This video is twenty minutes of fireworks from Douglas Rushkoff, pushing back on the technocratic view of technology. He is speaking at the recent FutureFest, and starts by describing a long-ago talk he had given called ‘why futurists suck’, thereby establishing his credentials and biting the hand that was feeding him in one simple line.
Once he gets going though, he gets onto the very interesting idea that technological determinism has led to a view that describing the future is essentially an exercise in prediction (and watching him act out a two by two matrix is a joy in itself) – when instead we should see the future as a thing we are creating. The central line, on which much of his argument then hangs, is that ‘We have been trained to see humanity as the problem, and technology as the solution’ – and that that is precisely the wrong way round.
This was more barnstorming than developed argument – but there are some really interesting implications, and there was enough there to suggest that it will be worth looking out for the book of the talk – also called Team Human – when it comes out next year.