The Douglas Rushkoff Interview - Part II
The song you just heard at the top of the show was 'Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs' by Arthur Loves Plastic. You can find more of Arthur Loves Plastic's music on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/arthurlovesplastic
This is Part II of our discussion with Douglas Rushkofff, author of the must-read Team Human and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Rushkoff is an author and documentarian on the frontlines of understanding how technology and tech billionaires are impacting our lives and the world. His twenty books also include the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. His films include the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. He won the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. For more on his indispensable work visit his website.
In our bonus episode, Rushkoff takes the Gaslit Nation Self-Care Q&A. To submit your own answers and give inspiration for ways to recharge as we run our marathon together to protect our democracy, leave your answers in the comments section or send an email to GaslitNation@gmail.com. We’ll read some of the responses on the show!
And don’t forget that Andrea will join comedian Kevin Allison of the RISK! Storytelling podcast for a special live event at Caveat in New York City on Saturday August 5th at 4pm to celebrate the launch of the new Gaslit Nation book Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! To get a ticket to that event in person or to watch the livestream, visit this website. Signed copies of the book can be ordered at the event!
Gaslit Nation Self-Care Questionnaire
What's a book you think everyone should read and why?
What's a documentary everyone should watch and why?
What's a dramatic film everyone should watch and why?
Who are some historical mentors who inspire you?
What's the best concert you've ever been to?
What are some songs on your playlist for battling the dark forces?
Who or what inspires you to stay engaged and stay in the fight?
What's the best advice you've ever gotten?
What's your favorite place you've ever visited?
What's your favorite work of art and why?
Download Transcript
[intro music features Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs by Arthur Loves Plastic]
Andrea Chalupa (00:21):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine: the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. First, a couple announcements. We are running a very special summer series called “The Future of Dictatorship. What's Next? And Ways to Resist”. This series features leading voices on the front lines of understanding AI, corporate surveillance, Silicon Valley greed, and more, because the dictator's playbook remains the same, but the technology they have to oppress us keeps changing. You can learn more about the dictator's playbook in the Gaslit Nation graphic novel, Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think. You can join me for a special night out in New York City to talk all about the making of that book on Saturday, August 5th at 4:00 PM at the fun Lower East Side bar, Caveat, where I will be in discussion with the comedian, Kevin Allison, of the hugely popular Risk storytelling podcast.
Andrea Chalupa (01:20):
If you're not in New York, you can join us by livestream. This is a huge deal for me because I hardly go out, so this will be like a Gaslit Nation prom night. Join me at Caveat on August 5th in New York. Signed copies of the Gaslit Nation graphic novel will be available for order at the event. For details on how to join us in person or livestream, go to gaslitnationpod.com and you'll see the link right on our homepage with more information about the event. Go to gaslitnationpod.com. That's gaslitnationpod.com. We'll be back with all new episodes of Gaslit Nation in September, including a live taping with Terrell Starr of the Black Diplomats podcast reporting from Ukraine. That's right, Terrell's gonna be in Ukraine, and we're gonna hear all about his summer, his reporting trips, what he is learning, who he's talking to, and what's next. That live taping will take place on Tuesday, September 12th at 12:00 PM Eastern for our supporters at the Truth-teller level and higher on Patreon. Come join us for that and drop questions in the chat and hope to see as many of our listeners as I can on August 5th in New York at Caveat for a fun night out. Before we get to this week's guest, here's a quick word from our sponsor, Judge Lackey, the wiley narrator of the new Gaslit Nation graphic novel Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think.
[clip - Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think trailer]
Judge Lackey (02:37):
You are getting sleepy [haunting piano music up and under], very sleepy. Ssshhh.When I snap my fingers, you will obey my every command, starting with always win, but never completely. The dictator must be an unlikely hero who is constantly winning, yet under siege, the battles can never stop. Now wake and seize power by reading dictatorship. It's easier than you think. Almost too easy.
[end clip]
Andrea Chalupa (03:12):
Here is part two of my discussion with Douglas Rushkoff. I'm going to read now from his bio: “Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human anatomy in a digital age. His 20 books include the just published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires—an extraordinary read, I have to tell you. It's chilling… Chilling how dumb the tech billionaires are—as well as the recent Team Human—another essential read, loved that book—based on his podcast and 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 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. This is part two of our conversation.
[transition music]
Andrea Chalupa [00:04:15]
And what about a universal income? Do you see that as something that we should be agitating for, or do you see it as just another control mechanism on the population?
Douglas Rushkoff (04:26):
I mean, it depends. Most of the models of them are stupid but I think it's a great transition mechanism. Really what we want is universal basic assets that everybody owns. It's more 40 acres and a mule than 40 bucks a week. You know? It's what do you own? When you look at inequality, particularly economic inequality across races, it's less the amount of money that they're earning, but the amount of generational wealth that's been accumulated. So if you have generational wealth and you send your kid to college, your kid can spend a year after college making no money, doing internships and developing their career, whereas someone who doesn't have… Isn't sitting on wealth, that kid's gonna have to work right outta school and start paying back their loans. So, it's like, it looks like they're equal but they're starting at a very different starting place with a whole lot less economic padding to allow them to do career and other sorts of development.
Douglas Rushkoff (05:21):
And that perpetuates. So yeah, universal basic income, universal basic assets, and designing economics around mutual aid, around basic equity. How do you develop enterprises around equity rather than around profit? And that's the work I'm doing now with Institute for the Future. We started something called the Equitable Enterprise Initiative, looking at how you can develop businesses that share equity. And that's more things like cooperatives and platform co-ops and, you know, businesses where everybody owns a piece of the business rather than being an employee for someone else's business. How do you earn equity in the enterprise?
Andrea Chalupa (06:00):
That's really cool. Tell us about that. How does that work?
Douglas Rushkoff (06:03):
Well, I mean, a lot of businesses are doing it now because a lot of boomers are aging outta their businesses and their kids don't want it, so they sell the business to their employees. And then when the employees own the business, they're not working for some shareholder. They're working for themselves. And they make decisions, you know, very differently because now they're impacting the neighborhood that they're living in. They want long-term stability and security. So, I mean… It's just a co-op, you know? We look at it like a silly thing like, or like Israel, kibbutzes in the 1960s: “All those didn't work and they were lazy people!” No, cooperatives do work. I mean, Publix, the supermarket chain, is a cooperative. It's a worker-owned cooperative. Even True Value hardware stores are… They're not a worker cooperative, but they're a small business cooperative.
Douglas Rushkoff (06:52):
So it's really just independent businesses that buy their stuff together. There's all sorts of cooperatives. There's a great book by Nathan Schneider on cooperatives. It's a great and increasingly used model where workers don't get exploited because they are their own bosses and they make decisions collectively for the benefit of everyone involved. So you get very different kinds of people at the table. You know, in a traditional business, the shareholder is only in the business in order to be able to sell the shares at a higher price. So that just means growing the business. But it's more like… It's a bit like selling your business to the mob, right? The mob doesn't care about the restaurant. They're just running money through the restaurant. The restaurant is a name on laundered money, and that's what happens to really any business that goes public. You become a tool of the markets, a tool of financialization rather than whatever enterprise that you're in.
Andrea Chalupa (07:48):
And could that model apply to media? We've lost so many amazing media companies and newsrooms have been shrinking for decades now, and it's something that a lot of people in media don't like to talk about.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa:
—because it's happened rapidly, there's a lot of shame involved. And a lot of those left standing or entering this profession tend to be propped up by their parents' money. And so media, the way we get our news, newsrooms tend to be rich and white. But in the place of it, we've had a lot of independent you know, podcasts obviously, and a lot of independent sites to try to fill that. Do you see this model working for that? And how would that work?
Douglas Rushkoff (08:33):
Yeah, well, Associated Press is a cooperative, and that's been around a long time. That's owned by the writers. That's what that is, you know? So yes, it works. ProPublica is a cooperative and they're the ones who are coming out basically revealing everything about international politics and money laundering. And so between the two of those, you have two important, well-functioning and prosperous... Well, ProPublica is not so prosperous. They need a heck of a lot of donations to work right now because people don't value finding out the truth about what's going on in the world, it seems. They prefer the sensationalism of the cable news networks. But no, it definitely works. And we're just… It's a media in transition and we're gonna start to see more and more of them. I mean, Substack is just kind of discovering now, Oh, what about instead of having everyone have their individual Substack, what if there were sort of 10 or 20 people that gathered together into a Substack, and then maybe they get someone who edits their pieces.
Douglas Rushkoff(09:41):
And then it starts looking like a traditional magazine again with a publisher and an editor. And the great thing about an editor is they do send the piece back to you and say, you know, you need to do a little more here. You need to support this. You need a second source for that claim. And people don't like to hear that and then they leave: “I quit the magazine because they censored me!” No, they didn't censor you. They asked you to find a source for what you were saying, and that's really different. And I get it. People are immature and they want things their way. I know what it's like to be sent back and have to do more work on something. It sucks. “I’ll take my ball and go home! Make my own blog and leave you all alone and get my own subscribers. I don't need you anymore!” No, again, that's part of being in a community. That's part of being in something. You gotta listen to some other people.
Andrea Chalupa (10:27):
Absolutely. And maybe fact-checkers might even come back. [laughs]
Douglas Rushkoff (10:32):
Yeah, remember them?
Andrea Chalupa (10:33):
Yeah. I'm glad I started when I did. I had to work with a fact-checking apartment and I was like, “Ugh, God.” But I miss them now. It's so sad.
Douglas Rushkoff (10:41):
But boy, didn't you hate them at the time?
Andrea Chalupa (10:43):
Yeah, obviously.
Douglas Rushkoff (10:44):
They always send you back. “Where'd you get the… I need to see the notes for this quote.”
Andrea Chalupa (10:49):
Yeah, God bless them wherever they are now. So what about social media and everything that's going on there? It's just getting worse and worse, right? It's just the whole… Social media, far-right propaganda like Fox News, Newsmax, the far right is consolidating. If you go to iTunes or you look at what the top podcasts are, I don't even know these guys' names anymore. All the guys that just got fired from Fox News in the wake of the big Dominion lawsuit, that's who's filling up like the top 100 of political podcasts right now. So it seems like the far right has just been building from success to success and just growing bigger and bigger in terms of the room they're taking up in people's minds and all the noise and division they're creating. Is there any remedy for that?
Douglas Rushkoff (11:35):
I mean, it depends who you are. I mean, I don't need a remedy for it because I'm not in there, so I'm lucky, I guess. It's not where I spend my time. I guess it depends… If we have an entirely for-profit media space that can leverage sensationalism for money, then we do as Neil Postman warned: we amuse ourselves to death. You know, that's the book he wrote, Amusing Ourselves to Death. And it was about that. I mean, and what he was asking—and this was in the ‘70s or ‘80s when he wrote it, at a much quainter moment—but he was asking, Why is there music on the news? You know, they'll say, like, “War in Iraq—” [mimics news music] What is that? Why is there a soundtrack on it? It's news. And they're turning it into this movie, this entertainment thing.
Douglas Rushkoff (12:34):
And that was really the beginning. Once news went from a public service requirement of an FCC license to a for-profit entertainment center at the networks, it was kind of all lost because the most successful news is the news that's the most sensationalist. So if you hear, you know, that Joe Biden is eating babies with Martian Jews, that's gonna sell more than whatever's really happening in a place or anywhere, unless the world gets bad enough to justify that sensationalism. I mean, and it really is. It should, you know, the loss of a species or the enslavement of a bunch of kids in Africa should be that news. And it's not. It's tricky. I mean, I still think that the answers are more on the ground. You know, that the desocialized landscape is part of what encourages people to see “the other” as so dangerous and horrible. You know, I have relatives who won't visit New York anymore because they've seen on Fox and Newsmax, whatever, that New York is a war zone. They're afraid that if they come, they'll be killed.
Andrea Chalupa (13:53):
It's a bunch of moms with strollers ramming into each other. That's my day-to-day [laughs].
Douglas Rushkoff (13:57):
I know. New York, for me, the problem for me with New York is I can't even afford to get a hamburger in New York, much less an apartment. New York is like… I look at New York as like, look at all these rich people! At least Manhattan, New York, it's all these rich people that I can't even—
Andrea Chalupa (14:10):
It's a billionaire's playground. It's a Saudi prince’s playground, yeah.
Douglas Rushkoff (14:13):
Right. Bloomberg built this bubble around the place. And the Saudi princes own these apartments they don't even go to. They're just these giant kind of like shares of stock in the sky. You know, these sort of apartment boxes that represent an investment. But there's not children running around in them. There's not people looking out the windows. They're just empty. I mean, so there's a different problem. It's people meeting it, but it's also, you know, lefties meeting righties, you know, and realizing that they're people too. And they've got some crazy ass views because of what they've been taught about people and things they don't know, but if they meet us, they'll see, “Oh.” You know, and it takes a few good disasters to do that. You know, when my town gets flooded, we got mud-flooded after one of the big hurricanes and it was righties and lefties next to each other, digging people outta their houses, you know? Digging the mud outta their basements.
Douglas Rushkoff (15:09):
And when you have that part in common, the parts that you don't have in common really do fade into the background. It's a choice of entertainment. People elected Trump, I think, because that's the TV person they wanted to see on their set, not because of any policy. They like that show better. And the less dependent we are on the TV show, the more realistic we'll be, I think, about our political choices. And that's just, you know, that's what passes for entertainment. It's reality television. It was the last writer strike that really brought this. The last writer strike brought us reality TV because we couldn't pay writers, so we started to do what they called “unscripted”, which has writers but they pretend it doesn't, you know, all of Trump's reality shows, whatever, that was all… That wasn't real. None of it's real.
Douglas Rushkoff (15:57):
You know, the lovers, the spats, the fights, all of those things. The housewives. Producers give them scripts. I mean, they're acting, but they're reality actors. That's what brought us, you know, the reality star as president. That was it. That's what became entertainment. So if entertainment got better, maybe we wouldn't need this reality crap and we wouldn't mistake politics for entertainment. Politics is supposed to be boring. Those are nerds. They're geeks. Remember student government? Who went out for that? It was a boring thing. I mean, God bless them. I'm glad. But it wasn't for charismatic people. It was for wonky people.
Andrea Chalupa (16:32):
I was one of those people [laughs]. It's cool. But, but yeah
Douglas Rushkoff:
[laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
I think Obama came in and he definitely made it cool because when I was in high school making phone calls in a candidate's campaign office, it was just me and the candidate because no one wanted to sign up for that when you were 16 years old.
Douglas Rushkoff (16:49):
And you could look at Obama as the problem in that, that the left got its perfect TV character guy. I mean, in some sense, maybe Hillary would've been the one to pick at that point. Who knows?
Andrea Chalupa (17:03):
Right, I mean, who knows? But what about 2024? We have Biden running again. We have just a whole slate of candidates; Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and of course Trump. Is it basically a done deal on the Republican side, do you think, because he's just going to bully the rest into submission, they're not going to be able to get a word in (if they hold debates), and it's just gonna be Biden and Trump again? Do you think that's where we're headed? I'm not even mentioning DeSantis because he seems to be pretty bogged down with his little mini dictatorship in Florida. What do you see coming for 2024? Do you think it's gonna be like a Trump/Biden matchup or do you think…?
Douglas Rushkoff (17:44):
I don't know. You know, I'm not really a predictor. I'm an observer. I mean, and what I'm observing is it's really hard for a younger person to credibly run for an office like that. And I think part of the reason is to be president, in some ways you have to be an institutionalist. You have to believe in the old school big institutions. And when you see a younger person run for president, like Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar or somebody—or even DeSantis in that sense—it's like… You think there's gotta be something wrong with them. It's like Amy Klobuchar, Oh, she's like this kind of cheerleader person, or Buttigieg, he must be like CIA or something, for him to have faith... Because He's young, he's younger than us, or one of us. That doesn't make sense. And with Biden, it's like, he's old enough that you can go, “Oh, I believe that he really believes in government because he's so old, they're so stupid.”
Douglas Rushkoff (18:55):
“They actually believe. They have faith in this thing.” And that's a problem. So it's sort of like what we're contending with is how do you have a president in a post institutional age, in an age when no one of right mind or normal age believes in the efficacy or validity of institutions? It's tricky. So I feel like we're gonna need, in the end, people coming in who, rather than competing on their faith, are competing in their realism; that, “I get it, government is flawed. This is a really screwed up system.” And they're sort of make-the-best-of-it candidates. It's a very Gen X kind of understanding of it, of like, Look, this is intrinsically, intrinsically flawed. We're gonna have to go in and see what can be salvaged from the wreckage of government.
Andrea Chalupa (19:50):
What about Gen Z that's coming up? They seem obviously more tolerant, more open-minded. They're organizing politically. They're gonna be voting in increasingly larger, larger numbers. You have Republicans terrified of this and trying to close whatever polling places they can on college campuses and so on with Gen Z, when they're gonna start to become the members of Congress rising up through the ranks. Do you see this being a more progressive time for our country that we're headed towards?
Douglas Rushkoff (20:21):
Well, it depends. I mean, progressive is a tricky word, you know, because progressive means incremental progress. And I wonder if Gen Z is progressive or absolutist. What will they bring? Republicans are scared of Gen Z because they see sweeping, system-wide change, right? They look at AOC or somebody and they say, “Oh my God, she's gonna come and do this everywhere, all at once!” [laughs Everywhere everything all at once will happen and they're afraid of that. And I think it is because Gen Z does have, to some extent, a very scaled system-wide understanding of the world. Which is part of why I'm trying to suggest that scale itself may be the problem, that solutions are very local, communitarian, person-to-person. And to build up as much of that as we can so that we're less dependent on the big, scaled national solutions for anything. You know, it's sort of like, “Yes, I want big government to function, but I want big government to be burdened with as little as possible.” Let big government take care of the big problems, you know? Nukes and starvation and whatever. And let us take care of each other as best we can, rather than look to these highly brittle, centralized institutions for day-to-day sustenance.
Andrea Chalupa (21:56):
Absolutely. I wanted to ask you about the book bannings. For the generation coming up after Gen Z, the kids in elementary school who are going to be coming up through school systems where their librarians are under attack, where books are disappearing from shelves, where there's probably even, like, a teacher exodus because of the immense pressure that that teachers are falling under, where do you see that heading? How can we push back against that?
Douglas Rushkoff (22:26):
Well, it’s interesting. The librarian who quit in the small public school district that I know of near me, she quit because they banned The Simpsons, right? And they banned The Simpsons because—I mean, The Simpsons graphic novels—because on The Simpsons they have a stereotypical racist depiction, I guess, of an Indian 7-Eleven convenience store owner; the guy Apu or whatever. And I get it, but it was interesting because I heard she left because of banned books. And I'm like, “Oh…” You know, I had heard that they took To Kill a Mockingbird or something and became, instead of it being required, it became the canon for whatever reasons. They don't like that, the other side doesn't like that one. And then I heard it was this one that sent her away because she's like, “The Simpsons?! I refuse! I’m gone!”
Douglas Rushkoff (23:21):
So there's a brittleness to the environment itself, and I realize, yes, the Floridian, you know, racist book bannings are worse than whatever they are, whether it's, you know, the white fragility or social justice bannings of books that they feel contain racist depictions. I mean, they're on different scales of harm, but they reflect a common brittleness. The common error of, even if you don't like the thing… When my wife was pregnant, the thing to do was the pregnant person was supposed to have no peanuts and no dairy in hopes that the child then wouldn't be allergic to those things. Now they have the pregnant mothers have a lot of dairy and a lot of nuts so that the child is not allergic to those things. And the latter one seems to work better. You know, exposure, kids who play in dirt have better immune systems, right?
Douglas Rushkoff (24:29):
So I think kids who have to confront a racist depiction and are able to discuss, “How did that make you feel? In what environment was this created? What do we think now?” is just as important as people in Florida learning that slavery happened. It happened. You know? It doesn't have to make the white child feel bad about themselves, the fact that they are in a society where they are still benefiting from the work that was done by the grandparents of the kids sitting next to you in that room. Sorry. You know? But it's a resilience that we need to teach rather than arguing over the books and things themselves. I feel like we are in a brittle atmosphere that is only compensated for with more discussion, human to human engagement in real ways, not just, you know, fighting at school board meetings.
Andrea Chalupa (25:27):
Do you think America's headed for a civil war? And how might tech be driving it?
Douglas Rushkoff (25:32):
God, this is all so dark. I think America's in a civil war
Andrea Chalupa (25:37):
That's darker [laughs].
Douglas Rushkoff (25:39):
No, but this is what it's like. You're in it. This is it. So now you think, how do we want to end this civil war? Do we wanna end it in a flurry of violence or something? Or do we wanna say, “Okay, we see this civil war happening. How do we create a rapprochement between these seemingly, you know, opposed sides; the same sides that were basically opposed in the original Civil War?” What is right, you know? Is the nation too big to sustain like this? Do we want to move to something more like the EU? Or if we do that, are we too afraid for our brothers and sisters who end up in the completely oppressed states, you know, where abortion is banned from before you even have sex or something. I don't know, [laughs] how far back into the process can they go? You know, or they make condoms illegal.
Douglas Rushkoff (26:29):
So I think what we're finding is it's hard to make decisions at scale. It really is, especially if we don't even agree on universal human rights and what those are. We've ended up in a brittle and contentious environment. You know, we have 400,000 or 500,000 years of painstakingly evolved mechanisms for establishing rapport in a face-to-face context and we don't have any of them for doing it at scale in social media and in these big ways. If people focused 90% of their political energy on mutual aid in their own communities, in active civics, rather than in national voting, it would be just so much easier. It would matter so much less who is president if most of your needs were taken care of by people you know in normal ways. You don't need all these policies. I don't even… I mean, yes, I'm glad there's a social safety net from the government as social security, but I would much rather have people's friends and neighbors take care of them when they get old.
Andrea Chalupa (27:37):
Yeah, absolutely. I do say on the foreign policy front, because I have friends and family that are right on the front lines and Donbas in the war of Ukraine. So for me, the president matters. [laughs] So, I do need—
Douglas Rushkoff (27:49):
Right, but wouldn't it be nice if the president was dealing with that rather than book bannings in Florida?
Andrea Chalupa (27:54):
Yes. Yes. A million times over.
Douglas Rushkoff (27:56):
Right. So the more we could take care of ourselves, then gosh, then a president could deal with that. I mean, I still don't even know exactly what happened there. I know that Putin went in there with tanks and stuff, and I just saw footage from that city that he claims he won and he just destroyed it. So there's nothing there, you know? It’s just... What the fuck, man? And it is interesting, you know, when you try to tell the story to a kid, it's like, okay, there's a bully who went in and he's killing lots of people and taking it. “Why can't we stop him?” Oh, because he's got nukes and we're afraid he'll blow up the world or something if we try to stop him. Talk about existential fear. That's a really fucked up thing to try to explain to a kid.
Andrea Chalupa (28:41):
Oh, absolutely. It's strange times, all the conversations we're being forced to have with our children. So if society should collapse, God forbid, in our lifetime, what is your plan for survival? Have you thought this through? Are you gonna be just like roasting hot dogs in your driveway and having a big cookout? And everyone's welcome? Because I'll come [laughs].
Douglas Rushkoff (29:02):
Yeah, but we'll run outta hotdog on the first night.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah.
Douglas Rushkoff:
You know? I live pretty close to an urban center, so the complexity of the supply chain is too difficult to overcome. I mean, I do think it's our responsibility to have a couple of weeks of food and first aid around for just natural disasters or whatever, or power outages or disruption of some kind. But no, I'm not… I don't have a prep plan. I've always believed either, you know, we all make it or none of us make it. You know? What would I do? You know, I mean, I guess I could get cans of tuna and batteries, you know, things to trade. I'm looking at it a little bit more macro. In other words, if we're going to be in the desert for a few generations or more, in other words, if the thing that we know is kind of ending and we're moving into an interregnum before the next thing, then what's important to me is more on a civilizational level what values do we want people to take with them?
Douglas Rushkoff (30:19):
How do you prepare for the desert? It's like looking at the Torah and the Israelites. You're gonna leave Egypt, you know? So if we leave this civilization, this death cult of capitalism that we're in, this world of false idols, that we go through the plagues and watch our idols be destroyed and are rebirthed into the desert, what do we take with us? And that's kind of why I’m writing. That's why I'm thinking. That's what… What will be our equivalent of Torah in exile? And I think that might be, you know… Whatever things you do to prepare yourself to live more actually resiliently. Also, reduce the possibility of the bad thing happening. The more sustainably we live, the more you depend on your neighbors rather than big centralized supply chains, the more you're doing permaculture agriculture and peer-to-peer trade, the more self-sufficient your towns are, the better they're gonna do in an apocalypse and the less likely an apocalypse has to happen at all.
[outro song features Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs by Arthur Loves Plastic]
[outro theme music, roll credits]
Andrea Chalupa
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth-teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We encourage you to donate to help rescue and recovery efforts in Turkey and Syria following the devastating earthquakes in early February. To help people in Turkey, visit the TPF Turkeye Earthquake Relief fund at tpfund.org
Andrea Chalupa:
To help Syrians in need donate to the White Helmets at whitehelmets.org. We also encourage you to help support Ukraine by donating to Razom for Ukraine at razomforukraine.org. In addition, we encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan. Donate at Rescue.Org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org and avoid products with palm oil.
Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon. It keeps us going.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production manager is Nicholas Torres and our associate producer is Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon-exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Visseberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank are supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher with the help of Judge Lackey, the narrator of the new Gaslit Nation graphic novel, Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think…