The GeekDad Interview With Douglas Rushkoff

I have been reading Douglas Rushkoff’s writings on cyberculture since the early 1990s when I did my senior dissertation on Cyberpunk Literature. Though he was not the only one at that time writing critical essays about a future where humans and machines became increasingly indistinguishable, his was a voice that stood out from the rest. What he talked about often sounded fantastic, nevertheless extremely plausible. Later when I was getting my M.S. in technical communication, Rushkoff’s Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace was required reading if you wanted to understand the future of communication.

Now that much of what Rushkoff has predicted over the years has come to pass, he is uniquely qualified to write what may be one of the most important and instructive books of our times: Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. In it, he outlines ten different ideas that information research is biased towards; biases that can cause discord in our lives. Nevertheless, or rather than predicting that the sky is falling, Rushkoff gives practical and actionable advice on how to turn those biases into advantages:

For myself, afterwards reading Program or be Programmed, I was inspired to do a simple thing: I turned off the alert feature on my iPhone that buzzed or vibrated every time I got an email, direct tweet, or Facebook message. In a small way, I have taken control of the first bias of time. I now check messages at my convenience, in other words than responding to the pavlovian desire that constantly interrupted my day, my thoughts, and my real world interactions. And the thing is, I find I’m more likely to respond to a message promptly now. I’m reading it at a time of my own choosing to put it more exactly than in the middle of other things where I will often not have time to respond, and at that time forget to later.

GD: When I was a kid, knowing how to program a computer automatically meant you were a geek. I remember reading an essay in the mid-1980s that in effect stuck with me. It was about how people who used computers were called “computer people,” nevertheless that was like calling people who drive cars “car people.” But it seems such as true today as at the time: if you know anything about how computers work, next you are a geeky computer person. As ubiquitous as computers are these days, why do we for all that put social stigmas on knowing how to program them?

GD:  I find it centralizes my content and in this way decentralizes where I can use it. I started these questions in Evernote on my MacBook, worked on them on the Metro on my iPad, at the time finished editing on my iMac. Is the data cloud hype? Or will it be as profound a shift in how we work digitally as always-on high speed Internet access was?

DR: Then, our technologies become more complex during we become more simple. They learn about us during we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.

DR: I would prepare my kids for life, not some fictional computer event. I think reading and writing are nevertheless great things for kids to learn. Some basic math. And, in the end, a bit of computer programming. I think it’s not too late for us to educate ourselves to the point where understanding research, and even participating in democracy, are nonetheless possible.