In our last interview with media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff, we looked at how humans have unwittingly become the product. Unwittingly because the design of the technology to meaningfully connect people is a parasite masquerading as something beneficial. In reality, most big tech social media software was designed to create addiction and ultimately stays true with profiting through the centuries old expansionist economic system. Big tech extracts money from the marketplace and then stores it as share price. Land and labor are devalued and missing from the basic factors of production, leaving capital as the one goal for shareholders. This is the dominant system that flourishes in the emerging digital industry. These concepts are part of what Douglas Rushkoff distills in the book Throwing Rocks At the Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity. It was published a couple years before Team Human.
Rushkoff asks what happened to the opportunity to innovate and reinvigorate economic and business models with new digital tools that might promise to usher in an era of distributed prosperity? Instead something similar to a digital colonialism has been created.
As corporations dominate the digital economic landscape and most people are keeping pace to survive, algorithms are killing jobs. More than two thirds of job loss is from being replaced by a machine.
There are other nefarious practices conducted by big tech that have impacted the United States’ democratic process and basic civil rights. Those practices include censorship and vote manipulation. For example big tech monopolies such as Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have been exposed in their effort to subversively deplatform and censor conservative political perspectives, without much opposition.
In his written testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Dr. Robert Epstein, a Senior Research Psychologist, American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, wrote ” to let Big Tech companies get away with invisible manipulation on this scale would be to abandon the free-and-fair election, a cornerstone of democracy. It would make democracy meaningless, even if your chosen candidate prevailed.”
Guest – author Douglas Rushkoff, who is also a broadcaster. He hosts the podcast Team Human and has written twenty books including Present Shock, Media Virus, Team Human and Siberia. Rushkoff has originated concepts such as viral media and social currency. He is also the leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice.