Douglas Rushkoff, here. Mark graciously invited me to guest blog for the next two weeks, in celebration of the release of my first book explicitly about digital culture, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (for which BB readers get an additional 20% discount if they type the code BOING in the discount box on the last screen).
In all honesty, the book brings me back to the core values that have been espoused here on Boing Boing since the beginning: these technologies are the most fun and the most useful if we have some idea of how they work, and if their workings remain accessible to us. Knowledge of the codes – both digital and otherwise – is the best way to begin changing them. Meanwhile, an awareness of some of the more dehumanizing biases of some of these tools and spaces helps us keep our digital communities productive, collaborative, and happily mutant.
For me, this was the core insight of using these technologies in the first place. As a kid raised on television, I was inspired by how computers allowed me to get behind the screen and change what was in there – even share what I did with others. It seemed to me that once people experienced the mutability of online spaces and systems, they'd begin to see the mutability of real world spaces and systems, too.
But over the years, as interfaces get thicker, devices get locked down, and the real programs and agendas behind the tools we use get more obtuse, I'm finding people quite willing to treat technologies as given circumstances. The cyberpunk insight I tried to share with others in religion, government, and economics seems somewhat scarce right here in cyberspace. I talk to kids – the ones I once extolled as "screenagers" – now accepting programs like Facebook at face value: they think Facebook exists primarily to help them make friends, and accept the system's embedded values as if Facebook had no agenda of its own. This is a perception I think communities like this one help to change, and I'm honored to be among you as a reader, commenter and, now, poster.
My posts over these two weeks will be likely be biased toward my own current fascination with people and organizations who are changing the rules and inviting others to do the same. But I will of course be on the lookout for anything of value to share with you for your appraisal and discussion.
(Portrait by Leland Purvis)
