Reclaiming the Home Field Advantage: A Selection from Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human (2019)
“Today’s digital companies are . . . disconnecting us from the ground on which we stand, the communities where we live, and the people with whom we conspire. To conspire literally means to ‘breathe together’—something that any group of people meeting together in real space is already doing. This is why we must reclaim terra firma, the city, and the physical communities where this can happen. Humans derive their power from place. We are the natives here, and we have the home field advantage.
Maintaining home field advantage means staying in the real world. But sometimes it’s hard to know what’s really real. We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe. Money, debt, jobs, slavery, countries, race, corporatism, stock markets, brands, religions, government, and taxes are all human inventions. We made them up, but we now act as if they’re unchangeable laws. Playing for Team Human means being capable of distinguishing between what we can’t change and what we can. . . .
Self-improvement of the transhumanist sort requires that we adopt an entirely functional understanding of who and what we are: all of our abilities can be improved upon and all of our parts are replaceable. Upgradable. The quirks that make us human are interpreted, instead, as faults that impede our productivity and progress. Embracing those flaws, as humanists tend to do, is judged by the transhumanists as a form of nostalgia, and a dangerously romantic misinterpretation of our savage past as a purer state of being. Nature and biology are not mysteries to embrace but limits to transcend. . . .
Each new media revolution appears to offer people a new opportunity to wrest . . . control from an elite few and reestablish the social bonds that media has compromised. But, so far anyway, the people—the masses—have always remained one entire media revolution behind those who would dominate them. For instance, ancient Egypt was organized under the presumption that the pharaoh could directly hear the words of the gods, as if he were a god himself. The masses, on the other hand, could not hear the gods at all; they could only believe.
With the invention of text, we might have gotten a literate culture. But text was used merely to keep track of possessions and slaves. When writing was finally put in service of religion, only the priests could read the texts and understand the Hebrew or Greek in which they were composed. The masses could hear the Scriptures being read aloud, thus gaining the capability of the prior era—to hear the words of God. But the priests won the elite capability of literacy.
When the printing press emerged in the Renaissance, the people gained the ability to read, but only the king and his chosen allies had the power to produce texts. Likewise, radio and television were controlled by corporations or repressive states. People could only listen or watch. With computers came the potential to program. Thanks to online networks, the masses gained the ability to write and publish their own blogs and videos—but this capability, writing, was the one enjoyed by the elites in the prior revolution. Now the elites had moved up another level, and were controlling the software through which all this happened.
Today, people are finally being encouraged to learn code, but programming is no longer the skill required to rule the media landscape. Developers can produce any app they want, but its operation and distribution are entirely dependent on access to the walled gardens, cloud servers, and closed devices under the absolute control of just three or four corporations. The apps themselves are merely camouflage for the real activity occurring on these networks: the hoarding of data about all of us by the companies that own the platforms.”—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)
