Douglas Rushkoff feels responsible.
Three decades on, the world looks very different.
Corporations have woven themselves into the fabric of our daily interactions, supercharged by the internet and social media.
Writer Douglas Rushkoff speaks onstage at Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now during the 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Austin Convention Center on March 9, 2013 in Austin, Texas.© Photo by Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW)
Now, seems like artificial intelligence will help corporations program humanity faster and better than ever before.
Rushkoff sees that as an opportunity.
Its like digital media finally has a character, Rushkoff says of AI.
In 2010 he wrote a slim volume calledProgram or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.
It was full of practical and meaningful advice for living in a digital world.
Rushkoffs philosophy and a warning were contained in its final command: program or be programmed.
Not the other way around.
Learn to recognize the biases of the media that theyre using.
Its that simple, he says.
The book sold well but, he says, was misunderstood.
When the book first came out…it became a learn to code thing.
It became an argument for STEM, he says.
We should know something about how technology works.
I dont think anyone quite got that.
Theyre all trying to program you in one way or another.
Rushkoffs first big book wasCyberiain 1994.
At the end of that book, Wired magazine had just published their first issue, Rushkoff says.
Until that point, Mondo 2000 and the psychedelic world had been kind of running internet culture.
Internet culture was so much about the unbridled potential of the collective human imagination.
Networked together, what are we going to do?
But Rushkoff also saw the warning signs.
Corporations began to circle and they asked a different question entirely.
What happens when we migrate the most propagandistic techniques of advertising and marketing and public relations to interactive environments?
Rushkoff says that Gen-X counterculture is partly to blame.
Feel this thing and it will unfold naturally.
You come forward 25 years and you end up with these dissociated anarcho-capitalists as feudal lords of these landscapes.
When Facebook feeds us a string of AI slop, we bemoan our feed.
AI provides a really coherent metaphor for what Im talking about.
Youre in a feedback loop, Rushkoff says.
He points to Twitter, now X.
Look at the total propaganda environment of Twitter/ X now, Rushkoff says.
[Elon Musk] owns the thing.
He sends you his own messages.
The ads, the bots, are the worldview that he wants you to have.
Its hard to be on that platform and not think: Well, thats the world.
Rushkoff tells me hes alarmed by how far this thinking has spread.
How do I get people to eat better?
Once youre talking about how do I get people to do something?
Youre saying, how do I program people?
He hopes that this new edition of Program or Be Programmed will push this paradigm shift forward.
What do we offer that they cant?
you could findProgram Or Be Programmed: Eleven Commands for the AI Futurewherever books are sold.
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