An AI Agent that can do your shopping for you (or, maybe one day, your job). Driver-less Waymo cars that take you to work. A notetaking app that can attend multiple meetings for you at the same time. These days, it can seem like our obsession with using technology to be more efficient (whatever that really means) has reached a fever pitch.
But who’s in control here? The humans using these tools, or the tech itself?
And when we use these tools to become more productive, who’s actually benefiting?
Ten years ago, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (who you might remember from our episode on the escapist fantasies of Silicon Valley oligarchs) published a book called Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for the Digital Age, an examination of how the internet was going to reconfigure the daily fabric of our existence. His discussion of the various affordances of digital technology and how they were poised to transform reality in their own image wasn’t just prescient (think: how digital technologies are biased, away from the local and towards the universal, and how the digital realm is biased towards the discrete – that is, leaving out the things we haven’t yet chosen or noticed, and forcing choices when none need to be made). It was a plea for everyday internet users to become more literate in the ways that digital technologies were “programming” us, so we could learn how to take back control.
10 Commands for the Digital Age, which is modeled after the 10 Commandments, are still as relevant today as they were a decade ago. One, for example, tells us to refuse to “always be on” — that is, to choose to whom and what we want to be available, and when. Another reminds us not to conflate having access to information and data with the ability to discern and contextualize it. But as we exit the long 2010s and enter a new era of technology increasingly oriented around the promise, real or imaginary, of artificial intelligence, its central question — of how to preserve human agency in a world where technology threatens to override and supplant it — feels more urgent than ever.
Rushkoff recently decided to reissue the book, with a new (and surprisingly hopeful) afterword where he contemplates what all that looks like in the age of AI. And it’s also why we asked him back onto the pod for a long chat about it one afternoon in September, which happened to be the day after the 2024 presidential debate. We’re excited to finally share that conversation with you today.
We get into the new 11-commandment edition of the book, the bizarre new world of digital second brains and driverless cars it foreshadowed, and the limits of what AI and other so-called productivity tools can ultimately do for us — that is, what aspects of humanity it can and can’t replace, and the importance of considering why we need to replace them in the first place, and what we are replacing them with.
Order the new edition of Program Or Be Programmed via ORBooks (and follow them @OR_books to support independent publishing!).
Follow Douglas on Substack.
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