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Posted Rushkoff on writing for a new alternate reality game to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Life Inc., Coercion, the graphic novel Testament, and many other books. I've written and even taught a whole lot about interactive narrative over the years, but rarely have the chance to play with this stuff. So last year, when a Canadian games company rang to see if I'd be interested in collaborating with them on developing stories for a giant, multi-dimensional gaming universe, I jumped. It was like I was being given the chance to live out Jack Kirby's dream of world-building with Robert Anton Wilson's vision of multiple and overlapping perspectives. The early results are finally making it online as the preview of a graphic novel, which spills out into the trailhead of at least one Alternate Reality Game, and also comprises the back story of the coming videogame series. This is a big big universe - a giant war for the future of humanity, of course - with maybe one overall timeline but many different pathways through the material. So people might follow my characters through a series of graphic novels, and learn something about them that they can then use in the games, or an artifact they find in the game might help them decode something in the comics. And even the ARG that people are beginning to play right now - through which they are "finding the others," and forging coalitions with other gamers in their own parts of the world to solve certain challenges - is a set-up for the bigger game, where these larger groups will be responsible for various aspects of the coming war. The object of the game right now is for the players to build the "Darknet," an alternative network through which a global resistance can operate, and people can begin to piece together why NASA scientists are being rounded up and what the hell happened over the skies in Los Angeles....
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Posted Life Inc: a book against corporatism, published by a corporation to Boing Boing
(Douglas Rushkoff is a recent Boing Boing guest blogger -- below, a previously-planned excerpt from his new book, the last in a series of excerpts which ran during his guest-blogging period.)Here's the final excerpts for the BoingBoing serialization of my new book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. I've chosen them in response to concern from readers of the earlier excerpts, who are asking "what should we actually do about all this?" I think the first step is to fully comprehend how the financial mess we're in is not some aberration, but the culmination of a debt-based economy. When speculation and lending outweigh innovation and value-creation as drivers of economic activity, addiction to growth and the attendant bubbles are really the only possible long-term outcome. That's why it's important we understand how the ground rules were established, who came up with them, and why. Only then can we begin to look at how arbitrarily they were determined, and how artificially they were upheld. But once we've done that, we need to look at mechanisms for restoring the functioning of a bottom-up economy that is at least as worthy as its top-down counterpart. Corporate foundations, while well-meaning, end up sitting on giant stores of investment that work against the very causes the foundations are supposedly working to fix. (There's a big section on how this works, using some of the LA Times terrific analysis of how the Gates Foundation invests its assets.)It's not a matter of getting rid of corporations and centralized currency altogether, but maintaining alternative means of creating value and exchanging it. This is as much about simple participation as it is about active legislation. Finally, I'll argue, it means abandoning "causes" as abstract as the entities for which we mean to develop alternatives. (for more on the book, movie, and tour, as well as appearances for groups such as A New Way Forward, check out lifeincorporated.net )From Chapter 8No ReturnsThe Fourth Estate is made up almost entirely of large corporations. And, operating almost entirely under the principles of debt, media companies cannot make any distinction between the market value of information and its importance. Britney Spears's latest breakdown and the invasion of Iraq are both treated as major media events deserving of equal time and space. In the face of all this, the hippest way out is to adopt the attitude of amused and quizzical cynicism worn by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Besides, no matter how critical of corporatism some entertainers and journalists might be, the impact of their arguments is undercut by their dependence on corporatized media for dissemination. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart work for Viacom. Naomi Klein writes for a division of the German publisher Verlagsgruppe, and this book is published by a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. We all have mortgages to pay. Even most progressive journalism--just like the kind that emerged in the early 1900s--tends to frighten and isolate the middle classes rather than bring them out of their homes to improve their communities. Populists such as CNN's Lou Dobbs, and others speaking out on behalf of working stiffs, stoke more rage and discontent than thoughtful engagement. In the isolation of our living rooms and surrounded by bills, the menaces of immigrants willing to take our jobs for less pay and affirmative- action candidates offered our jobs with fewer qualifications feel all too real....
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Posted Life Inc: Everything's Open Source but Money to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger. I'm posting an excerpt from my upcoming book, Life Inc., every Monday morning until the book publishes on June 2. Two weeks ago, I published the introduction. Last week, I published the first half of Chapter One. Today, some excerpts that answer or at least address the questions and comments being raised here at BB. Next week is the final installment. I'll also be keeping the excerpts up as PDFs at LifeIncorporated.net. from CHAPTER ONE ONCE REMOVED: THE CORPORATE LIFE- FORM ...As a result, our physical, commercial, spiritual, and personal accomplishments came to be valued only insofar as they could serve the market. And while the market may be as good a model as any for human interaction, the corporate terrain did not represent a level playing field or a "free market" in which value might be created from anywhere. Remember--in spite of its individualistic mythology of open competition, the landscape of corporatism was first cultivated during the Renaissance, when local currencies were outlawed in favor of centralized money. In the United States, in an assumption of centralized value creation that reached a crescendo under the Nixon administration, the Federal Reserve won the authority to create money by fiat, based on nothing but faith in its own corporate chutzpah. The massive potential of computers and networking, technologies developed in many cases by engineers hoping to decentralize the very power structures funding their projects, was quickly recontextualized as a market opportunity--the beginning of a "long boom"--and appropriated as NASDAQ's stepchild. New rules for a new economy were invented, in which people's ability to access interactive technology for free or to create value independent of any corporation could be understood as the power of the network to leverage what were formerly "externalities." The dot- com boosters sought to reconcile the incompatibility of an abundant, decentralized media space with the legacy of a scarce, centralized monetary system. Everything is "open source," except, of course, money itself....
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Posted Strange, but Never Strangers to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff was a guest blogger. Thanks for having me aboard these past two weeks, engaging with me so honestly and provocatively, and for quickly scrolling past my posts if they just strayed too far from what it is you know and love about BoingBoing. The beauty of guest bloggers is that we are temporary. And no matter how combative we get in these spaces, sometimes it's good to remember we're all on the same side. I do hope I get to meet a lot of the people I engaged with in the comments sections, here. I'll be touring - both for my Life Inc book and, more importantly, to promote ideas for DIY commerce. I really do believe the BoingBoing ethos of open source and cyberpunk (make) culture dovetail perfectly with those of complementary currencies, peer-to-peer lending, and other non-outsourced finance. And I look forward to taking what I've learned into the field and into the media. There's two more excerpts coming up to finish the serialization on BB, too - this Monday and next. For those of you who may want to catch up or meet up, here's where I'll be the next few weeks. You can always find out where I'm going to be via http://rushkoff.com - and I'll be on the MediaSquat via WFMU every week, as well, so call in. Please don't be strangers. Thanks again. Your humble but happy mutant, Douglas Upcoming gigs:NY: May 26th: Reading in Irvington, 8pm-9pm Chutney Masala 4 West Main Street in Irvington, NY NY: May 31st: Comp Currency panel, 1-5PM St. Marks Church 2nd Ave & 10th St Boston: June 2. Boston Public Library, book reading, 6pm 700 Boylston St.NY: June 7th: Life Inc. Book Party, open to public Comfort Restaurant 583 Warburton Ave, Hasting-on-Hudson, NY 10706 SF: June 9th: Booksmith, reading and signing, 7pm - 8pm PST 1644 Haight St,Seattle, June 10th: HL2.com, Seattle talk and signing, 7pm PST www.hl2.com/ Redmond: June 11th: Lecture at Microsoft, 10:30 am - 11:30 am PST NY: June 16th McNally Jackson Books, book reading and signing, 7pm - 8pm 52 Prince Street, NY: June 18th: Blue Stockings, book party and talk, 7pm 172 Allen StNY: June 29th: Personal Democracy Forum www.personaldemocracy.com/...
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Posted Books about (or at least by) weird but interesting people to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. I just raced through two novels - not because I had to finish them quickly, but because they moved so quickly. The first, by my best friend from college Walter Kirn, is an entertaining but (for me, anyway) nightmarish reminiscence on trying to make it through Princeton called Lost in the Meritocracy, based on this essay Kirn wrote for The Atlantic. Not the academics, but the culture itself. What self-conscious public school kids like Walter and me learned at Princeton was that there really super wealthy people who control a heck of a lot of the world, and that they have institutions like Princeton to help their kids find one another and then inherit their daddies' places. Yes, I know most of you already know that - but we didn't. It was a more innocent era, and these kind of things came as big, adolescent, crises of disillusionment that required ample self-medication. And Kirn's writing, if you haven't gotten to experience it before, is the most effortlessly engaging literary literature being written today. The second is a book by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the acclaimed Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, then went ahead and won a MacArthur genius grant which made the rest of us really jealous. It's hard to be too jealous, though, because Jonathan is a totally sweet guy and he actually is the sort of genius writer for whom such prizes were created. And, most of all, he used the time and money to create his first true work of genius, Chronic City, which - like Kirn's novel - deconstructs the hyper-competitive social landscape of eastern urbanites in a fair but viciously accurate near-future parody of manners and hermeneutics....
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Posted Personal Democracy Forum to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. Although I begged them (and they agreed at the time) to change their name from Personal Democracy Forum to Participatory Democracy Forum, the name remains the same. But the purpose remains the same, too, so I'm glad I got invited to participate in the Forum's conference again this year in New York City on June 29 and 30. The one thing that has changed, however, was my ability to negotiate a short-term discount of $100 for BoingBoing readers who want to go, by using the discount code "boingboingpdf". That's only going to work for the next 24 hours, but that's better than nothing. (They are pretty good about finding roles for interns, too, so try for that if the entry fee is still too high.) On the brightest side, this year's confirmed participants include Danah Boyd, Clay Shirky, Frank Rich, Dan Gillmor, Jack Dorsey, Dave Troy, Baratune Thurston, Ana Marie Cox, Vivek Kundra, Amanda Rose, Tara Hunt, Nate Silver, Craig Newmark, Gina Bianchini, Beth Noveck, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Simon, Michael Wesch, Joe Rospars, David Weinberger, and Mark Pesce. And unlike a lot of conferences, these folks actually participate in the whole thing. (Micah Sifry of PDF informs me that they tried to change the name to Participatory Democracy, but couldn't find an unused url for it.)...
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Posted Personal Freedom, by State to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. The "Index of Freedom," maintained by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. By measuring across a wide variety of policies and activities, the study concluded that New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the most free, while my own New York is - by significant margin - the least (due in part, no doubt, to the famously draconian drug laws implemented during the Rockefeller era and still not repealed). (Then again, as we look at the Mercatus Center funding, another picture emerges.) State Policy Index...
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Posted Vida Inc: La Pelicula to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. This is what I love about the Internet. Two days after we posted Janine Saunders' Life Inc: The Movie, Carlos Boyle - author of De Revolutionibus Orbium Argentum - has created a subtitled version on his website for the Spanish speaking (and reading) audience. Reflexiones Siesteras - Life Inc subtitulada en español...
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Posted Ben Franklin's DEATH RAY to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. Nate Dimeo, an NPR reporter, has been creating some fascinating audio at a site he called The Memory Palace. These are highly textured historical narratives about stuff we might not know or remember. My favorite is a piece on a widespread fear among the British that Franklin had invented a lightning-bolt gun - and such rumors led many to shun lightning rods on their homes, in turn leading to countless unnecessary fires. The Memory Palace...
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Posted Retrotech: I want my vinyl back, too to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. The New York Times reports that MTA city buses are losing the yellow rubber electronic strip in favor of the good ol' pull string connected to a bell. The electronic strip technology costs more to make and to maintain. For those of us who are old enough to remember the cord-pull system, it's a welcome return of a technology with more depth, character and dependability than the rubber strip. Perhaps the best thing about the pull wire is that you can really yank on it when you're mad or frustrated - as if to ring the bell louder - even though, for the driver, the bell has the same sound. So you get to express frustration in a fully gestural way, without actually annoying anyone, or spreading the anxiety any further. The New York Times...
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Posted The New RAW website to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. Robert Anton Wilson is back! On the web, anyway. Congratulations to his crew for getting the new RAW website together even though Bob is no longer around to give his inimitable positive reinforcement. Maybe that's as much his legacy as anything....
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Posted Whiskey Rebellion Anniversary to Boing Boing
Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton imposed a new tax on Americans - both as a way of paying down the national debt and, in his words, "more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue." The taxes led to widespread organizing, protests, and ultimately insurrection. The first shots were fired in the town now known as South park (not Colorado, but Pennsylvania, but it always made me wonder what Trey Parker had in mind). By May, 1794, Americans in most states were raising liberty poles, the symbol of revolutionary American resistance to tyranny. Although dismissed by Hamilton as a "whiskey rebellion" in order to make it sound like a bunch of drunks dissing government authority, the movement was a widespread challenge to the federalist model that - perhaps ironically - led to the raising of an American army as big as the one raised for the Revolutionary War, and ultimately a vast increase in centralized control over the American economy, and society. (In the form of corporatism.) May 13 is also the anniversary of the "May 13 Incident," when Sino-Malay race riots in Kuala Lumpur led to a suspension of Parliament and at least a couple of thousand people killed by police and Malaysian Army rangers....
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