The best-kept but scientifically-validated secret for engendering generosity

Re-Socializing (the) People

We’re starting a new MA program in Media Arts and Performance, for community-minded artists, media activists, and performers.

Triggering Agency

How Denaturalizing Power Reveals the Constructed Landscape

Social change is not about changing people, but changing the register

The lesson we still refuse to learn about the ill-fated AOL-TimeWarner Merger

What we should have learned from the Covid experience

How arguing for open source Judaism led me to see healthy institutions as ones that are open for debate

Social media were the Missionaries; AI are the Conquistadors

A defense of academic modesty

How the universe winked at me, and why I think it means we will be okay

Media Literacy is Everything Literacy

Be careful how closely you follow the data

From pitch to publication

The only answer to more tech is more human investment

The real and imagined dangers of AI

What if the platform rose to this occasion?

A Holiday Story

2022 Year in Review

Longtermism, and Metamodernism, and Optimizing Twitter for a Post-Human Future

Big Tech’s Search for the Ultimate Escape Hatch

The new Troll in Chief may have undermined both authoritarianism and his hopes for a techno-monarchy

Raising interest rates doesn’t increase supply, it just makes people poorer.

The political expediency of holding one’s nose

The real promise of shared virtual realities

The platform makes you, your friends, and family vulnerable to robbery

Revisiting my book Life Inc, Fifteen Years Later

On the publication of Cybersalon’s new collection of ideas about the future

We living things are here on the Ground

Our desperate attempts at profiteering and monopolization render us all more vulnerable to death and disaster

Why the tech billionaires want to rise above the rest of us, and why it’s so stupid you have to laugh

Part IV: How we convince the wealthy that shared prosperity is even possible

Part III: How to get from digital industrialism to digital distributism

Part II: From Artisans to Employees

Part I: A new economic story; a new theory of change

Ecstasy Club and the Unfulfillable Promise

How to transcend both denial and distraction when the world seems to be coming apart

The catastrophes on your TV screen are the result, not the cause

If baseball is going to abandon the poor, then I’m going to abandon baseball.

Let’s build an Overground Railroad instead

How Speculators Prevent Crypto from Working as a Safe Haven

Higher prices are not necessarily a bad thing.

Too much artifice is a symptom of something wrong

When middle school bullies rule the world

The coming crypto crash may take down more than the tokens, but this is actually good for the blockchain

My Medium piece Survival of the Richest has grown into a whole book

No hot takes. Just take action.

Psychedelics, like everything else, are political

Ten years ago, I realized media literacy meant something different

How do we catalyze awe and humility without just triggering more fear and confusion?

The real incentive for blockchains

How haggling holds us all together

I’ll stake my future on the solidarity of the people over the cynicism of the elite.

And that’s more than okay

We are not there, we are not informed, so we should shut up and use less oil

Why it’s better for humans to believe in something

I’m trying a new approach to the pain and suffering around me. It may be working.

The problem with my proposal for a new centrist Democratic Party

Only the Democratic party — corrupted though it may be — is willing to submit to the rule of law. Should it move to the center in order to represent everyone interested in representative democracy?

How Team Human can retrieve the true promise of the digital renaissance.

How the civic abuses of national politics trickle down to Main Street

Everything doesn’t have to end.

Real Americans Don’t Give a Shit About the Culture Wars

Social media is work. So how about taking a day off?

What we can all learn from the accountant who became my second father

The Balkanization of media will continue, until it doesn’t

Invitation to a new course I’m teaching with Jeff Jarvis

Why I turned down an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast

Why sci-fi shows should start naming spaceships after social justice heroes.

On Facebook’s need for human intervention

Why create solutions ‘at scale’ if operating at scale is itself the main problem?

Collaboration is the human employee’s secret weapon

How automation will force us to retrieve human competence

Yes, It’s Really Okay to Reduce Our Exposure to the Global Info Onslaught

Extreme weather may help remind humans of their place in the bigger scheme of things

Retrieving the great, big, migratory meta-community of digital nomads

How to make the next generation of bankers better than today’s

The technology is fine, but its speculative bias reveals something sad about our relationship with money

Epidemiologists are stuck in a real-time feedback loop with public health

A modest proposal for connecting the dots

As even our smartest friends fall to conspiracy fever, we have to accept it’s not about logic or politics, but addiction

The problem with policing a language already built on objectification

On the re-publication of Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘The New Inquisition’

We are not the users of their network. We *are* the network.

Granting slack is a better choice than venting rage

Zooming is to real conversation as smoking is to breathing

We must help one another strive for integrity over impact

How the counterculture surrendered communal well-being to individual enlightenment

r/WallStreetBets delivered cybernetic karma to those who deserve it

If America is going to recover from its Trump addiction, it’s going to need to embrace monotony

A grim journey through partisan network coverage

Even if the candidates weren’t shouting over each other, did we really gain anything?

A counterintuitively optimistic take on the first presidential debate

Trump has brought pranksterism to the Republican Party. That used to be liberals’ specialty.

Technology gave us the dream of a cocooned future. Now we’re living it.

Black communities have for centuries harbored a spirit of support and mutual aid. It’s time the rest of the country followed their lead.

The militarization of our police goes hand in hand with the collapse of civil society

The sooner we open up the economy, the faster we simply recreate what got us into this mess. It’s time for a radical shift.

Covid-19 may be our final, last-gasp revolt

To Trump, our illnesses and deaths are a necessary cost of doing business

Online resources provide a much better tool for understanding COVID-19 than broadcast news

What learning to speak remotely teaches us about how to compensate for the coming era of social distancing

The intraparty social media spats of today will inspire Putin and Co.’s memes of tomorrow

Algorithms have led to filter bubbles and fueled polarization. It’s time to bring back the tech for a shared reality.

Rules are for the weak and hold back strong men like himself

A 1990s cyber enthusiast considers whether he’s to blame for our digital woes

The rest of the world is using technology to subvert digital capitalism. We can, too.

Democracy suffers as a dying medium makes one last bid for relevance

How tech companies turned an instrument of human potential into one of exploitation

What the great vaccination debate reveals about our social immune system

Trump obsesses over cable news not as viewer but as co-producer — watching, learning, and getting better every day

The hippies’ effort to destabilize the American dream may have worked too well

We need to welcome the newly woke, however imperfect

How digital technology alienates you from your soul

How the left succumbed to the cult of Trump

Two more years at Harvard would have taught him some valuable lessons — and changed the course of Facebook

There’s something happening here

We should convince the rich that climate remediation is a sure thing and that they better get in on the ground floor

I was outraged by a tweet. I didn’t share it.

Cooperation is imprinted in our genes just as unmistakably as competition

What the algorithms can’t see may be the most human thing about us

How an esoteric Russian religion still fuels the digital apocalypse

Virulent nationalism proves the U.S. was founded on a myth

Nationalism may have started as a side effect of fake news, but it’s quickly becoming the new American way

When supposed progressives go wobbly on social justice, we need to engage them, not ignore them

How a collective in New Zealand is pointing the way to social change from the bottom up

Instead of seeking to represent us, the GOP has weaponized manipulation. Sadly, some Democrats are following suit

How we sold the world a picture of America more enlightened than Americans could tolerate

But conservatives have reality TV — and reality itself — on lock

The plan is no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement

What happens when the counterculture becomes mainstream? Hint: the mainstream becomes the counterculture.

Can billionaires gamify social good?

How we can hallucinate our way back to sanity

A charismatic leader, mind control, and other telltale signs

An open letter to the tech giant’s awakened workers

Interactivity, the Mets, and the death of feedback

A conversation with Bo Burnham, America’s new favorite comedian

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Distributed Prosperity Means Breaking the Addiction to Growth, and Circulating Value Throughout Your Marketplace

Team Human: Our Last Best Hope for Peeps

Transcript from an interview on BigThink about Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Portfilio, 2016)

An excerpt from Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff (Portfolio 2016). Published in Harvard Business Review March 02, 2016.

I’ve given up on fixing the economy. The economy is not broken. It’s simply unjust. There’s a difference.