Douglas Rushkoff – Kent Fackenthall

Really, It’s OK to Do Nothing Sometimes

The latest episode of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast is pretty good. The guest, Tiffany Shlain, has written about about unplugging from screens one day a week in a practice that is sort of a modern day throwback to the notion of a weekly ‘sabbath’ or ‘Shabbat’. Some really interesting discussion ensues.

Ep. 139 Tiffany Shlain “Unplugging One Day a Week” + Tribute to Paul Krassner

They talk about the notion that people don’t know how to just sit with themselves anymore – or that it’s become thought of as a bad thing to ‘sit idly’. I feel the generations my kids belong to will especially have no concept of this, or construe it mostly as ‘wasting time’ having been exposed/connected to tech their entire lives.

The reality is that in many cases time spent in self reflection, or simply being present in the moment with others without the distractions of tech, is time better spent but we’re not taught that anymore and indeed, most tech companies/platforms are trying to encourage the very opposite.

The Dark Forests of the Internet

Yancey Strickler, cofounder of Kickstarter, has written an interesting piece on Medium about how the Internet is becoming segmented into different channels primarily out of people’s desire to feel safer to express themselves honestly while being free from the barrage of advertising and tracking. I can relate to much of what he says there.

I went dark on the internet a few years ago. I took social apps off my phone, unfollowed everyone, the whole shebang. This was without a doubt a good decision. I’ve been happier and have had better control over my time since. Many others have done this and are doing this. A generation of modern wannabe monks.

I haven’t been off for years – a little over a year maybe – and it does start to feel monk-ish. It’s been an interesting experiment, especially when you run into people in real life who are still on various platforms and didn’t even realize you’ve checked out. There’s sometimes an awkward back and forth when you try and figure out what to talk about when they discover that you’re not up to date with everything they’ve been seeing daily in their feed.

But even as my personal wellness grows, I see a risk in this change.

You could argue that these decisions removed me from the arena. I detached from the mainstream of conversation. I stopped watching TV. I stopped looking at Facebook and Twitter. I silenced my voice on the platforms where the conversation was happening because of the strings, risks, and side effects they created in return.

This detachment wasn’t just in politics. It was also true of how I shared my personal life. Milestones for me and my family were left unshared beyond our internet dark forests, even though many more friends and members of our families would’ve been happy to hear about them.

While I too feel the sense of better overall ‘wellness’, I don’t know that I feel or see the same associated risks. One thing I do think could become – or possibly already is – a problem is that people become continually more ‘siloed’ in their respective ‘dark forests’ and channels, leading to increased polarization – if that’s even possible. In much the same way algorithms are currently gaming people to reinforce biases or think certain ways, if they get comfortable only with the viewpoints found within the familiarity of their own ‘dark forests’, could it become even harder to see and or consider other viewpoints?

It’s possible, I suppose, that a shift away from the mainstream internet and into the dark forests could permanently limit the mainstream’s influence. It could delegitimize it. In some ways that’s the story of the internet’s effect on broadcast television. But we forget how powerful television still is. And those of us building dark forests risk underestimating how powerful the mainstream channels will continue to be, and how minor our havens are compared to their immensity.

I think there’s a giant hole waiting to be filled by whomever can figure out how to optimize the social aspects of the internet for the good of humans instead of the corporations – pretty much everything Douglas Rushkoff has been talking about with his Team Human project. Like the impending crisis of climate change though, it will take wholesale changes on a massive scale by businesses – and possibly even government involvement – to change the direction and business models towards the interests of the users vs. treating them as product – a huge ethical leap to take.

I myself haven’t been hanging out in many ‘Internet Dark Forests’ – save maybe listening to more podcasts – something that Strickler mentions as an emerging channel for people to cloister themselves within online. Aside from my posts here and selective reading, I’ve been staying away from screens altogether and trying get out more into the literal ‘forests’ of both green and humanity to rediscover and experience what is there.

Strickler’s article and conclusions are thought-provoking though, and clearly highlight the direction things are going. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially if the ‘side channels’ become prevalent enough that advertisers and corporations no longer feel they’re getting their bang-for-the-buck from the mainstream firehose of the Internet.

Douglas Rushkoff Playing for Team Human

I caught Douglas Rushkoff on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast the other day and it really resonated with me. I look forward to reading his new book, Team Human.

A few nuggets I gleaned from the podcast:

Rushkoff, speaking about his book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas In Popular Culture, “It was celebrating this new stuff called viral media – which seemed like a good idea at the time…”

“…algorithms are taking all of these painstakingly evolved social mechanisms and using them against us…we are no longer the users of this technology, but the used….”

“Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups.” – Norton Publishing

Full info on Douglas’ Team Human project

Fits and Starts.

Here is this year’s blog reboot.

I have stopped and started this thing more times than I can count, so I’ve stopped trying. It would seem, at some point, what I am destined to do, so I will roll with it. I have a bit of a new format this time, a renewed habit of writing offline, and a few posts in the vault so we’ll see what that gets us. As someone of the age who has seen the birth and development of ‘blogs’ it never ceases to amaze me the breadth they now encompass and people’s compulsion to keep feeding them, including mine. It seems quite silly, really. If everyone had placed messages in bottles and tossed them in the sea, we’d have a sea of bottles. Essentially the same game. Well, I guess now you can search for a specific bottle, but whatevs.

I had initially deliberated about starting separate blogs for the different topics I tend to write about but eventually nixed that as too hard. I still felt that tons of categories was kind of a drag and overbearing so I’ve winnowed it down to 3 categories that sort of encompass what I write about for the most part.

Headspace and meatspace.

I continue to try to enrich my mental experience on the planet while also trying to optimize the condition of the meatsuit that carries me around it. I had been pretty successful in losing some weight last year, have gained some back, and sort of plateaued. Changing things up some now, specifically with regards to what and how I’m eating to try and shake things up a bit. Exercise has never been an issue aside of time to do it, and I’m finding more of that now, in addition to making it more of a priority. All of this is greatly improving the ambience in my head – combined with an increase of reading and introspection and decrease in visits to the Internet.

Contradiction.

Fitting that I’d be writing about leaving the Internet alone on a blog. Weird that it’s like a ‘thing’. “HEY. STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR INTERNET.” Since it’s inception I’ve been fascinated by it and even more so with social media. I’m sure it’s been unhealthy at points. But I found, sometime around the time I took this blog offline, that it wasn’t really all that fulfilling anymore. Checking in on various sites and SM platforms was only making me angry, frustrated, or leaving me with a feeling of hopelessness, or WTF? So I checked out for a bit. Stopped following all those people who annoyed me but I’d felt obligated to for some reason. Life’s too short for that.

I stopped commenting, for the most part, because in most cases it’s the cyber equivalent of banging your head against the wall. People come online and post stuff they’re passionate about partly to validate it for themselves. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind with a comment on their post. You’re just not.

I’ve been trying to be much more discriminating about what I post. There’s a bunch of different acronyms out there I think, floating in the inter-ether about things you should ask yourself before posting something on the internet. I’ve basically narrowed it down to is it informative or uplifting. I try to steer clear of pretty much everything else. I don’t know how well I’m succeeding, but I’m trying.

Things I’ve Been Reading

As I said I’ve been trying to read more, and to read more actual books, vs reading ebooks on my phone. I initially thought that was great because I could read books anywhere, but I found though I was reading more, I was actually absorbing less due to distractions of the environments around me or the compulsion to click away and answer a text or email etc. I’ve gone back to – gasp – checking books out from the Library. I’ve found that the ability to take a book somewhere and leave my phone entirely somewhere else has been hugely liberating.

One book I read recently that addresses that very thing was The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. A great read. Ironically I read it on my phone, when I was still doing a lot of that. Interesting discussion around theories and studies that support that current generations of peoples’ brains are actually being physiologically changed by the way they read and consume material. This book is kind of old too, so I’m sure there’s a lot more out there about it now. On a sort of related note, there’s a new book out I’m anxious to read, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff. I want to read it real bad, but am trying not to cave and get the ebook version. Kicker is that I’m not sure I want to spend the beans for a physical copy and of course it’s not at the library yet.

Other books I’ve read recently and enjoyed greatly include Robert Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Both of these were fantastic and made a huge impression on me. The kicker for me is whenever I come across I look forward to re-reading, then I know I’m on the right track. Both of these fall in that category.

I also recently finished Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air – a book I’ve heard about for years, but just finally got around to. I’d read Into the Wild a few months back as a precursor, so I was looking forward to this one. Both of these books I read in a matter of 2-3 days’ binge reading – I don’t know if that’s a testament to my enjoyment and immersion in them or Krakauer’s writing style. I do find I like the way he writes and Into Thin Air lived up to every bit of its hype.

Some months back, Ryan Correy posted a video of Dan Harris talking about his experience with meditation, something I was curious about. Dan’s talk resonated with me and I’ve been meditating fairly regularly since. In the video he mentions a book by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. I was interested in reading some of his work, as I’d been hearing his name various places for a while as an author to check out. I picked up The Power of Now from the library, and though I found it an enjoyable and informative read, it got a bit spacey for me towards the end. There are definitely some good ideas and takeaways in it that I have found useful and/or inspiring.

The next read.

Somewhere in my internet wanderings I came across the High Existence website through a shared link, or something, I don’t remember. They have a suggested reading page which I found had some interesting titles. I picked up one of them yesterday from my library, The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton and am looking forward to digging into it. I’ve got an account over at Goodreads.com, so if you’re into that sort of thing, let’s hook up – I’m always looking for books to add to my ‘Want to Read’ list.