Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is one my oldest and dearest friends. He's also one of the sharpest media theorists and cultural critics I know. It's always a thrill to have a conversation with him because he makes me question my opinions and I alway end up with a changed brain. So it was great fun to have him on the Cool Tool podcast.

Douglas is named one of the "world's ten most influential intellectuals by MIT. He's an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc., and Media Virus. He also made the PBS FRONTLINE documentaries, Generation Like, The Persuaders, and The Merchants of Cool. He's a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at Queens College, a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D., and Aleister & Adolf are all being developed for the screen. You can find him on Twitter @rushkoff and Youtube.

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Show notes:

Written languageWritten language is definitely a tool. It's a medium. It's an environment. There's all these ways to think about it, but I love thinking about words as a tool. Because particularly, when I'm mad about something or I feel like there's something that people don't get, once I can put words around it, once I can articulate what's happening, what people are feeling, or the dysfunction, or the paradox, I feel like it empowers me and so many other people to then go do something about it. Read the rest