The Humanist In Our Midst

Do you know media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s work? It’s intensely human. He’s intensely human.

Allow me to transcribe a couple of key segments from this powerful TED Talk…

Human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We can’t think that way anymore. We have to stop using technology to optimize human beings for the market and start optimizing technology for the human future.

And this:

Then came the Dot Com Boom and the digital future became stock futures…the future changed from this thing we create together in the present to something we bet on in some kind of a zero-sum winner takes all competition. And when things get that competitive about the future, humans are no longer valued for our creativity. No, now we’re just valued for our data. Because they can use the data to make predictions. Creativity, if anything, that creates noise. That makes it harder to predict. So, we ended up with a digital landscape that repressed creativity, that repressed novelty. It repressed what makes us most human. We ended up with social media. Does social media really connect people in new interetsing ways? No. Social media is about using our data to predict our future behavior, or when necessary to influence our future behavior…