Douglas Rushkoff

Host

Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Why Team Human?

People-driven solutions for a relentlessly controlled and top-down society.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Autonomous technologies, runaway markets and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. It feels as if civilization itself were on the brink, and that we lack the collective willpower and coordination necessary to address issues of vital importance to the very survival of our species.

The simplest way to understand and change our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human, alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our will.

Team Human is a podcast striving to amplify human connection. Each week we are engaging in real-time, no-holds-barred discussions with people who are hacking the machine to make it more compatible with human life, and helping redefine what it means to stay human in a digital age. Members of Team Human include Bo Burnham, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, Sherry Turkle, Philip Rosedale, Divya Siddarth, xiaowei r. wang, Duncan Trussell, debt activists Astra Taylor and Tom Gokey, Yes-man Andy Bichlbaum, co-op organizer Esteban Kelly, DNA artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, counterculture pioneer R.U. Sirius,  and so many more, including, hopefully, you.