Leader Dr. Joe Chuman sat down with author, professor, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff to discuss his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:
Five billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive The Event: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset: a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making—with enough money and the right technology.
Rushkoff shared how we can transcend the landscape the Mindset created—a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. Instead of changing the people, we can change the program.
Douglas Rushkoff is rofessor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at Queens/CUNY, and an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, his twenty books include the upcoming Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He writes a weekly column on Medium, and lives with his family in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
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