actually considering not saying fuck at all ever again on this podcast.
Marc:But, you know, fuck that.
Marc:Am I right?
Marc:I mean, I don't know how I'm going to do that.
Marc:But I know that some people who don't know really what to expect from the show are perhaps coming to the show later.
Marc:Perhaps this is your first show.
Marc:And you're like, wow, this guy has said fuck, you know, nine times already in five minutes.
Marc:And to that I say, what are you, my grandma?
Marc:Are you my grandma?
Marc:I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:I'm happy to be here, and I don't want to drain you.
Marc:I hope you're doing well.
Marc:It's nice to see you.
Marc:One thing I'm not going to do is talk about any of my feelings about how an interview went or didn't go.
Marc:Look, that's on you.
Marc:I just do what I do.
Marc:I'm not going to share my experience of interviews anymore.
Marc:I'm just telling you that.
Marc:And I had a policy of that before because people have their own relationship with the guests that I have on, their own history with them and their minds.
Marc:Why mess with that with my own ridiculous emotional expectations?
Marc:Let it be, man.
Marc:Am I right?
Marc:I am right.
Marc:Douglas Rushkoff is on the show today.
Marc:He's a man I've talked to before.
Marc:And back when I was on the radio, he's a thinker.
Marc:You know, there's not a lot of, you know, we all consider ourselves thinkers, but he's a professional thinker.
Marc:And his new book is Present Shock.
Marc:He's written a lot of books.
Marc:Life Inc.
Marc:How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back.
Marc:I enjoyed that one.
Marc:Media Virus.
Marc:Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture.
Marc:Get Back in the Box.
Marc:How Being Great at What You Do is Great for Business.
Marc:Nothing Sacred, The Truth About Judaism.
Marc:This dude is a thinker.
Marc:A public intellectual.
Marc:That's what he does, he thinks.
Marc:He'll be on in a second.
Marc:Before I forget, I will be at Zaney's in Nashville.
Marc:Tennessee, Land of Prince's Chicken.
Marc:July 18th, 19th, and 20th.
Marc:OK, that's going to happen.
Marc:I'll be at the Silver Jubilee for Sub Pop, Sub Pop Silver Jubilee this weekend.
Marc:This the 12th up in Seattle.
Marc:Anyways, look, people, I'm going to talk about technology and culture in a few minutes.
Marc:You know, I'm going to talk like I am a I'm a Twitter addict.
Marc:I'm having a hard time, man.
Marc:My conscience is starting to speak to me in 140 character bursts.
Marc:Sometimes I wonder whether or not any of us are actually moral people anymore or whether or not we're just afraid that something will be revealed on a social networking site or that some camera will pick up our behavior or that someone's going to overhear us and send that out into the world.
Marc:I wonder if we are really moral people or just frightened people.
Marc:I don't know if that's ever been any different.
Marc:Everybody's worried about the NSA, which they should be because we didn't know about that stuff.
Marc:Obviously, the NSA stuff is horribly disturbing in that we didn't know that our government was doing that.
Marc:I mean, some people are like, hey, man, if you got nothing to hide, don't worry about it.
Marc:But that's not the point.
Marc:The point is, what if that technology gets into the hands of somebody who may not have our best interests at heart, which is almost any government to some degree.
Marc:But what's more disturbing is the more you tweet, the more you get on Facebook, the more you do anything publicly in any platform.
Marc:All that shit is amassed.
Marc:and sold clicks identities and then you know it's just put into a mill and they sort of break you down and then they can shove shit directly in your face that they think you'll like and you might not even know it's happening you might think you have control over your desires but you don't they've been designed and boxed and exploited and mined
Marc:by corporate interests who pay for that information just because we want to post what we're doing.
Marc:Hey, I'm eating breakfast.
Marc:What's he eating for breakfast?
Marc:Puffins.
Marc:All right, he's a Puffins guy.
Marc:Break it down.
Marc:He's a Puffins guy.
Marc:It means he shops at probably at least in the natural food section of a regular supermarket, but most likely at a Trader Joe's or perhaps a Whole Foods.
Marc:That means that his tastes are specific.
Marc:Probably brings his own bags.
Marc:He's that guy.
Marc:He brings his own cloth bags guy.
Marc:Because he thinks he cares about the environment, but he probably doesn't.
Marc:He might have a girlfriend that forces him to bring his own bags to TJ's.
Marc:And that's the type of girl that probably uses healthy products for her face and cares about stuff.
Marc:And he's probably the kind of guy that, because he's trying to make his girlfriend happy, is secretly miserable.
Marc:So let's put all that into the bank and see what we get and try to push it right up into his face and he'll jump at it.
Marc:I guess what I'm saying is I just wonder how much of our brains we really have left and how much of the collective unconscious is mediated by social networking platforms and how they're using that to just extrapolate.
Marc:information and and sort of categorize it until they completely pummel our desires and we don't have any control whatsoever our only the only ability we have is to sort of scream loudly at home at our computer or step away from the computer just to scream loudly occasionally
Marc:Wait a minute.
Marc:When did Scott Aukerman get here?
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:Scott Aukerman, when did you get into my garage?
Guest:Mark, did you really sleep with Gina Gershon?
Marc:No.
Guest:What?
Guest:I was in bed with her for a few minutes.
Guest:I had my shirt off.
Guest:I think that that is disingenuous.
Guest:If you're going to say you slept with someone on your TV show, you should literally do it.
Guest:What?
Guest:While you're filming.
Marc:Look, it's bad enough that my girlfriend has to see me in bed with women.
Marc:Has to.
Marc:Let it know.
Marc:Gets to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Try and spin that with her.
Guest:A commercial comes on and I'm in trouble.
Guest:I literally, my wife is in my TV show and I put her in a makeout scene.
Guest:I didn't even think about it.
Guest:I was just like, oh, she'd be good for this role.
Guest:And then the day happens.
Guest:Oh, and how did you- And some young, handsome guy is making out with her.
Guest:Did you have any emotional reaction?
Guest:Oh, so hot.
Guest:Well, that must be where you're at in your relationship.
Guest:Let's mix it up.
Guest:We've been together 14 years.
Guest:We need something.
Guest:Bring in the new guy.
Guest:So are you done shooting everything?
Guest:Yeah, we just wrapped season two.
Guest:Funny?
Guest:I mean, you feel good about it?
Guest:I feel great about it.
Guest:I feel like this season, I think we came in the first season kind of going, okay, we think we know what we're doing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because we had a good pilot and we sort of based it all on the pilot.
Guest:And then we found out that we didn't really know what we were doing, especially.
Marc:So you had no idea how to construct a series out of your pilot, but you figured, well, there seems to be a template here.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So by the end of it, we were kind of like, oh, here's a way we could do it better.
Guest:And so this year, I think we did it really, really well.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:What were some of the things you changed or made you understand it better?
Guest:There were certain structural things that we changed to streamline it a little bit.
Guest:There were certain ways that we made it easier on the talent involved.
Guest:But more than that, I think we really amped up the storylines that are in this season.
Guest:We actually have more narrative in the actual shows and through lines through the shows.
Guest:So like Mr. Show style?
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:I mean, there's a few of the episodes where everything comes together at the end with all these disparate elements that we've layered in there that you go, holy shit, I never saw that coming.
Guest:Well, you were one of the pioneers of that.
Marc:You were there at the cutting edge of modern-themed improvisational comedy using celebrity guests and weirdness.
Guest:I wouldn't say that I was there a pioneer of it because those guys did it before I ever joined them.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Yeah, I was very influenced by them and I used to see the Mr. Show shows and it made me start doing comedy.
Guest:And then Bob asked me to write on it and that was really nice.
Guest:And this is your own thing.
Guest:This is my thing.
Guest:Did Dave Cross come on your show?
Guest:He came on this year, yes.
Guest:Yeah, he was great.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He was on the first season doing a little funny part, but he's a celebrity guest, as we say, this year.
Guest:Was that part of your deal with him on the first season?
Guest:Like, just do this thing with me?
Guest:No, he came on the first season and he didn't know what the show was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:All he did was read the script.
Guest:I think he just read his lines.
Guest:He didn't even read my lines.
Guest:And said, oh, I think this is a funny sketch, so I'll do it.
Guest:And then he saw the show later and was like, oh my God, this show is really, really good.
Guest:So he was really excited to come on this year.
Guest:And I have him and Bob doing a scene together.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:As themselves?
Guest:David is himself and Bob is playing a character.
Marc:Who else is on?
Guest:There are so many people on this year.
Guest:We have Pee Wee Herman.
Guest:That's a big thing.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:As Pee Wee.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did all new Pee Wee bits.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He wrote a whole bunch of new Pee Wee bits to do.
Guest:Is this the first time that he's done new Pee Wee bits?
Guest:I mean, since the Broadway show, I think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I mean, I love the Pee Wee on Letterman shows, and that's what I wanted my show to sort of be.
Guest:So a mixture of those two things.
Guest:So to have him come on and do all new Pee Wee bits, the style of what he used to do on Letterman, was a huge thrill for me.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:And he looks good?
Guest:Yeah, he's great, yeah.
Guest:It's not like, oh, Pee Wee's old.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:He's really funny.
Guest:He was great.
Guest:All the bits were fantastic.
Guest:Awesome.
Guest:We have the season premiere.
Guest:We have Andy Samberg on it with Jordan Peele and a whole bunch of guest stars.
Guest:They're funny.
Guest:Peele's funny.
Guest:We have Jessica Alba, Anna Kendrick, Aziz Ansari.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Was she funny?
Guest:Anna Kendrick's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She was a fan of the show, I guess.
Guest:She was the first person to sign on.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She wanted to be part of that thing?
Guest:She was the first celebrity to get back to us and schedule a date.
Guest:How many did you do?
Guest:We did 20.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a huge undertaking.
Guest:Who wrote them with you?
Guest:I have a staff of Neil Campbell as the head writer, who was the artistic director of the UCB Theater.
Guest:Three of the Birthday Boys.
Guest:I don't know if you know that sketch group, but they have a show coming out on IFC.
Guest:And then Eva Anderson, who's a great sketch writer.
Guest:And then the head writer of The Onion, Seth Reese, joined us.
Guest:And then Paul Rust, who wrote the Pee Wee movie.
Guest:wow that's uh seems like kind of an all-star writing room yeah it was really great it was and and the writing this year i think the other thing that we changed back to your point was uh the first year we started doing a ton of um i wanted to do like takes on talk show stuff and so this year we threw that out and said any sketch we'll do any sketch we can find a way to that's the great thing about the fake talk show format right is you can find a way to do almost anything just fit it in
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So if we if someone had a sketch that was really funny, we would figure out a way to like walk out of the studio and do it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Why not?
Marc:Without it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:As opposed to just doing a riff on a talk show.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Open it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So if someone had a fake trailer, we go, hey, I'm starting this movie.
Guest:Let's see this trailer.
Guest:Or if someone had a sketch about, you know, men back in the 1920s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We would flashback and remember.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, something in the 1920s.
Guest:so it's really anything can happen in the show and it's really a great opportunity for comedy I think and wait okay so who else 20 fucking episodes I mean you just named four people yeah we have Bill Hader we have Zach Galifianakis did Zach do more than one
Guest:Zach is the only person who's been a couch guest in more than one, but I will say this year he is not himself.
Guest:He is a couch guest, but he's not himself.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:If that makes sense.
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:That doesn't even mean it may be a character.
Marc:It might just be Zach not being himself.
Guest:The hint I'll give you is he's the special guest in our Christmas episode.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I don't know if you can put two and two together.
Okay.
Guest:Who else do we have?
Marc:Does he have a beard?
Guest:He does have a beard.
Guest:Perhaps a white beard.
Marc:Oh, I get it.
Guest:How's your show going?
Marc:It's good.
Marc:It seems to be doing well.
Marc:It's hard to tell with them, isn't it?
Marc:They say they're happy.
Marc:That's all you have to hold on to.
Guest:They say they're happy.
Guest:Just take them at their word.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:They probably are.
Guest:Then I will.
Guest:How's yours doing?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:We're not back on yet.
Guest:When is it on, Scott?
Guest:It starts July 12th, 10 p.m.
Guest:IFC.
Guest:And if you want to get caught up on the first season, it's all on Netflix right now.
Guest:And you can watch all 10 of them on Netflix, which I guess a lot of people are doing.
Guest:That's good, because you don't want to come in the middle of Comedy Bagbag.
Guest:Yeah, not know what's going on.
Guest:We actually do have storylines that are layered throughout the whole season.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:One of the last episodes we have is a running joke throughout the entire season that is finally resolved.
Guest:And how's Reggie?
Guest:Reggie's great.
Guest:Reggie Watts is my band leader in it, if you haven't seen the show.
Guest:He's one guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He is the band.
Marc:Yeah, he's a very talented guy.
Marc:He makes a lot of sounds with machines and his face.
Guest:And he's a really funny actor.
Guest:And we asked, we actually, while we were writing, asked him what he wanted to do this year.
Guest:And he said, I don't know.
Guest:I'd like to play a cop.
Guest:So he's a cop in one episode.
Guest:With that hair and that beard.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:There's a really funny episode with Zoe Saldana from Star Trek and Avatar called Cop Swap, where it's a fake reality show where every week a policeman switches jobs with a regular citizen, and so he switches with Reggie.
Guest:Oh, that's a good idea.
Guest:Who came up with that idea?
Guest:You know, the writers.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Well, it really was.
Guest:He said I wanted to play a cop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I started saying cop swap like in the writer's room.
Guest:Cop swap.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then we just wrote a sketch around me saying cop swap.
Marc:And that's how it's done, kids.
Marc:You just, you know, you kind of lock into something.
Marc:You say it enough and magic happens if you're around the right people.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:You have to be around the right people.
Guest:so all right july don't do it yourself july what july 12th friday july 12th and we're doing 20 episodes all the way till december 19 or something like that it's good news for everybody it's hilarious scott ackerman comedy bang bang do you need me to show you out of the garage or how do you want to do this i'll just sneak around the way i came in here i'll just yeah i know a special way in here you don't even know about did you come up through the skunk hole
Marc:Wait, you know about the skunk hole?
Guest:Oh, I didn't know that you knew about it.
Marc:Now you're going to have to figure out a different way.
Marc:Ah, well.
Marc:So watch that.
Marc:Watch that comedy bang bang thing.
Marc:That's happening.
Marc:Oh my God, I'm crying.
Marc:I'm crying.
Marc:Let's talk to Douglas Rushkoff.
Marc:Do these go right into your mixer, or do you use these preamps and then?
Marc:No, I go right into an analog mixer, and then I go from there into GarageBand, and that's it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I get one track.
Marc:Because it's voice, I don't deal with USB mixers.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But you told me about this.
Marc:What's the thing you told me about?
Marc:Source Connect.
Marc:Source Connect for the ISDN line.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you could run yourself a satellite or actual terrestrial radio show right off your computer.
Marc:Right.
Marc:See, the future is here.
Marc:Is that the point, Douglas Rushkoff?
Marc:That is the point.
Guest:The future is here.
Guest:Well, that was supposed to be the point.
Guest:That was the point of digital technology.
Guest:I mean, was that we get to do stuff in our own time, in our own way.
Guest:You know, I can sit at home in my underwear and work and not- Was that always the point?
Guest:That was originally, it was a part of the slacker era.
Guest:This was the Simpsons and Rick Linkletter, and it was that moment.
Guest:But-
Marc:Okay, so the new book is Present Shock, which is When Everything Happens Now.
Marc:That's a riff on Future Shock, which was a book that was prophesizing or speculating.
Guest:Yeah, 1978's Alvin Toffler.
Marc:It was a Toffler book.
Marc:He wrote the third... What was his other book?
Marc:There was Future Shock and... Oh, what was the other one?
Guest:It wasn't third wave.
Guest:Third... Oh, fuck, man.
Marc:Because Toffler... He and his wife, yeah.
Marc:Right, but they were not necessarily on the money.
Guest:They were, you know, you go back and read Future Shock again.
Guest:He's right 70, 80% of the time about what's going on.
Guest:You know, that birth control is going to give people more choice.
Guest:It's going to change people's relationship to marriage, allow for gay marriage and all this other stuff.
Guest:I mean, he was kind of seeing basically the main thing he was arguing was that we were going to get more and more choice over things.
Guest:And as we get more and more choice, we're going to have to think about how do we legally structure our world?
Guest:You know, if everybody's doing everything they want, when they want, how they want it.
Guest:And that's a real problem.
Marc:It can be.
Marc:Well, it's a challenge.
Marc:Okay, it's a challenge.
Marc:All right, so let's start off with some background about you.
Marc:You come from where?
Marc:Queens, New York.
Marc:Queens.
Marc:Queens, yeah, Whitestone.
Guest:Whitestone.
Guest:You grew up there?
Guest:I grew up there in Larchmont and Westchester.
Guest:My dad got better jobs.
Guest:What was his racket?
Guest:His racket, he was a CPA who became a hospital financial administrator back before the days of HMOs and all that.
Guest:He ran an outside hospital by the end of it all.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:As a non-doctor.
Marc:Big Jewish family?
Guest:Jewish family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he was the first one to go to college, that whole thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Kicked out of my grandfather, got thrown in a well in a pogrom in Kishnev when he was a little kid.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, broke his back.
Guest:So that was the story.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And his father got hanged in the store window.
Guest:The other one hanged.
Guest:And the other one, they were from Romania and they used to fish by this big lake in Bucharest.
Guest:And then they made a law.
Guest:The Jews aren't allowed to fish in that lake anymore.
Guest:So they send him over.
Guest:He's 12 years old and he's pushing a cart and he turns it into the biggest textile chain in New England.
Marc:So your grandpa was part of the sort of immigrant rush of Shmata in New England.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah, there you go.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So you're thoroughbred.
Marc:Thoroughbred Eastern European.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Grandma was a Bolshevik or whatever.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And what was your education?
Guest:I went to college.
Guest:I went to Princeton.
Guest:I went to art schools after that.
Guest:I went to CalArts out here and then AFI out here.
Guest:I was going to do theater and film and then it just got too kind of vapid.
Guest:And I ended up writing books, which worked.
Guest:I just got, for fun, I got a PhD at Utrecht University in Holland.
Guest:I wrote this big dissertation on sort of money as a, it's called monopoly monies.
Guest:The idea that I think anyway, the digital technology helps us see the kind of how fabricated money is.
Guest:It helps us recognize the operating system of central currency, you know, as an operating system rather than as real.
Marc:Oral.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:That's interesting because it's sort of a sham that this is just a bunch of, you know, there's very little money in a lot of IOUs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's what money is.
Guest:That there used to be, if you look at it from the perspective of a media theorist, there were all these other kinds of monies back in the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries.
Guest:And they came and said, all those monies are illegal.
Guest:If you want to trade with each other, you've got to use this money.
Guest:You've got to borrow it and you have to pay it back at interest.
Guest:It's like, it's a great way for the rich to stay rich by being rich.
Marc:Yeah, just by creating indentured servitude with anybody below a certain point.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then from the perspective that I'm in now, though, the whole point is they put a clock in money that didn't need to be there.
Guest:That's how we got the industrial age.
Guest:Time is money.
Guest:We have to grow and expand and grow faster and faster and faster.
Guest:And that's what Toffler was looking at.
Guest:That's what futurism was.
Guest:End of the 20th century.
Guest:How can we go?
Guest:What's the Moore's law by which things are going to increase?
Guest:Right.
Marc:But how does actual production of goods play into that paradigm?
Marc:I mean, if now you're really dealing with a production of content and an almost addictive need for content on a consumer basis, and then a good part of the population demands free content, so what is the industrialism that we're looking at?
Marc:It dies.
Guest:I mean, basically, it goes away, and we start to realize, okay, everybody wants everything for free, and they don't want to pay for it, but...
Guest:Well, where's the real problem in this?
Guest:And that's when you've got to start doing some kind of thought mining.
Guest:The problem is that what we're trying to do is to extend the industrial age model of economics and business and central banking into a digital age that doesn't recognize it, that doesn't need it.
Marc:Into the Wild West, basically.
Marc:Not even the Wild West because that was pre-industrial and actually was a movement towards building capitalism.
Marc:But in the sense that there's this very thinly organized chaos happening
Marc:Right.
Marc:In the digital age.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the digital age really retrieves that peer-to-peer kind of marketplace, the bizarre of the 11th and 12th century that central currency was invented to stamp out.
Marc:But oddly, I can buy that model, but the bizarre is actually an individual.
Marc:That every individual, that the bizarre is an interesting point, but the way they pinpoint their consumers is they can literally break you down by the number of clicks into- But that's them.
Guest:It's a personal bizarre.
Guest:Yeah, but that's not our peer-to-peer.
Guest:That's not you and me transacting with each other.
Guest:That's you and me being trailed and big data analyzed by some big corporation.
Marc:Big data instead of big brother?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Big data.
Guest:But they're there.
Guest:That's on the other side of your Facebook wall is a big data engine that knows if you're going to turn gay, if you're going to have a kid, if you're going to get cancer.
Marc:Big data is watching us.
Guest:Big data is and predicting.
Guest:I mean, it's the future collapsing into you while you've got friends from second grade trying to befriend you on Facebook.
Guest:It's like this tremendous time compression, which is what present shock really is on an emotional level anyway.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:that a little bit what do you mean present like what what are the symptoms of the emotional traumatization of living in present shock because i know how i experience it immediately everything becomes very personal the internet and and information that comes through the internet to me through whatever platform possible is some sort of personal attack or some sort of moment of of emotional connection but i think that i have to be i have to adapt
Marc:It seems like there's a generation after me that has a detachment to this because you can't sort of interact with the present as it is presented to us in your model without becoming incredibly drained as a guy who grew up in a more industrial age.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And drained in one of, you know, in the book, I kind of break it up into five ways.
Guest:The first is narrative collapse.
Guest:You know, we're used to being raised with stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.
Guest:In a presentist age, we don't have that.
Guest:Well, you got 140 characters.
Marc:We have the now.
Guest:Yeah, basically.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is the pinpoint now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, or you have the now sort of the now of the occupiers, which is another which is a healthier now than now of I'm going to be in this moment.
Guest:I'm not going to be joining these ends justify the means campaigns with eyes on the prize.
Marc:And, you know, that's also stopping the pace that you're talking about and saying that, you know, human beings have to have, you know, some some.
Marc:power in this that i think that what was interesting about the occupy movement outside of the way it traveled through twitter or it became sort of you know digitized and known throughout the world and a symbol of protest was that there were there were feet on the ground there were people in a place right actually being there right and they weren't even marching to something right but those of us who weren't there could go okay they've got it covered which is one of the negative elements
Marc:Well, right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The same way you Jews in America might say, oh, don't worry, there's someone at the Western Wall who's actually praying to God the right way so I can just write a check.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that's sort of like, how much of that are we going to lose?
Marc:Because it seems that it's very easy.
Marc:And one of the things that I'm sort of obsessed with right now, I know we're just at one of your five.
Marc:is that we have a very predatory content culture that we are now, I think, entering somewhat of a troll culture.
Marc:There's a lot of people that don't do shit, but steal and prey on other people's content, on other people's point of view, on other people's.
Marc:Even when you have occupiers who are out there in the streets, the number of people that are still at home going, fuck that, is going to be high.
Marc:And they can diminish everything.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And then there's not just the people saying, fuck that.
Guest:But this is the people saying, fuck you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's like, you know, there's just so mean.
Guest:People are so willing.
Guest:You know, there's this sense, you know, when you're online, you get this kind of an Asperger's kind of thing where where you don't see the other person.
Guest:You don't sense the other human being.
Guest:I mean, you look in the comment section of any place, even friendly places like Boing Boing and horrendous places.
Guest:It's horrendous.
Guest:And it's like, my God, do they realize there's another human being?
Marc:But how do you account for that disposition?
Marc:Does that fall into your model at all?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's the second thing I'm talking about, which is the second symptom.
Guest:I'm calling it digifrenia, which is the sort of mental confusion that comes from having multiple instances of yourself operating at the same time online, that you no longer have a personal connection to yourself.
Guest:your your uh your online avatars to your online personas i mean in some cases you actually don't like on facebook they're advertising as you to other people they're misrepresenting you and they're taking the worst they're taking people who've liked your page and using them in ads so identity becomes fragmented in how it's represented right you know in these different platforms and how it's used by big data
Guest:right okay so then what does that say for you know how how is there a battle for for your sense of self in this age totally i mean and if you live in present shock right if you live chasing the tweet and chasing the moment online then you're not even on the home turf you're not even on human home turf right you know the more that you connect and it ends up sounding kind of new agey but what the heck i'm in california today i can talk like this you know the more you connect with the actual cycles by which you live the kind of
Guest:biological rhythms and biological clocks, which we're just starting to learn about, I mean, the more coherent you can be in these other spaces.
Guest:So, you know, it's not just, you know, jet lag, which they looked until the 50s and 60s, they thought jet lag was a superstition.
Guest:It wasn't until major league baseball managers started to say, look, our pitchers are doing worse when they travel west to east than when they travel east to west.
Guest:Why is that?
Guest:That science kind of caught up.
Guest:And now it's really simple things like, you know, knowing there's a lunar cycle and each week in a lunar cycle, people tend to be dominated by a different neurotransmitter.
Guest:We go from acetylcholine to serotonin to dopamine to norepinephrine.
Marc:Sure, the human machine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you have a week in each one of those, it's not even the human machine, it's the human organism.
Guest:No, I get it.
Guest:I hate to be too mechanical about it, I guess.
Guest:But if you understand that, that we're all in these rhythms, then you can ground yourself or just be aware of that rather than trying to be in this kind of always-on generic reality of the internet.
Marc:Well, but, okay, sure, you can be aware of that if you're not compulsive, if you're not having addictive personality.
Guest:Or if you don't have some shift work labor where you've got to work against your thing and you've got a boss telling you you've got to keep churning it out.
Guest:But that's the whole thing.
Guest:We're taking the priorities of the industrial age, which is more, faster, efficiency, work the person, time is money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And trying to exacerbate them with digital technology, which really throws them out of control.
Marc:But who do you think is doing that?
Marc:Because it seems to me that a good number of people who are active online day-to-day compulsively are sitting in cubicles supposedly doing something else, number one.
Marc:And number two, you know, if that production model...
Marc:It still holds in your premises that it holds in the digital age.
Marc:What exactly are those bosses expecting people to produce?
Marc:Because all I see is an almost malignant appetite for content.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, from from a lot of people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, the appetite for content doesn't doesn't.
Guest:kind of bother me as much you know as well two things one is the way that's replaced the need for the appetite for contact you know people would rather consume bites yeah then right yeah it's a lot less draining be with others you know there's a detachment there right so the loss of eye contact yeah the inability of people to experience rapport with each other right you know our actual basic social abilities are diminishing as we get more and more of uh
Guest:as we accept more and more simulations.
Guest:But it's more now the way that machines have learned to make us more compulsive.
Guest:I mean, our machines are learning more about us than we're learning about them.
Guest:So every interface you're interacting with, everything that Google shows you, they're all...
Guest:It's just testing, just trying to learn to get you to have a more compulsive, more addictive relationship to it.
Marc:But you're talking about the challenge of being a genuine human in a world that is dictated by this new age.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's not by the technology.
Guest:It's by industrial age corporate capitalism being enacted through this technology.
Guest:Because shareholders own these companies.
Guest:Shareholders want fast returns.
Guest:So every machine that we're using is being programmed to get us to buy and sell more stuff.
Marc:It seems that way, but I don't know that those models have proven.
Marc:I can't tell you how many startups I've seen begin and fail with this idea of actually creating consumers of something.
Marc:A lot of times they just want eyes.
Marc:I mean, it seems that it starts there.
Marc:How do we get eyes on this?
Marc:How do we get clicks on this?
Marc:Whether or not those business models really work, I still think the jury's out in a lot of ways.
Guest:Well, they don't care for most of them because what they want to do is get enough eyes so they can execute an exit strategy and make their money and leave.
Marc:well then well then that becomes the big question is that given that most people aren't making things because in the same way you say that you know what dictates the internet and what dictates our relationship with it are these corporate entities that are trying to create consumers or maximize consumption what you have against that is you know people who are watching the people that have jobs aren't really making much of anything and and you know what what what is the product is the product us i mean you know what are they trying to uh to to if what is the job
Marc:of the future, Douglas.
Guest:Well, the whole thing is I don't even know that we need jobs in the future.
Guest:Everyone keeps saying, you know, the big problem on the headlines is jobs.
Guest:We need more jobs for Americans.
Guest:How are we going to get a factory or get a bank to lend money to a factory to come to a town and give people jobs?
Guest:Who really wants a job?
Guest:No, I don't want a job.
Guest:Nobody wants a job.
Guest:We want stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We want stuff.
Guest:Yeah, but at some point there has to be some- There's some people doing some things, but the problem now is not that we don't have enough labor to accomplish what we need to to be fed and closed.
Guest:We don't have enough jobs to justify giving what we already have in abundance to people.
Guest:So here in California, we've got banks tearing down houses because-
Guest:They're in foreclosure and we can't just sell them below market.
Guest:So maybe it's getting better today.
Guest:But last year we were ripping down houses because you can't just let someone live in it because he doesn't have a job.
Guest:He didn't earn it.
Guest:So we're destroying food.
Marc:We're burning food every week.
Marc:So then what do people do?
Marc:Just what?
Marc:They just be aware of the lunar cycle and sit around and wonder how they're going to make money?
Guest:No, they don't need to make money.
Guest:That was the whole thing.
Guest:I mean, this is why we're retrieving certain values that seem medieval to us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The sort of the Burning Man Etsy peer to peer values.
Guest:The fact is we've gotten really efficient.
Guest:So now what can we do?
Guest:We can start to unwind the efficiency of Del Monte and Big Agra and start doing community supported agriculture.
Guest:You know, we can start unwinding the false efficiency of central currency and banking and start to say, how could we also have a local currency in our town and provide each other with goods and services?
Guest:The fact is, if we don't need everybody working 40 hours a week, which, again, is a Renaissance era 13th century construction, 40 to 40 hour week, working on the clock, working by the hour instead of working by the unit that you produce.
Guest:I mean, all of these things are our features.
Guest:They're artifacts of a very particular model.
Guest:So.
Marc:So you're saying that as human beings in relation to the advent of technology and the the the way it makes our life easier and more connected is that there needs to be a contraction in physical reality to a more localized, community driven barter model of economics.
Guest:Yeah, or a local favor bank, because a barter is kind of one-to-one.
Guest:In a genuine local economy, you can still ... I can give you chickens, you can fix his shoes, and he can ... Because, I mean ... It doesn't have to go back and forth.
Marc:James Kunstler talks about this, about the contraction, that the suburbs are now going to be sort of phantom limbs that are going to die out, because there's not going to be enough fuel to get people from place to place.
Guest:Well, it's not just the contraction doesn't have to be just because and although it's partly because we're reaching the limits of our resources.
Guest:It's that we've reached the end of the colonialist story.
Guest:You know, the industrial age only worked.
Guest:The expansionist debt based economy only works when you've got more and more regions to take over.
Guest:Now, the last region, you know, was sort of Africa and South America.
Guest:We ran out and then they thought, oh, the Internet, that's going to be the new region, the new territory.
Guest:So what they did was they took the agenda of the Industrial Age expansion and said, let's throw it into cyberspace and get more hours and more eyeballs and more of this.
Guest:But that's not the opportunity here.
Guest:The opportunity here is to actually...
Guest:I mean, that's the beauty of it's what Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush and all the original net theorists talked about.
Guest:We could actually work less.
Guest:It's just that we don't the operating system underneath the net, which is just corporate capitalism.
Guest:That one doesn't work for a digital age economy of abundance.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So let's just get rid of corporate capitalism then.
Marc:What's the plan?
Guest:Well, we are.
Guest:We are doing it.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:Is that number four?
Guest:Where are we at?
Guest:Number three or four?
Guest:We're not none of those.
Guest:We're off that map in some ways.
Guest:I mean, I guess what we're in is number three, which is overwinding.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Overwinding is when you try to take big timescales and compress them into teeny little ones.
Guest:So in the business landscape, it'd be using derivatives and derivatives of derivatives instead of doing investments.
Guest:It's like people bought Facebook on the IPO day and they were disappointed they hadn't made money in 10 minutes.
Marc:It's bubble thinking.
Guest:It's bubble thinking, but it's wanting to make money on the trade rather than through investing.
Marc:It's trying to get those long-term-
Guest:goods doing something right exactly we're doing actually doing something actually providing inflating an idea and selling it right but the economy of speculation the economy of derivatives is bigger than the economy of stocks the economy of stocks is bigger than the actual uh supply and demand economy of real people it's got nothing to do with you or i actually need from each other that the the the
Guest:Artificial economy, the synthetic economy, is 200 or 300 times bigger than the actual economy at this point.
Guest:So we're just at that tail.
Marc:So what do you think happens when that actually collapses?
Marc:Is it going to be a slow fading away?
Guest:I'm trying to make it a slow, wonderful fading away rather than an awful collapse.
Guest:A panic.
Guest:Right.
Marc:A post-apocalyptic landscape.
Guest:But the strategy for both scenarios is the same.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The more friends you have that are actually farmers, the more you can... You can't be self-sufficient.
Guest:That's an illusion.
Guest:That's the Unabomber.
Guest:But the more that you have sort of local...
Guest:Local supply chains rather than these long, crazy... If you need to get your stuff through Safeway, who's getting it from trucks, who's getting it from another country, these giant supply chains are what are really vulnerable.
Marc:So it's interesting.
Marc:What you're sort of presenting is a rural and I think what would be considered primitive model in the face of this amazing technology we have.
Guest:Well, it's not a... It sounds primitive, but what we're doing is...
Guest:I'm not saying that in a negative way.
Guest:We're retrieving a non-complex, coherent relationship with our food, our shelter, our energy, because we now have the technologies to actually do that in an intelligent
Marc:But how do you shift the millions of people that use the technologies that you're celebrating specifically to distract themselves, specifically to be destructive, specifically to isolate themselves in compulsive, you know, sometimes dangerous situations?
Marc:Right.
Marc:The only way this model that you're talking about really seems to function in my eyes right now is Craigslist.
Marc:Right.
Marc:On a certain level, yeah, but what you're really asking- Goods and services, can you meet me at this gas station?
Guest:Another way of asking the same question is, how can you make real sex more attractive than internet porn?
Guest:In other words, that's really what we're talking about.
Guest:How do you get people to be as seduced by reality as they are-
Marc:But it's the same issue that you're saying is what's distancing ourselves from just interaction is that, you know, if I can get this done by myself with this stuff right here that nobody would do if I asked them to do it, perhaps.
Marc:I certainly couldn't watch it.
Marc:12 people do it uh how am i i think you're dealing with another sort of uh a hijacking of the dopamine that you're talking about that we should be aware of with lunar cycles is that the addictive nature of of what you know massive amounts of content whether they be sexual or tweets or whatever this sort of crack nature of having that at your fingertips all the time i i hope you're not overestimating a good part of the population
Guest:Well, no, it is the crack nature.
Guest:I mean, and the crack nature is, I mean, classical conditioning is the hardest kind to break.
Guest:You know, so if you know that every 40 or 50 emails, if you check it all the time, every 40 or 50 of them, there's going to be one that's going to give you that dopamine rush.
Guest:It's going to be a girl who wants to see you, a new job, money.
Marc:Twitter is a better example of that.
Guest:Twitter.
Guest:Every once in a while, ooh.
Guest:Ooh, there's something.
Marc:It's a speed ball.
Marc:You go, you go, you go.
Guest:It is.
Marc:And you're sort of like, oh shit, that sucks.
Marc:Oh yeah.
Marc:But that, how do you accommodate
Marc:How do you create an awareness in the human brain of that process?
Marc:Because I'm aware of it because I'm a drug addict.
Marc:And knowing what one does to act out or having some sobriety, which I do, so you can feel what you're doing to act out or to get out of yourself or to feel that rush.
Marc:you know what the evolution into some sort of productive nature and also the the diversity of technology and this compulsion to constantly create different platforms to create different ways to get people to watch it like there's a whole business model that i guess you would call industrial that's set up around that which is that we've got these nine different platforms this is for these people this is for these people this is for these people and if we do that what happens with that because all that stuff seems to
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, the prescription and, you know, my prescription for present shock anyway, you know, what the one I'm selling these days is for people to take back their time, you know, even in small bits, you know, to take back to take back your moments.
Guest:And that's, you know, for what does that mean?
Guest:What does that look like?
Guest:It looked like deciding to take two years to write a book when I'm going to get more attention if I write a tweet.
Marc:You know, I mean, I write, you know, I wrote.
Marc:But how do you write?
Marc:Do you not do you?
Marc:Are you ascetic about it?
Marc:Do you?
Guest:Yeah, I got to sit and write, you know, or for someone to say, OK, you're going to take five hours of your time to read a book.
Guest:That's the most radical thing about this book.
Guest:I'm asking people to take that kind of time.
Marc:I'm pissed off that I don't.
Marc:But you're saying what you're saying is it's a choice that if I detach from the Internet for a week, it's not going to make fuck all of a difference.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or the way, I mean, I'm not, this is not an anti-tech idea.
Guest:I'm not saying detach from the internet to leave it.
Guest:I think you go through the internet, use the internet for what the internet is great for.
Marc:Oh, you're overestimating people.
Guest:Or am I underestimating?
Guest:I mean, at the same time, like I quit Facebook last month, right?
Guest:And I quit Facebook.
Marc:It's gotten too chaotic.
Guest:Yeah, but I quit Facebook not just because of the pain it was causing me.
Guest:I quit Facebook because as a minor celebrity on Facebook soliciting the likes of other people, it's unconscionable for me to ask people to make themselves vulnerable in the ways that I would disapprove of for them.
Guest:If I overestimated them, right, if I thought that they were as digitally literate as they need to be, that they all understand that there's a big data machine on the back of it, they all understand that their faces are going to be misrepresented in ads for things they never heard of.
Guest:then I would stay on there because it's a great tool.
Marc:Did you make the analogy Big Data versus Big Brother, or did we just do that here?
Marc:I think we just did that here.
Marc:That's fucking good.
Marc:Let's write that down.
Guest:Big Data.
Marc:Big Data is watching you.
Guest:He is.
Guest:He is.
Guest:But Big Data is watching you.
Guest:The thing is, the...
Guest:We like to believe that it's personified.
Guest:We like to believe that there is some guy at the top of the corporation doing this, but there really isn't.
Guest:What we're doing is programming our technologies to extract more value from us.
Guest:That's what we're doing because we are the very shareholders on the other end.
Marc:But we're not conscious shareholders necessarily.
Guest:No, we're not.
Marc:We're only conscious.
Marc:But we're only shareholders in that we engage with the technology and what they're doing is mining our desires in order to guide us towards what they want us to guide us towards.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in order to insulate yourself from that, the amount of awareness, because even somebody who is aware, it's surprising how efficient these fucking machines are.
Guest:I don't think you can insulate yourself from it, but I think what you can do is achieve coherence within it.
Guest:You can be a coherent person.
Guest:And that's what you have to do is take what aspects of the home field advantage you have.
Guest:And your big home field advantage is you are living in real time.
Guest:Digital technologies live in an asynchronous universe of pings and pulses.
Guest:We're actually in real time.
Guest:We're decaying.
Guest:And night.
Guest:Well, that's beautiful too, though.
Guest:I mean, sound is decaying.
Guest:You know, it's different in some ways between sound and image.
Guest:Sound, you experience it because it's decaying.
Guest:Image is there in the present.
Guest:We are moving from much more of an audio culture into a visual culture.
Guest:That's part of the net.
Guest:That's why it's much harder to be a blind person.
Marc:But what are the implications of this?
Marc:Just in terms of, I'm very hung up with the predatory nature of people that feel incomplete or aggravated.
Marc:That what I've I've always thought that there will become a time because of this visual culture that, you know, historical precedents or important movements or moments or even context historically, you know, will will deteriorate.
Guest:It does.
Guest:I mean, that's the fourth syndrome in the book.
Guest:Actually, it's called fractal noia.
Guest:And fractal noia is the kind of paranoia that results from trying to draw connections between things in the present tense when you have no sense of history.
Guest:When you don't have a story, you don't have cause and effect.
Guest:9-11 happens and you say, how can I look at what happened on this day and understand, oh, there must be that smoking gun here and smoking gun there.
Guest:There's no story.
Guest:There's no history.
Guest:And if you look at the history, it's conspiracy enough.
Guest:You know, who trained this guy who gave him money?
Guest:How did that actually work?
Guest:The real story is bad enough.
Guest:We don't have access to that story because we're trying to do it.
Guest:Right in the moment.
Guest:The answer, of course, is to be able to do true pattern recognition, which is hard for people.
Guest:How do you see what's similar?
Guest:How do you see the cycles that are repeating themselves?
Marc:But also just the fact that anybody who exists on the Internet, who has a profile on the Internet or has a biography or a history on the Internet, that that person just exists in the present, that the application that you're saying is that.
Marc:So anything that person did to anybody taking it in in a certain way without putting into context, it's just all that.
Marc:there at this one it's all there you can't afford anybody any evolution or any growth they're they're responsible for whatever they're responsible for their entire life whether it be a company or an individual in that moment and you put it on the timeline even you know facebook creates this timeline which just exacerbates that feeling right it's all right there you know
Guest:The friend who finds me or a person I don't even remember from second grade, all of a sudden they're there with the same weight as someone who I'm friends with now.
Guest:It's like the past never leaves.
Guest:It can't recede.
Guest:That's why, you know, you look at kids now, they're not even using Facebook.
Guest:They're leaving, which is very positive.
Marc:Yeah, because their parents are there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because their parents and because they don't want everything they do to be on their permanent record.
Guest:You know, they're using Snapchat and very temporary.
Marc:That's interesting about the sort of a digital paper trail.
Marc:And just about like if you really think about your day, if you know, if you text, if you email, if you're on Twitter and you check your Facebook that on any given day, I imagine you have a massive sort of weird digital paper trail.
Guest:Yeah, there's an archive.
Guest:Every email that you send, although it seems ethereal, you may as well be etching it into the side of the Parthenon.
Guest:Yeah, because big data has it.
Guest:Big data has it.
Guest:And you feel like it's gone, but it's going to come back to you.
Guest:It's just all your emails that ever exist are just one little text file that seems big now, but you know how those files are smaller and smaller.
Marc:They're all going to come back to you and beat the shit out of you when you least expect it.
Marc:well exactly or be used against you in a court of law you know there you have it well what is that what so everything you say can and will right well yeah but what what does that say about the the kind of weird you know we sort of asked for this you know this was sort of asked for and then you know it's like uh you know i used to do a line where it was like big brothers watching us and that's what we pay him for but but the idea is that you know there is a surveillance based society that is completely voluntary that that in in a sense
Marc:Right.
Guest:Kids are putting it up on their walls.
Guest:You know, it used to be the walls of your bedroom reflect back to you who you were.
Guest:Now it's broadcast to the world.
Marc:How does this play into, you know, to moral sensibility?
Guest:Because I know- It's not about morality for these people.
Guest:It's about getting on American Idol.
Guest:It's about-
Marc:I'm not saying a bigger question is how much of what we've put in place or what has been put in place technologically is actually stopping people from doing things because they know at every given turn, with every push of a button, with every turn of a corner, they're on camera, there's something transmitted, there's evidence.
Marc:Do you think that-
Marc:That we live in a surveillance culture, but a lot of people are willing to forego that freedom to have the convenience of what we live in.
Guest:Yeah, which is why we're starting to get gay marriage and legal pot and all that.
Guest:Because it's like, all right, if everybody's going to know I'm having sex in this way, then I can't live in a state where sodomy is illegal because it's out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I can't live in a state where smoking pot's illegal because we're all smoking pot.
Guest:So you don't want to live in this world where they can use selective enforcement against just just the pot smokers they don't like.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you've got to fight the idea that, you know, that as as the technological database grows on any one individual, that that that the fight that's interesting that the fight really becomes it's like they're stacking this shit against us.
Marc:So if we don't make it known and create a legal precedent.
Marc:That diminishes some of the power of a surveillance state, then we're going to be fucked.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because everything's going to be enforceable.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, there you go.
Marc:I mean, well, that's going to really be the make or break of your big fucking system here.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Is that who is ultimately going to take charge and in what kind of way are they going to take charge of this world that you're talking about?
Guest:I mean, the interesting thing, the interesting flip for me is, you know, the net started out.
Guest:It felt like it was sort of the little home for the counterculture where we could talk about weird stuff.
Guest:And now it's like the real world is the home for the counterculture.
Guest:And the net is really the native soil of the world.
Marc:And I do think that's, you know, that speaks to a lot of what's going on on a grassroots level around, you know, local farm economies or around a lot of the stuff you're talking about is specifically a reaction towards the hyper reality or non reality of what's being presented to us through media and through technology.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's also, I mean, and for me, it has so much to do with real time.
Guest:You know, it's the real time economy.
Guest:It's your real time social relationships as opposed to these ones that are frozen.
Marc:But real time is all well and good.
Marc:But like right now, as we talk for an hour, one of our identities and our complete fucking status in the world could be being destroyed.
Marc:Right.
Guest:On Twitter without knowing.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:But you got to get over that one.
Guest:I mean, you know that moment when you wake up in the morning and that bad tweet thing is happening?
Guest:You're like, oh my God, I got to do damage control.
Guest:We're all like Marlboro having a corporate crisis.
Guest:But the way it ripples, and this is because of the hunger of the machine that I talked about before.
Guest:Well, the hunger of the machine combined with the meanness of the audience and the readiness for people that just feed on the... That's right, but that is the addictive need for content that I'm talking about.
Marc:That with the way the content providers are set up and what they know juices people, which is controversial
Marc:and bullshit is that if that wins, dude, then what is going to be the fabric of our real time?
Marc:But there's a better question, though, because a lot of those people that engage in that online, whether they're consumers or actually victims of it, I mean, in real life, they're just sort of like, hey, what's up?
Marc:Once you reenter real time, everything that's going online is really bullshit for now.
Guest:Although I feel like the more time we spend online in that, the meaner we get in real life, the more likely we are just to say, I think that's right.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:I think that that that in indulges a type of narcissistic behavior and a type of lack of politeness.
Marc:and personal morality that becomes very hazy between like your pseudo persona or the way you interact anonymously online will eventually affect how you engage the rest of the world.
Marc:And I think there's a lack of empathy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's and that's of concern, which is why people have to, you know, so I'm arguing in this book, I'm arguing if you're in school for seven hours in a day, don't have your kids with their faces in the iPads, you know, actually be with them.
Guest:And there's so few opportunities.
Guest:People have to be in rooms with one another looking in each other's eyes.
Guest:That's why this podcast is popular.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the interesting thing about the podcast is what you're doing is exploiting the asynchronous nature of the Internet in order to connect people rather than disconnect people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is not live.
Guest:This is potted.
Marc:But in my thought around this and the way this has evolved, you know, this particular podcast was that all I'm coming at anybody with is a need to connect.
Marc:right and i'm assuming that within an hour that we will have a genuine connection and because audio is so intimate you know you can sense that right and a lot of the people that gravitate towards what happens here is it's about the conversation and about knowing that you know it's always interesting to me that you know people say well it's you're like doing therapy with people in there it's like no there was a time where people communicated and sat down and just shot the
Marc:shit for an hour he's like now the only way people have an honest conversation is if they pay the other person or commodified it doesn't even exist or that it's or that it's a sign of weakness in and of itself that there is a careerist you know positive thinking you know just you know you know fuck everybody else it's about you disposition that has evolved because i think of what you're talking about that once industrialism as a sort of group thing started to to fall apart and careerism and sort of positive thinking
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I think creates a problem in society in that everything becomes pathologized.
Marc:And the actual idea that human beings are built to sort of carry the burden of other people, no matter what it is, without saying, look, I got no time for this.
Guest:That's the social reality.
Guest:And the thing is that thing that we're avoiding is the thing that actually feeds us and makes us human.
Marc:Yeah, it is exactly the soul nourishing element of humanity's ability to sort of be there for another person, you know, and sort of carry the load for a minute with an empathetic eye or ear.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And the only the only times we do that is honestly these it's in recovery.
Marc:Right.
Marc:A little bit.
Marc:A little bit.
Marc:Yeah, I think that's true.
Marc:And I but I think that, you know, I've always put a big premium on it that, you know, like I spent a lot of my youth wandering around, hanging around record stores.
Marc:hanging around guitar shops.
Marc:And I think the record store phenomenon, the resurgence of vinyl is sort of a reaction to what you're saying is part of this barter.
Guest:The same way the romantics reacted to industrialism.
Guest:We have a new kind of a real time medieval reaction to digital.
Guest:Digital.
Guest:And like Etsy and peer to peer and maker movement, even maker bots.
Guest:I mean, everybody's hands on.
Marc:So then what what in your mind?
Marc:I think we're at point four.
Marc:But what in your mind, you know, is the battle at hand?
Marc:I mean, like, like if we're seeing if you're seeing the the the digital landscape is being primarily corporatized.
Marc:And what occurs against that within the digital landscape is pirating and hacking and a disruption of the digital flow of the corporations.
Marc:You know, what is the real fight between us in real time and whatever is happening in that digitized landscape?
Marc:I mean, what what's the struggle at hand?
Guest:Well, the struggle at hand is that the digitized landscape wants to take away, you know, whatever's left of the real time.
Marc:Of humanity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Of what makes us human.
Marc:I shouldn't say humanity, but maybe on some level.
Guest:And, and this is, you're right, is the last syndrome in the book.
Guest:What I call apocalypto is, you know, my peers, my fellow sort of digital enthusiast media theorists are...
Guest:have a very self-loathing view of humanity.
Guest:They see human beings as just one stage in information's inevitable journey towards greater complexity.
Guest:You know, you read James Glick's book, The Information, or read Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, or anything by Ray Kurzweil about the singularity.
Guest:Humans are just a step in information's journey, and that has the medium and the message tragically reversed.
Guest:That seems horrendously cynical.
Guest:To me, it does.
Guest:Now, they see it as optimistic.
Guest:In what way?
Guest:Get over it.
Guest:Get over it.
Guest:Get over your ego and your humanity and this and that.
Guest:Don't you understand that it's bigger than you and that my focus on humanity is self-centered?
Marc:But see, to me, that type of thinking can only lead to fascism.
Guest:Of course, that's the only place it goes.
Guest:But then they would argue, well, on a certain level, isn't fascism okay as long as the fascists are always right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:But that was why intelligent people supported fascism initially.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Time magazine and everything.
Marc:and also it's also the the sort of misconception of the philosopher king right because the one thing that everybody forgets and it seems to be forgotten in the markets in general is that the whole idea of a free market eventually finding its own level that you know without regulation you know capitalism will will seek its own level and it will benefit the people what what people forget is that the basic blueprint is
Marc:At one point in time, though it was religious dogma, nonetheless, it was a means to sort of harness civilization are the seven deadly sins.
Marc:So if you're going to discount the idea of greed and avarice and the quest for power out of this equation, the scientific equation about the evolution of information, you're making a tremendous mistake and people are going to die.
Marc:Right.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's basically the problem.
Guest:And what they don't realize is that their, you know, what I'm calling apocalypto, their sort of singularity vision is so conveniently consonant with corporate capitalism.
Guest:Everything's going to keep expanding.
Marc:Do me a favor.
Marc:Give me a primer on the singularity.
Guest:Singularity basically says technology is going to get more and more complex until it gets either conscious or better at everything than us.
Guest:So human beings become superfluous, except to the extent that we can keep the machines.
Marc:Servicing technology.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And then it's a new form of life.
Guest:There was animals and there was people and now there's computers and they are our our children.
Guest:They are the next the next phase of civilization.
Marc:But tell me, like, you know, the scientific ambition.
Marc:And the competitiveness within the thinkers that are thinking this, you know, are willing to disregard the complete evolution of civil society and just the poetry of the human struggle.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What they're willing to discount is...
Guest:the the quirkiness of people they think that's a bothersome to them well it doesn't exist to them they think that we're going to figure out the genome everything is it's all figure outable right that it could all be modeled in a machine right we've got the DNA code Obama just said this week he wants to get you know the figure out the brain you know what's the brain work yeah yeah it's as if it's as if you're gonna find it you know and and
Guest:If it turns out that they're wrong, if it turns out that human beings are basically radios and not the source of it, then they're never going to find it.
Marc:Well, until they find the transmitter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that might not be here.
Guest:That might be in some other dimension.
Guest:But that would throw a wrench in the thing.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But people are weird and fine.
Marc:But the line between figuring that out and...
Marc:Leads directly to control and destroy in the sense that like, well, if we can't figure it out, at least we can wire them the way we want them to behave.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if they're unhappy, we're going to drug them.
Guest:So they're there.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's easy to speculate about this, but it's sort of like the manufacturing of need is really what consumerism is about.
Marc:And that's really where industrialism is now, is that if we can keep, if big data can keep mining these desires and manufacturing needs, then we can feed those needs.
Marc:And that's how barter works.
Guest:And people will chase them and chase them and chase them.
Marc:Yeah, but right.
Marc:But once that taps out and what you say maybe becomes true that people don't need to work and everything else, in my mind, what that looks like is like, okay, we don't need to manufacture need.
Marc:We just need to completely control.
Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Which is just as bad.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that's what you're fighting.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That your, your idea is it's a William Burroughs said control needs control to survive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, what you're basically saying is to pull ourselves out of this paradigm, we have to preemptively fight against, you know, this machine that will eventually tap out by controlling us.
Marc:That's how it's going to work.
Guest:And the way to do that is not to run away from the machine, but to learn how to use the machine, to program the machine, to be on the, on, to make your own.
Guest:How is that different than the servicing technology?
Guest:Well, because then you're programming.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Then you're, you are, you are deciding what the program is going to do.
Guest:All right.
Marc:So finish with the singularity.
Marc:So, so the singularity is.
Guest:So it happens and then human beings are done, you know, or, or, I mean, it's, you either go into the matrix where you're just the batteries and the attendance of the machine.
Marc:Or any number of dystopic science fiction.
Guest:And we're supposed to be okay about that because, you know, Ray Kurzweil thinks that, you know, human consciousness is so simple and so limited that we could just upload it to the chip.
Guest:And then it'll be fine there.
Guest:Just get over yourself already.
Marc:How would he feel if it happened to him?
Guest:Well, he wants to live forever.
Marc:I think that's really the key to this whole thing.
Marc:I want my consciousness to be uploaded first, and I want to be aware of it.
Marc:And I want to be aware with it.
Guest:But ideally, I'm going to take enough whatever, new genomic hormones and stuff to live forever anyway.
Yeah.
Marc:I just don't know what that.
Marc:So so you're saying that, you know, when it comes right down to the the the epic battle, it's for living in a present that is dictated by human time versus being hijacked by an ever present.
Marc:That is digital time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or or analog time before that or calendar time before that.
Guest:You know, there's been an age old time is a problem.
Guest:But between Kronos, you know, Greeks call it Kronos, time of the clock has always been somewhat in conflict with Kairos, which is human timing.
Guest:You know, it's like, what's the best time to tell dad you crash the car?
Guest:It's not 503.
Guest:It's yeah.
Guest:Every's had his drink.
Marc:It's when you get a good story together.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's timing.
Guest:And human beings live in the realm of timing.
Guest:And we've used time, chronological time, we've used chronos to really either distract us or box us in or dehumanize us one way or another.
Guest:Whether it's to create monotheism and this one God that's going to someday come back in the messianic age and don't worry.
Guest:Whether it's the industrial age where time is money and there's a clock and now you're going to work by the hour.
Guest:Or now the digital age where you don't even have time at all and you're just supposed to somehow treat it all as generic.
Guest:All of that is about riding roughshod over that quirky way that human beings actually move through our experience.
Guest:And if you reconnect with that kind of time, you know, you achieve coherence.
Guest:You can see these systems for what they are and you can begin to map out a strategy.
Marc:Well, I think the metaphor of the matrix is already really functioning in the sense that, you know, we are sort of the battery that, you know, the engine doesn't run without our eyeballs on it.
Marc:So, you know, we're the happy batteries.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But it's got, again, the medium and the message reversed.
Guest:You know, that's not we're not here to service the market.
Guest:The market was here to service us, you know, and the technology is just the face of the market at this point.
Marc:Uh huh.
Marc:So where does I know I remember now we had a conversation on one of my other outlets.
Marc:I can't remember where that, you know, you had written a book about about Judaism at one point.
Marc:What was the thrust of that?
Guest:Where do you stand with that?
Guest:Same thing.
Guest:I mean, that was called nothing sacred.
Guest:And the idea of that was I felt that Jews had gotten locked into the Jewish story as history.
Guest:Uh huh.
Guest:rather than as analogy, than as metaphor.
Guest:You know, they had basically, they felt like if it's not actually factually true, then, well, we're going to lose this piece of real estate in the Middle East.
Guest:All these problems.
Guest:So we have to lock it down as fact.
Guest:And, you know, to me, it's like, it's about letting kind of historicity or letting the historical validity of something overtake its relevance to the now, to the actual moment we're in.
Guest:Okay, so... Judaism is a process that occurs in the present tense.
Guest:It's a way of engaging with other people.
Marc:You know, it's not... Not unlike what we're supposed to be doing with technology.
Guest:Or we're supposed to be doing right now, you and me.
Marc:Well, we are doing it.
Marc:From what I can tell.
Marc:Sure it is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're sort of debating, but not really.
Marc:We're having a conversation.
Marc:We're hashing it out.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And God would be thrilled that we're challenging him.
Marc:He would.
Marc:He would come.
Marc:He would show up.
Marc:So do you ever put any thought into the sort of innate necessity for human beings to feel connected to something bigger than themselves?
Marc:Do you think about that in terms of what you're thinking about?
Guest:I do, but it's like...
Guest:What replaced our innate desire to be connected to our community was the connection of people to these big movements, to these big campaigns.
Guest:Rally around me and we're going to go take over the French or something.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And that's not belonging, really.
Guest:That's belonging with an agenda.
Guest:That's something else.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:It's like, I don't really understand what the fight is for, but I'm mad about other things.
Marc:I'm going to go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's eyes on the prize.
Guest:It's a great way.
Guest:And it worked for a thousand years.
Guest:And it worked really well in the 20th century of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement.
Guest:But it's like, how can we group without necessarily having that, without an end to justify the means?
Guest:Why can't the group be the end?
Marc:Do you think that there is a way to sort of compact this message in a way that human beings will understand without there being some catastrophic series of events that drives people into the streets and makes it a very hands-on fight of community versus chaos and tribalism?
Guest:You know, it does seem like that's the road we're going to go down, right?
Guest:But, you know, the things we would do to prepare for that eventuality are actually the same things we could try to do to prevent that from happening.
Guest:If you have a local favor bank or a local currency, if you're using community-supported agriculture, if you've got petrobiodiesel, if you're doing those things already, then you're already deflating the dominance of Walmart in your community.
Marc:Yeah, but I'm not saying about Walmart.
Marc:I'm saying about the other neighborhood that doesn't have the diesel.
Marc:Like, you know, like when you get down to this sort of loose, you know, not even a confederation of, you know, rural and basic, but ultimately inevitably tribal communities.
Marc:You know, what's going to be in place?
Marc:Are you still foreseeing some sort of legislative democracy?
Guest:Oh, yeah, I think you get both is the thing.
Guest:What we're looking at is balance.
Guest:Just because we move from the industrial age and, you know, and highly centralized government authority and corporate authority to a more digitally distributed society.
Guest:civilization doesn't mean you lose it.
Guest:It's just the balance shifts a little bit.
Guest:So I think we have both.
Guest:We still have central currency and international trade to get our iPhones, and we have a lot of local stuff going on to get our charred.
Marc:Okay, so you mean...
Marc:So what you're saying is that, you know, on a federal level, you know, on a state to state level, a city to city level, town to town level, the central government says, yeah, you can use your local currency if we approve it.
Marc:And there's only within this these parameters.
Marc:And that's fine.
Marc:We encourage that.
Marc:So so or with no permission at all.
Marc:We can tax it or whatever.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that will that that'll be an interesting fight.
Marc:And I wonder how long it will take for for legislative democracy to be re delivered to the people.
Marc:And if that if what you're talking about is a means to that end, I'd be I'd be interested to see how that works, because right now it's really just a, you know, it's a money laundering front.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, for corporate interests.
Guest:Well, the thing is, the beauty of it is corporations have gotten so good at collecting money that they've now lost the ability to make money with that money.
Guest:Corporate profit over net corporate worth has been going down steadily for about 60 years.
Guest:So it means they don't know how to make money with money anymore.
Guest:And that's actually good news because it means that they're going to have to kind of wind down to some extent.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that sounds interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or fight to the death.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I just I just don't know.
Marc:I don't I don't know how it all looks.
Marc:But like, you know, you talk to a lot of people and I'm sure there's been people at this precipice throughout every era in history that are not necessarily apocalyptic, but anticipating a sort of cataclysmic change.
Marc:It doesn't usually seem to happen very fast.
Marc:Not in America.
Marc:It takes an awful lot of shit to go down for people to change their behavior.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it probably will.
Guest:I mean, you know, the two places I see these kinds of things happening are, you know, Ithaca, New York, where people have the luxury of doing it because they're all great, crunchy, hippie, you know, wonderful, forward thinking people.
Guest:And Lansing, Michigan, where they've got no jobs and no money and no food.
Guest:So they're building their own economy.
Marc:Well, I think Detroit too is someplace to watch.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that where you have the shells of industrial, maximum industrial success that is clearly gutted, how they occupy those shells like hermit crabs is going to be interesting.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Have you been to Detroit?
Marc:Have you done any traveling?
Guest:Yeah, I'm actually, I'm supposed to start a radio show through WDET in Detroit, their NPR station there.
Guest:And I'm going to do it from New York, do a local Detroit radio show and then scale it out from there.
Guest:Where do you live in New York?
Guest:Now I live in a little town called Hastings-on-Hudson.
Guest:It's a strange little lefty town.
Marc:And are you seeing any of the stuff you're talking about take root?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, outside of you, I'm not saying that you would have spurred.
Marc:I'm not I'm not saying you're out in the street going.
Marc:Come on, you guys.
Marc:Who's growing the kale?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What are you seeing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, well, I mean, I still see the most positive signs in places like Occupy, you know, where I see Occupy debt.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the debt jubilee and people, you know, buying debt at pennies on a dollar and just relieving it.
Guest:You know, things like that.
Marc:But that's sort of like classic late 60s pranksterism.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Except it's real, though.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I'm not saying it's not real.
Marc:I mean, it was real then.
Marc:I mean, when they were ripping up money and throwing it out of the Wall Street Stock Exchange when Abby Hoffman was... I mean, the metaphor of that had an effect.
Guest:But the metaphor of that had an effect, but ripping up money didn't help anybody.
Guest:In this case, raising $10,000 and relieving $5 million of debt off actual people who now don't have to worry about it anymore is a great model.
Guest:It actually...
Guest:Why don't we buy it instead of, you know, instead of visa companies?
Marc:And why don't we ease the burden of this other person?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which is nice.
Guest:But yeah, I see it.
Guest:I mean, it's again, it's easier for, you know, middle and upper middle class, you know, white people living in the suburbs to do community supported agriculture than it is.
Guest:You know, someone living in the middle of Detroit.
Marc:Well, it becomes very difficult when you have people that are despondent, despairing, aggravated, angry, seeking justice to sort of like, you know, get them to realize that it's not specifically personal.
Marc:It's an economic liability of a failing system.
Marc:And to sort of unite around a proactive idea that isn't sort of weird nationalistic and hate-based.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that's why I mean, I feel like by by not being goals oriented, but by being present oriented, saying, no, we're not going to have a revolution.
Guest:We're just doing it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it becomes a lot easier for people because now they're not being fed another line.
Guest:They're not being asked to go do another thing in order to get some other thing.
Marc:So what else?
Marc:What about music?
Marc:How's everything going?
Marc:Do you listen to music?
Marc:Is there happiness in your life?
Marc:Do you turn the brain off at all?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'm still listening.
Guest:I listen to old music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although, you know, new old music.
Guest:I'm listening to Neil Young's new record.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:So you're a little older than me.
Marc:You can't shake that, can you?
Guest:You can't.
Marc:It's weird, right?
Guest:Well, whatever kind of music type you get that gets anchored, like between 16 and 22.
Marc:That's absolutely true, right?
Guest:I still listen to the Yes album.
Guest:You know, it just doesn't go away.
Marc:Yeah, I don't quite go there.
Guest:But I was... It's prog rock, isn't it?
Guest:You were a prog rock kid?
Guest:Yeah, it's underestimated.
Marc:So you were a nerd.
Guest:I was a nerd, exactly.
Guest:You grew up to be a nerd, doesn't you?
Marc:I can't get rid of it.
Marc:I've been listening to a lot of vinyl and a lot of stuff's coming out on vinyl and just trying to open the brain up.
Marc:But there are slots that things fall into that were sort of dug when you were in high school and maybe a little older where, you know, well, this seems to fit into something I can understand.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, all right, Douglas, I think we covered it.
Marc:Do you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You feel good about it?
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:Did we miss anything?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm sure.
Guest:I feel like I talked with a person, though.
Guest:It's rare.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Remember people?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it's interesting when you do some radio or whether or not somebody's just going to talk at you.
Marc:Hi!
Marc:There's that.
Marc:So tell us about your new book.
Marc:What is present show?
Marc:Yeah, and you just jump into a momentum of it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you were jamming, though.
Marc:I appreciate you coming down.
Marc:Mazel tov.
Marc:Mazel tov on the show.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Mazel tov on your brain and your books.
Marc:Take care.
Marc:All right, that's our show.
Marc:That was interesting, wasn't it?
Marc:Did we jam a little bit?
Marc:Did I jam with the public thinker?
Marc:With the professional thinker?
Marc:Did we jam?
Marc:Did we think jam?
Marc:All right, go to WTFPod.com, get all your WTFPod needs met, check the calendar, leave a comment, check the episode guide, get the app, get the Lipson deal to start your own podcast, buy a little merch.
Marc:I will be at Zaney's in Nashville Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, July 18th, 19th, and 20th.
Marc:I will be doing the Sub Pop Silver Jubilee.
Marc:on July 12th up in Seattle.
Marc:And I'll be around watching music too.
Marc:Jonah Hill is going to be on the show Thursday.
Marc:Okay, that's that.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you