Team Human 1st Edition

by Douglas Rushkoff (Author)

33 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0393651690

ISBN-10: 039365169X

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“A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson

Team Human is a manifesto―a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together―not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups.

Team Human delivers a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity―together―we can make the world a better place to be human.

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From the Publisher

Review

“[A] thoroughly fascinating exploration of the long interplay between power and the technologies of communication…. Rushkoff's knowledge of digital technology shines … This is an important book that readers are going to want to share with others. ”
- Adam Frank, NPR

“Team Human serves as a reminder that we do not have to surrender ourselves to technology. … Joining Team Human means prioritizing the social, transcending a digital inclination and connecting as humans.”
- Washington Post

“[Rushkoff] paints our current predicament with infectious élan and energy.”
- Wall Street Journal

“Original and uplifting. Just the book America needs right now. In his unique and engaging style, Rushkoff reminds us of our human essence: we are social creatures, and if we trust this truth about ourselves we can accomplish the seemingly impossible.”
- Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and Daring Democracy

“Rushkoff is the gold standard. He always knows what tech is up to―and he’s usually prophetic. Now he’s here to tell us how our Silicon masters are attempting to pit us against one another for their own gain. Go Team Human.”
- Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out and Up in the Air

“A vivid thinker, Rushkoff is an insightful and acerbic antidote to Facebook, cultural hegemony, and the corporatization of everything.”
- Seth Godin, bestselling author of The Dip, Linchpin, and What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn)

“Can the revolution start already? This book will help us. Thank God for Douglas Rushkoff.”
- Parker Posey

“Technology can be a force for good or amplify our self-destructive capacities. In Team Human, the always-brilliant Douglas Rushkoff reminds us that the tools we design design us in turn, and offers a vision to invert our tools and make them better.”
- Jason Silva, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games

“An astonishing, paradigm-shifting must-read for all inhabitants of the twenty-first century. Precisely and cogently written. Rushkoff’s best work so far.”
- Grant Morrison

“[A] catalyst for conversations on what it means to be human.”
- Booklist

About the Author

Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. The host of the popular Team Human podcast, Rushkoff has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed; written regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast, and the Guardian; and made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like” and “Merchants of Cool.” Rushkoff coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 22, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 039365169X
ISBN-13: 978-0393651690
Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 33 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #154 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #539 in Social Work (Books)
- #79 in Sociology of Social Theory

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Chris Woods

THE most important book to read, bar none

January 27, 2019

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The key to living a good life is to understand the world around you, so you can figure out how to meet your own needs and goals. Today's world has been force-designed (by others) to disorient you from your true needs and goals.

Once you read this book, you will understand the world, and yourself better. There's nothing more important to do than that. In a few hours, this book can change your life.

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Rasheed

Too Cynical

March 4, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I don’t know how I came across this book but I liked the title: Team Human. I’m a strong believer in people being communal by nature and in need of one another to thrive and reach our fullest potential. Maybe I should have read the synopsis because whereas the author, Douglas Rushkoff, intimates that--he takes a long time to get there.

Before Rushkoff gets into the beneficial aspects of being a team he spends an inordinate amount of time being a misanthrope. He presented one doomsday scenario after another in which humans were the culprits. Even though he spends the bulk of his time attacking technology he leaves some bullets in the chamber for religion, agriculture, politics, and of course capitalism. I was starting to believe he hated civilization.

He harps on the fact that the digital world has made humans into slaves of technology with only binary choices. He pillories the very thought of having binary choices. But the hypocrisy is abundant as he issues one black or white scenario after another. Either we break free from our computers or become machines, either we break free from capitalism or become mindless workers, either we break free from agriculture as we know it or we’ll destroy the earth. It was very depressing.

That’s not to say that there weren’t any truths in his book at all because there are many. Such as:

“We seek high numbers of ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ on social platforms
because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social
acceptance.”

“Following through on mechanomorphism, transhumanism holds that
people can be upgraded just like machines.” (p. 108)

Still, embedded in those truths was sort of a dismal outlook on humanity. Not only that, some of his analyses took him into making proclamations that seemed wholly inaccurate and/or very conspiratorial. For instance:

“Instead of designing technologies that promote autonomy and help
us make informed decisions, the persuasion engineers in charge of
our biggest digital companies are hard at work creating interfaces
that thwart our cognition and push us into an impulsive state where
thoughtful choices—or thought itself—are nearly impossible.” (p. 81)

“Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us
from manure-filled cities.” (p. 137)

“Worshippers turn to religion less to explore their relationship to
creation or ethics than to guarantee their own salvation or claim
virtue.” (p.159)

Between the conspiracies, false analyses, and cynicism I found myself audibly disagreeing with Rushkoff and literally shaking my head. Chapter after chapter, paragraph after paragraph I was thinking, “Is not anything created by human hands worthy of indulging and free from some ulterior motive?”

In the end he did offer suggestions for solutions and the few he offered weren’t half bad. I think he needed to tone down the animus and turn up the optimism. After all, he’s trying to be a recruiter for team human; he’s got to be a better salesman.

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Doug Sundheim

A (good) slap in the face

January 22, 2019

Format: Hardcover

Doug Rushkoff has written a slap in the face. It’s a loving slap, but a slap nonetheless. And it’s a slap we could all use right now. The essence is this: we humans have created a host of wonderfully freeing advances, but over time they’ve come to enslave and control us–and we need to wake up. We need to question what we call “facts” and remember the potential of our collective humanity. The book is arranged into 100 brief essays under 14 topic headings. From beginning to end you will find yourself saying “yes!” to much of it. And even if you don’t agree with everything he says, you will find his writing helpful in clarifying your thinking.

Below are a few passages that stuck with me:

On Social Media…

What people couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for with money, we would now paid for with personal data. But something larger had also changed. The platforms themselves were no longer in the business of delivering people to one another; they were in the business of delivering people to marketers. Humans were no longer the customers of social media. We were the product.

On losing track of figure and ground (a section I found particularly eye opening)…

When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems to which we have become enslaved… Take money: it was originally invented to store and enable transactions. Money was the medium for the marketplace’s primary function of value exchange. Money was the ground, and the marketplace was the figure. Today, the dynamic is reversed: the acquisition of money itself has become the central goal, and the marketplace is just a means of realizing that goal. Money has become the figure, and the marketplace full of people has become the ground.

On losing track of figure and ground with regards to schools…

Once we see competitive advantage and employment opportunity as the primary purposes of education rather than its ancillary benefits, something strange begins to happen. Entire curriculums are rewritten to teach the skills that students will need in the workplace. Schools consult corporations to find out what will make students more valuable to them. For their part, the corporations get to externalize the costs of employee training to the public school system, while the schools, in turn, surrender their mission of expanding the horizons of the working class for the more immediate purpose of job readiness.

On the digital media environment…

A search engine designed to promote academic thought became the world’s biggest advertising agency, and a social media platform designed to help people connect became the world’s biggest data collector…

Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation. Persuasive technology, as it is now called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral change“ and “habit formation,“ most often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

Those of us who want to preserve the prosocial, one-world vision of the TV media environment, or the reflective intellectualism of the print era, are the ones who must stop looking back. If we are going to promote connection and tolerance, we’ll have to do it in a way that recognizes the biases of the digital media environment in which we are actually living, and then encourages human intervention in these otherwise automated processes…

On mechanomorphism (machines becoming more like us and vice versa)…

It’s not that wanting to improve ourselves, even with seemingly invasive technology, is so wrong. It’s that we humans should be making active choices about what it is we want to do to ourselves, rather than letting the machines, or the markets propelling them, decide for us.

On economics…

The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate goodwill.… The commons is not a winner-take-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a long-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other“ player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

Capitalism as it’s currently being executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplace is in delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity…Corporations are still great at sucking all of the money out of the system but they’re awful at deploying those assets once they have them.

That growth mandate remains with us today. Corporations must grow in order to pay back their investors.… With each new round of growth more money in value was delivered up from the real world of people and resources to those who have the monopoly on capital. That’s why it’s called capitalism.

In perhaps the most spectacular reversal of figure and ground we’ve yet witnessed corporations have been winning court cases that give them the rights of human beings.

The human beings running those enterprises are no less the psychic victims of their companies practices then the rest of us, which is why it’s so hard for them to envision a way out.

On artificial intelligence…

We’ve got a greater part of humanity working on making our social media feeds more persuasive than we have on making clean water more accessible.

We must not accept any technology as the default solution for our problems. When we do, we end up trying to optimize ourselves for our machines, instead of optimizing our machines for us.

On solving complex problems…

We have been trained to expect an answer to every question, and an ending to every beginning. We seek closure and resolution, growing impatient or even despondent when no easy answer is in sight. This fuels capitalism and consumerism, which depend on people believing that they are just one stock market win or product purchase away from fulfillment. It’s great for motivating a nation to, say, put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, or go to war against some other nation.

But it doesn’t serve us as we attempt to contend with long- term, chronic problems. There’s no easy fix for climate change, the refugee crisis, or terrorism. How do we even know when we’re done? There’s no flag to plant, no terms of surrender. Motivating a society to address open-ended challenges requires a more open-ended approach—one that depends less on our drive toward climax than on our capacity for unresolved situations. Like life.

The planet’s complex biosphere will survive us, one way or the other. Our own continuing participation, however, is in some doubt.

On expanding our view of what we can change…

We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe. Money, debt, jobs, slavery, countries, race, corporatism, stock markets, brands, religions, government, and taxes are all human inventions. We made them up, but we now act as if they’re unchangeable laws. Playing for Team Human means being capable of distinguishing between what we can’t change and what we can

You are not alone…

As much as we think we’re separate individuals, we’re wired from birth and before to share, bond, learn from, and even heal one another. We humans are all part of the same collective nervous system. This is not a religious conviction but an increasingly accepted biological fact.

We can’t go it alone, even if we wanted to. The only way to heal is by connecting to someone else.

But it also means that when one of us is disturbed, confused, violent, or oppressed, the rest of us are, too. We can’t leave anyone behind or none of us really makes it to wherever we think we’re going. And we can’t just stay confused and depressed ourselves without confusing and depressing everyone who is connected to us.

This is a team sport.

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