Healthy Competition: A Selection from Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human (2019)

“We don’t have to be absolutely generous all the time. There’s a place for aggression and entrepreneurialism, winners and losers. It just has to happen, like sports, with rules and transparency.

A humane civilization learns to conduct its competitive activities within the greater context of the commons. Our courts, democracy, markets, and science are all characterized by competition, but this competition takes place on highly regulated playing fields. The free market is not a free-for-all, at all, but a managed game with rules, banks, tokens, patents, and stock shares.

These competitive spaces only work in everyone’s long-term interest when their operations are radically transparent. Courts can’t provide justice if we don’t know why certain people are jailed and others are not. Markets don’t function when certain players get information that others don’t. Science can’t advance if results are not shared and verifiable.

Transparency is really the only choice, anyway. We can’t hide from and lie to one another any longer. There’s just no point to it. If a stage magician can read our faces and detect our false statements, then we all must know on some level when we’re being deceived by another person. When our media and machines are both opaque and untrustworthy, we must learn to depend on one another for the truth of what is going on here.

If we want to steer our society back toward reality, we have to stop making stuff up.”—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)