Heeb

Douglas Rushkoff interrupts your regularly scheduled tweeting and friend requesting for an important announcement: You are in dire danger of becoming a “bizarre, sick, welfare state of ADD yuckies.” This might sound like an out-of-line move on Rushkoff’s part, but hear him out. This cyberspace pioneer and cultural critic has been right before—a whole lot! —and he’s calling out your total, wasteful misuse of the World Wide Web. And he doesn’t just mean all the bukkake you download.

Fifteen years ago, he thought it would be different. Then the Internet was the Garden of Eden—a true democratic medium. Back when he published the seminal Cyberia, the first of his ten acclaimed books, Rushkoff was optimistic. Cyberpunks and the ‘net were revolutionizing the flow of information, the exchange of goods. As Rage Against the Machine put it, we were gonna “Take the power back!" And it probably didn’t hurt that he was getting a lot of action back then. (“In the early ‘90s you could still get laid by being a writer,” he admits. “Girls found it sexy.”) Unfortunately, his outlook today has changed: instead, he sees the careless spreading of misinformation, youth asleep in web-induced stupor , and the proliferation of stealth marketing that tricks us into buying useless crap. Rushkoff begs us to become adults who “see that they are the creators of everything.” But we’d rather be kids at the Internet candy store—consumerism, porno, social networking—all too sweet to resist.

Technological breakthroughs, especially ones in communications, can seem like the start of a transformation. The tools for change! Deliverance from the oppressive forces of society! Sadly, history has shown that humanity is too lazy to use the tools it is given. Rushkoff traces this never-ending habitual behavior all the way to the invention of the alphabet. “But did people learn to read?” the media theorist asks. “No. The rabbis learned to read and the people gathered around to listen!” The same goes for the printing press—it gave man the ability to receive information, but only what the elite chose to print. “And then, finally, you get the computer era and the ‘net, and people gain what? They gain the ability to write,” Ruskoff, the Marshall McLuhan of today, rejoices. But what do we use that ability for? “To write inside the box that Facebook has given us,” he sighs.

It’s not that Rushkoff has a problem with Facebook, but it’s a far cry from the revolutionary ways the Internet could “put people in a participatory role in their lives and in the world.” In order to do that, he claims we must all embrace the idea of open sourcing. As a tech term, open source refers to software that makes its code available to the user —something everyone can manipulate—but as a movement and ideology, it goes way past Wikipedia and Linux. “If we don’t internalize the open source ethos online,” he says, “then we never translate that open source ethos to the things in the real world that really matter." By that, he means “religion, urban planning, agriculture and the economy." Pretty much everything.

Unfortunately, as he passionately posits in his latest book, LIFE INC. How The World Became A Corporation And How To Take It Back, corporate interests continue to choke off the common man, preventing him from truly grasping the interactive nature of the Weband the world around them. “Big business and big media worked for ways to make the Internet less about creation and more about passivity, consumption, and disconnection, reducing all the tremendous possibility to consumer activity and brand discussion," he writes. It would sound paranoid if it weren’t so true.

So how likely is it that Joe Internet will stop the frivolous crap and take back the web? These days Rushkoff, currently working on his next book, the tentatively titled Net Gain, is doubtful. “People are surrendering their agency. Human beings are under-utilizing their cognitive capacity by choice. They would rather have Glenn Beck in charge,” he says. And the LED monitor that is the future gets dimmer and dimmer. “The doomsday scenario really is that human beings [will] decide they are so uncomfortable with agency—meaning with having any ability to affect their outcome, their world—that they’re so uncomfortable with the notion that we are the adults here, that they would rather have everyone die than grow up.”

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