Douglas Rushkoff: Media Theory/Digital Technologies/Techno-Feudalism (Azimuths)

[Team Human is Rushkoff's latest project and title of his new book - he is host of the podcast, starting off each time with a monologue on relevant issues (why the various episodes are listed here), and a participant in all of the episodes]

Douglas Rushkoff's Substack

Rushkoff (His personal website)

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Dewey-Hagborg, Heather and Douglas Rushkoff. "Stranger Visions." Team Human #8 (October 4, 2016) ["... the brilliant and terrifying artist and bio-hacker Heather Dewey- Hagborg. As a transdisciplinary artist, Heather explores the intersection of science, art and biopolitics. Heather recently made the headlines with a project called Stranger Visions, in which she collected random human genetic material left behind in the detritus of public spaces to generate portrait masks of strangers using a process called forensic DNA phenotyping. In another recent project, Radical Love: Chelsea Manning, Heather again used this process of DNA phenotyping to create a series of 3D portraits of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is not allowed to be photographed while in prison. Radical Love is both subversive and thought-provoking as it calls attention to Manning’s incarceration as well as issues of gender stereotypes and identity."]

Gokey, Thomas and Astra Taylor. "Debt Collective." Team Human #1 (July 29, 2016) ["Joining team human are debt resisters Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. Her films include the documentaries Zizek! and the Examined Life.Taylor’s recent book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age takes a hard look at the persisting and embedded inequalities in today’s digital media landscape. Thomas Gokey is a visual artist, adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and activist. Gokey’s piece entitled, Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper reimagined his own student debt as art. Both Thomas Gokey and Astra Taylor seized the momentum of Occupy Wall Street to help launch a direct action campaign of debt resistance. Working through the collective force of Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and the Debt Collective, Gokey and Taylor are fighting back against the economic injustice of debt in America."]

Gorbis, Marina and Douglas Rushkoff. "At PDF 2016." Team Human #7 (September 27, 2016) ["...recorded live on the floor of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum, where we caught up with Marina Gorbis, executive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Marina joins Team Human to help us see how a utilitarian value set has been embedded into our society and its technologies. Together Marina and Douglas discuss those ambiguous and even anomalous qualities of being human, while looking to a future that embraces humanity as something greater than mere data points. This episode also features Rushkoff’s closing talk at the Personal Democracy Forum."]

Horowitz, Mitch. "Occultism and the Fight for Reality." Team Human (December 18, 2024) [MB: This is an interesting discussion around the concept of "collective occultism" as a form of resistance to monologic discourses that deny alternative ways of thinking/perceiving/being.] 

Maxwell, Richard. "Greening the Media." Team Human #2 (January 2016) ["Playing for Team Human today is Professor Richard Maxwell. Richard Maxwell is a political economist of media. His research begins at the intersection of politics and economics to analyze the global media, their social and cultural impact, and the policies that regulate their reach and operations. Richard has published on a wide array of media topics. Recent work includes The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media (Editor) Media and the Ecological Crisis (co-editor) and Greening the Media with Toby Miller. In this episode of Team Human, Professor Maxwell provides an eye opening account of the environmental damage caused by media technology, the myth of a “Post Industrial” society, and what we must do create a world sustainable for people."]

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coronavirus Is Making Me Believe in the Power of the Internet Again." Medium (March 16, 2020) ["Online resources provide a much better tool for understanding COVID-19 than broadcast news."]

---. "Economics is Not a Natural Science." Edge (August 11, 2009)

---. "The Epidemic of Civic Amnesia Is Spreading to Liberals." Medium (November 14, 2018)

---. "How We All Became Russia's Useful Idiots." Medium (December 5, 2018) ["Nationalism may have started as a side effect of fake news, but it’s quickly becoming the new American way."]

---. "I ditched Facebook in 2013, and it's been fine." CNN (March 21, 2018)

---. "Introduction: They Say." Coercion: Why We Listen To What 'They' Say. Penguin Putnam, 1999 (Excerpt)

---. Merchants of Cool (Frontline: Season 19, Episode 5, 2001)

---. "Merchants of Cool Interview." Frontline (2001)

---. "The only fix for Facebook is a competitor that puts users first." CNN (April 11, 2018)

---. "On the Contradictory Numbers of Contemporary Capitalism." Keen On (March 27, 2020)

---. "Our reptile brains were triggered by MAGA hat video." CNN (January 22, 2019)

---. "Survival of the Richest: The Wealthy are Plotting to Leave Us Behind." One Zero (July 5, 2018)

---. "This Game is Not Reality." (Substack: November 11, 2024) ["The political institutions that seem to be failing us now are just one symptom of a civilization whose many institutions are no longer up to the challenge of contemporary, digital life. Their inconsistencies and compromised value systems simply can’t hold up to the stresses of this time. How can we discuss border policy and immigration when the essential premise of the “nation state” is itself an intrinsically unjust construction? People who live on one side of an imaginary line are entitled to basic human rights that are to be denied those who live on the other side? No amount of policy can correct for the injustices of neoliberalism, nationalism, or colonialism. So we can’t pretend that any political solution is more than duct tape. While a good one percent of us might choose to task ourselves with party politics at this moment, I think it’s ultimately a distraction from the matter at hand. Rather than spend all of our effort at getting the right person in a seat of power, many of us can do things that make it less important who controls the strings of government. I’m not saying it’s not important; I’m just saying that presidential politics may not be our primary means of lessening the decree. Rather than focusing so much on the institutions that are failing us, what if we take on the functions that our institutions are failing to execute? The more engaged we are in mutual aid, the less our impoverished neighbors need to depend on the institutionalized social safety net for their food and shelter. The more we engage our troubled friends in our own and less fortunate communities, the less they will need to turn to welfare, mental health clinics, homeless shelters, and other failing national programs."]

---. "We Were Naive to Think Digital Media Would Be Democratic." Medium (April 16, 2020)

---. "We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros." The Guardian (November 25, 2023) 

---. "Winning Is for Losers: Enspiral and the Politics of Consent." Medium (November 7, 2018) ["How a collective in New Zealand is pointing the way to social change from the bottom up."]

Rushkoff, Douglas interviewed by Seth Godin. "Book Launch: A Live Human Team Conversation." Human Team #117 (January 23, 2019) ["Not the typical book reading, Douglas and Seth use this live event as an opportunity to engage with each other and audience in a spontaneous, free-form Team Human conversation. It’s a talk launched by a question that cuts to the heart of the book itself – How have technologies meant to connect us come to alienate and atomize us instead? Douglas and Seth share why we must reclaim connection and find the others. “It’s not too late! We can retrieve what it means to be human in a digital age.” Join Douglas, Seth and the live Betaworks Studios audience for this invocation of the spirit of community and solidarity so desperately needed in this pivotal moment in the human story."]

Stark, Kio. "Talk to Strangers." Team Human #6 (September 20, 2016) ["Kio’s new book When Strangers Meet explores the transformative power to be found in person-to-person interactions with strangers. Kio describes how even a brief interaction can foster empathy and open up the possibility for meaningful human connection. Kio and Douglas challenge the unwritten rules of social interaction and talk about how basic human connection can spark positive social change."]

Team Human. W.W. Norton & Co., 2019.

Tucker, Ian. "Douglas Rushkoff: 'I’m thinking it may be good to be off social media altogether.'" The Guardian (February 12, 2016) ["The media critic on the malfunctioning tech economy, digital detoxes and why Facebook is unhygienic."]

David Graeber: Anthropology/Economics/History (Azimuths)

  David Graeber (Website on him and his work)

David Graeber Institute ["We believe that a different social narrative has started to emerge which unleashes the political imaginary and reshapes public common sense. It is leading many people throughout the world to challenge the status quo through concrete actions, projects or structures that are making our societies socially and ecologically just and sustainable. The David Graeber Institute (DGI) provides a platform for projects related both directly to David Graeber’s legacy, developing his ideas and for projects that will take on a life of their own, continuing and contributing to his work."]

"There are many mysteries of the academy which would be appropriate objects of ethnographic analysis. One question that never ceases to intrigue me is tenure. How could a system ostensibly designed to give scholars the security to be able to say dangerous things have been transformed into a system so harrowing and psychologically destructive that, by the the time scholars find themselves in a secure position, 99 percent of them have forgotten what it would even mean to have a dangerous idea? (10)" - David Graeber (2017)

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Calhoun, Craig and David Graeber. "The Democracy Project." The London School of Economics and Political Science." (April 30, 2013)

Deloria, Philip, et al. "A New History of Humanity." Open Source (August 11, 2022) ["Giant questions this hour, and a slew of fresh answers: Where do we humans come from? Who are we, after all? Where are we going? Was our pre-history a Garden of Eden, or a nasty war of survival, or some of both? Are we human beings good or evil, by the way? Pretty much the same, the world around, or many different varieties? An anthropologist and an archaeologist walked into a bar, so to speak—into an endless chain of emails, in fact, and produced a bestseller, chock full of Stone Age history and modern science. Their book is titled The Dawn of Everything. A main argument is that we’ve been one free-wheeling, improvisational species for fifty thousand years. A main question might be: when and how did we get to feel so stuck in this 21st century? Make way this hour for the news of our human pre-history. Could it be: that our Stone Age ancestors were just as smart as we are, as playful and strong—if anything more inventive and adaptive than we, as they settled a planet and seeded a great variety of civilizations 10,000 years ago? The questions come from a surprise bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: it’s a 600-page brick of a book by an anthropologist and an archeologist, sharing fresh evidence and best guesses in A New History of Humanity. The sadness in reading it is that the American co-author David Graeber died as he was finishing the great work of his life. The relief is that his writing partner in London, David Wengrow, is still grappling with the puzzles they posed."]

Evans, Ellen and Jon Moses. "Interview with David Graeber." The White Review (December 2011)

Glaser, Eliane. "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency." The Guardian (May 25, 2018)

Graeber, David. "America's Kurdish allies risk being wiped out – by NATO." The Guardian (February 1, 2019)

---. "Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges." N + 1 (February 9, 2012)

---. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011 [PDF file of the Book: also available Here]

---. "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years." Mute (February 10, 2009)

---. Direct Action: An Ethnography Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009. [Entire book in PDF format]

---. "I didn't understand how widespread rape was. Then the penny dropped." The Guardian (November 5, 2017)

---. "‘I had to guard an empty room’: The rise of the pointless job." The Guardian (May 4, 2018)

---. "Occupy and anarchism's gift of democracy. The US imagines itself a great democracy, yet most Americans despise its politics. Which is why direct democracy inspires them." The Guardian (November 15, 2011)

---. "Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots: The 'Occupy' movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles." Al Jazeera (November 30, 2011)

---. "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit." The Baffler #19 (March 2012)

---. "On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time." School of Visual Arts (January 19, 2012)

---. "On Inequality and Human History." Against the Grain (November 21, 2018) ["Open any world history book and you’ll read that the Neolithic Revolution was the key turning point in human history, when hunter gatherers gave up roaming in small egalitarian tribes and settled down to farm. Out of that, civilization was born, with all the benefits and ills connected to it: the rise of cities, the emergence of the state, inequality, and class society. But, according to anthropologist David Graeber, that tale is not based on fact. Graeber interrogates this chronicle of paradise lost — and much more."]

---. "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs." libcom (August 20, 2013)

---. "Roy Bhaskar Obituary." The Guardian (December 4, 2014) ["One of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science and a political revolutionary."]

---. "The Shock of Victory." UK Indymedia (October 15, 2007)

---. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 2024. ["Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews. "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker."]

---. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015.

---. "What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?" The Baffler #24 (2014)

---. "Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?" The Guardian (February 23, 2018)

Graeber, David and Astra Taylor. "Democracy May Not Exist, But We Will Miss It When It's Gone." At the Bookshop (December 16, 2019) ["In her latest book, Astra Taylor – ‘a rare public intellectual, utterly committed to asking humanity’s most profound questions yet entirely devoid of pretensions’ (Naomi Klein) – argues that democracy is not just in crisis, but that real democracy, inclusive and egalitarian, has never existed. Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Verso) aims to re-examine what we mean by democracy, what we want from it, and understand why it is so hard to realize."]

Graeber, David and David Wengrow. "How to Change the Course of Human History (at least, the part that's already happened)." Eurozine (March 2, 2018)

Purves, Miranda. "You’re Not Just Imagining It. Your Job Is Absolute BS." Bloomberg (May 15, 2018)

Robinson, Andrew. "Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power." Cease Fire (September 9, 2011) ["The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change. The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse. This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil. The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.""]

Shaviro, Steven. "Anarchism and Principle of Play: Steven Shaviro reviews David Graeber’s posthumous essay collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World." Los Angeles Review of Books (November 15, 2024) ["The volume’s title comes from an earlier book by Graeber: in The Utopia of Rules, he wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Such rhetoric is typical for Graeber: a phrase that sounds grandiose (“the ultimate, hidden truth”) is brought down to earth, since the “secret” really consists of things that we already do on an everyday basis. Graeber is unusually optimistic for an anti-capitalist activist: he seeks to remind us that we ourselves have ultimately constructed the forms and institutions that oppress us, which means that these structures of social and economic life have no necessity to them but can be reorganized in multiple ways. Some of these ways may in fact be substantially better than anything we have now."]

 Taylor, Astra, et al. "David Graeber, 1961–2020." The New York Review of Books  (September 5, 2020) ["David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues."]

Velmet, Aro. "An Interview with David Graeber: Anarchism, work and bureaucracy." Eurozine (May 9, 2017)

The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum - Music Mix #37

Fela Kuti; Freak Slug; Salo Panto; New Dreams; Day Dreams; Black Pumas; Kristin Hersh; Mr. Vale's Math Class; TV on the Radio; The Tamed West; King Black Acid; Kim Deal; Jimi Hendrix; Erin Sliney; Robyn Hitchcock; Michael Kiwanuka; Father John Misty; Say Lou Lou; Devendra Barnhardt; Blake Mills, Beverly Glenn-Copeland; Lightning Bug; Benet; Faye Webster; Bill Withers; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Louis Armstrong; Blackalicious; Ben Harper; Camp Saint Helene; Angel Olsen; Jenny Don't and the Spurs; Mobilities; Lo Fives; Culpeppers; Rascal Miles; An Invisible Jet; Robert Wynia; Peter Cornett; Atomic Momma; Camper van Beethoven; Cracker; The Macks; The Black Flash; Time Theft

 The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum - Music Mix #37

Howard Zinn: History/Political Science (Azimuths)

 As a teacher, I'm not interested in just reproducing class after class of graduates who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What we must do--whether we teach or write or make films--is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world. (15)

---Zinn, Howard. "Stories Hollywood Never Tells." The Sun #343 (July 2004): 12-15.

Biographies/Archives

(August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010)


Zinn Education Project

Democracy Now: Howard Zinn Interviews

Bill Moyers' Journal: Howard Zinn

Voices of a People's History: A Tribute to Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Digital Collection


Resources by and about Howard Zinn


Arnove, Anthony. "Anthology for Change: Howard Zinn's Impassioned Progressive Speeches Span Four Decades." TruthOut (November 28, 2012)

Arnove, Anthony, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Alice Walker. "Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian." Democracy Now (January 28, 2010)

Arnove, Anthony, et al. "Howard Zinn Read-In at Purdue University." We Are Many (November 5, 2013)

Atwan, Helene. "On the Loss of Howard Zinn." (January 28, 2010)

Benton, Michael and Michael Marchman. "So long—it’s been good to know ya: Remembering Howard Zinn." North of Center (February 13, 2010)

Kreisler, Harry. "Howard Zinn." Conversations with History (2001: posted by University of California Television on Youtube on June 12, 2008)

Schell, Jonathan, Marilyn Young and Howard Zinn. "Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93: A Look at His Legacy." Democracy Now (July 7, 2009)

Vodovnik, Ziga. "An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny." Counterpunch (May 12, 2008)

Whitney, Joel. "A People’s History of Howard Zinn." Guernica (October 27, 2004)

Zinn, Howard. "America's Blinders." Progressive (April 2006)

---. "Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny." Revolution by the Book (January 28, 2010)

---. Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology. Harper Perennial, 1990.

---. "Don't Despair About the Supreme Court." The Progressive (November 2005)

---. "Holy Wars." Democracy Now (January 1, 2010)

---. "In Depth with Howard Zinn." C-SPAN (September 1, 2002)

---. "The Myth of American Exceptionalism." MIT Video Productions (Posted on Youtube: July 29, 2019)

---. "The Omissions of U.S. History." The Tavis Smiley Show (November 27, 2003)

---. "On Anarchism and Marxism." An excerpt from the DVD Theory and Practice: Conversations With Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn: posted on YouTube January 29, 2010)

---. "A People's History of Empire." (Video on the Graphic Novel by Zinn posted by the publisher Henry Holt: March 28, 2008)

---. A People's History of the United States History is a Weapon (Entire book posted on the site: No Date)

---. "The Problem is Civil Obedience." (1970) The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press; Posted on Third World Traveler)

---. "War and Social Justice." Democracy Now (January 2, 2009)

---. "Why Teach a People's History." (Video of talk given to 2008 National Conference for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference)

---. "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train." Books of Our Time (Posted on Youtube by the The Massachusetts School of Law: May 19, 2010)