Resources from Technology, Media and Culture: A Funder Briefing with Douglas Rushkoff
[Source: May 20, 2010]
Highlights from Douglas Rushkoff’s presentation:
As a society we are operating on “social software” and legacies that are inappropriate for what we want to get done. The people and organizations that create our digital systems dictate our government, economy and cultural values; and if you’re not a programmer you are passive. You don’t know what rules can be bent because you don’t know the inner workings of the system.
Our world structure is biased, shaped and designed by interests that promote a focus on things like defense spending, cars, consumerism, etc. Take Facebook as an example. If you question the program (Why is it free? What does the leadership of Facebook want to achieve?) you realize it’s an emerging tool for market research to help better target advertising. It’s a sophisticated marketing survey that’s created or programmed with very specific monetary goals in mind.
While the Internet and new digital age has shifted from a cultural platform to a financial one, it also allows for transparency and accountability within the current system. It helps us ask and answer questions that challenge previously held images or ideas. The Keebler Elves were a created brand strategy that supported a fantasy model of food production. The Internet allows us to raise questions like, “Who really makes this food? What are the ingredients? How are the factory workers treated?”
The Internet has created a lens that allows and encourages us to peer into the systems that govern our lives.
But - our social software has failed to catch up to the current move to decentralization. We have operated on central banking model – one currency, manipulated and governed by corporate interests that are removed from community investment – since the Middle Ages. Just as the Internet has facilitated greater transparency, it’s also undermined traditional monetary systems, which as a whole are the basis of our culture and society.
• You can create and sell software without a bank loan.
• Peer-to-peer transactions on sites like Ebay and Esty remove the need for a corporate middleman.
Companies now are divided. Half are working within a new system to create P2P exchanges, collaborate with partners, producers and shareholders as one large community. Half are trying to fortify the walls between producer and consumer to protect themselves from the need to innovate.
The creation of decentralized, bottom-up values is the new reality. Trickle down information, money, decision-making and power don’t work anymore. We need ideas and movements that promote actions in a bottom-up fashion. Example: Billboards in Uganda won’t promote condom use. Peer education, community decision-making, community media and resource allocation are what work to change the way people think.
This is a challenge to the thinking from the Industrial Age, which has valued specialized workers who are totally removed from what they are making. Greater extraction and efficiency has been prized over innovation. Unskilled labor has been prized over skilled labor. A disposable, low-cost worker who can pull a lever to make a part generates income for the corporate owner but devalues the connection between the worker and the end product.
People with actual core competencies have had little place in our corporate system. Entire companies are currently functioning without doing anything. They’ve outsourced the design, production, customer service and fulfillment. As a company they are an empty shell that doesn’t do anything anymore. Innovation is a challenge to this system.
Foundations are in the business of decentralized actions – via social change. The key is to support people who have core competencies, who are doing new things well. Recognizing achievement and innovative approaches without the established power structures telling us who is good/valuable is the challenge for foundations.
Q & A
1) Do you see value or validity in the way The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Ford Foundation are focusing so many resources on urban initiatives? What about the value of rural areas?
Rushkoff: Cities have great things like museums, cafés and scales of efficiency that aren’t available in rural areas. But in many ways rural communities are made of people who are really doing things, like family farmers. The tension is that Big Agriculture helps write the regulations that favor factory farming and make family farms obsolete. Overall it’s less about the urban vs. rural divide as the divide between those who are really creating and innovating, and those who are maintaining the status quo.
2) Other than taking on regulatory reform, how can foundations take these lessons and make wise investments?
Rushkoff: A similar example is the toy industry, which in response to the lead paint problems found on toys in the past few years pushed regulations that require enormously expensive chemical analysis testing for all new toys. That regulation effectively destroys all small and mid-sized competition because they can’t afford the testing. While foundations might not want to take on the regulatory structures associated with toy manufacturing and consumer product safety, they can support organizations like the Handmade Toy Alliance, comprised of people who are already trying to get a seat at the regulatory table.
Helping communities access the wealth of money, enterprise and knowledge to challenge the existing system is an important role that foundations can play. Whether through farmers markets and Community Share Agriculture programs, craft and handmade goods organizations, credit unions and community loan systems, there are myriad ways to educate people on how to create alternatives to the existing centralized financial system.
3) What do you think about the value of using prizes to spark innovation?
Rushkoff: This is tricky. The amount of investment on the part of the innovators is so high and, with only one award, too many people lose the time and money they’ve expended in applying. Though some will hopefully move forward with their ideas regardless of winning, or will attract other support by the final stage of the competition. Multiple winners or stages to a competition can help spur more innovation by widening the field.
