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Named one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. The host of the popular Team Human podcast, Rushkoff has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed; written regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast, and the Guardian; and made the PBS Frontline documentaries "Generation Like" and "Merchants of Cool." Rushkoff coined such concepts as "viral media" and "social currency," and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
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Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith by
Techno-Fixers traces the source of modern confidence in technology to engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-makers' soundbites, corporate marketing, and optimistic consumer culture from the turn of the twentieth century until today. Cautioning that the rhetoric of technological fixes seldom matches reality, Johnston examines how employing innovation to bypass traditional methods can foster as many problems as it solves.
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The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch by
The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of things--connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances--there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in loss of communication but also potentially in loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. Laura DeNardis argues that the diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and she offers new cyber-policy solutions. In her discussion, she makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.]]>
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Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work by
Focusing on the economic and political implications of AI, digital connectivity, and robotics for both the Global North and the Global South, they move beyond diagnostics to seek solutions that offer better lives for all. Their analyses of the challenges of technology are placed against the backdrop of three decades of rapid economic globalization. As Confronting Dystopia shows, we are on the eve of--indeed we are already amid--a technological revolution that will impact profoundly the livelihoods of people everywhere in the world. Across a broad and deep set of topics, the contributors explore whether the need for labor will inexorably shrink in the coming decades, how pressure on employment will impact human well-being, and what new institutional arrangements--a new social contract, for example, will be needed to sustain livelihoods. They evaluate such proposals as a basic income, universal social services, and investments that address key global challenges and create new jobs.
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Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by
Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy," and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in--and all too often overwork and underpay--a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can't get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity--rather than misery--for those who do it.
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Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy by
This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights.
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Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology by This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window
The Technological Singularity by
The idea of technological singularity, and what it would mean if ordinary human intelligence were enhanced or overtaken by artificial intelligence.
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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by
Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work--but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement." Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures--whether they be PTA, church, or political parties--have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe. Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam's Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.
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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Based on hundreds of interviews and with a new introduction taking us to the present day, Alone Together describes changing, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, and families.
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A Nation Fragmented: The Public Agenda in the Information Age by
A Nation Fragmented reveals how the content and character of the public agenda has transformed as the media environment evolved from network television and daily newspapers in the late 1960s to today's saturated social media world with 200 cable channels. The authors seek to understand what happened as the public's sense of shared priorities deteriorated. They consider to what extent our public agenda has "fallen apart" as attention to news has declined, and to what extent we have been "driven apart" by changes in the issue agendas of news.
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Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by
From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.
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The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege by This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window
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The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by
Are trees social beings? How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? In The Hidden Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers.
This link opens in a new windowUse the StoryCorps resources for interviewing the stories of students and classmates during this historical time of COVID-19.
Developed in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, StoryCorps Connect is a first-of-its kind platform that enables you to record a StoryCorps interview remotely using video conference technology. The audio and a still photo from each interview goes into our archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Instructions and Question Lists
From Cassandra Khatri
Use the course content and the intersecting points found in Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff to craft an assignment.
StoryCorps Interview Assignment Instructions
Throughout the book Team Human there are many themes and ideas that focus on the importance of building connections in an attempt to build community, in order to help us overcome the isolation and loneliness that can grow from an increasingly technologically centered life. As it pertains to this class, the idea of building a community and finding a sense of place and belonging are the foundational elements of a society and their accompanying systems of government.
As we consider the content in this class, the themes of Indigenous/Anti-Colonial Activism (Statements 67-72) and Political Organizing Methods (Statements 85-91) align best, so they should be the main focus of your assignment. You are certainly not limited to just these themes and their accompanying prompts or the questions, but this is just a place for you to get started.
In your interview, pose the questions listed along with the themes of Political Organizing Methods and found in our campus read, Team Human. Before you get started on this assignment, think about a subject in your life that has a compelling story relative to the provided prompts or themes. If your interview subject does not meet these themes or prompts completely, that is fine; consider identifying a theme on your own as you read the book and choose your interview subject relative to that theme.
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