Interview with Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed

Interview Intro —

MK: We’re here to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Program or Be Programmed, arguably one of the most foundational books on digital literacy.

Program or Be Programmed originally offered 10 commands to intentionally navigate the biases of our digital technologies. Now a decade and a half since its original release, Program or Be Programmed — for better or worse — is more important than it has ever been… especially in the context of AI… the newest and 11th command in the re-released version...

...Which was published earlier this week.

In prepping for this chat, I came across an online review that I think is perhaps best description of the value and intent of this work.

Now mind you, this is a random review from Nathan G. on Amazon nearly 15 years ago...

And I think Nathan nails it. Thank you, Nathan G.

“What makes this book worthy of the Neil Postman Award that it won (I just learned that such an award exists) is its refusal to let any digital technology become transparent.

From the first Arpanet connections to email to the ubiquitous vibrating phones (and "phantom phone buzz syndrome"), Rushkoff keeps his sharp eye on the assumptions that one has to make before the technology makes any sense: that one should adjust one's personal biological rhythms to the atemporal "always on" existence of computer networks rather than vice versa; that the world should conform its complexity to the reductionism of binary choices; and that human beings are meant to exist as infinitesimal nodes in a vast global network, just to name three.

Spelling out those assumptions, Rushkoff does not so much give ten commands as ask ten penetrating questions, questions that ought to haunt human beings as we jump on board the Internet train.”

Now 15 years later, we are certainly haunted by these questions and the Internet train feels to be hijacked, barreling and completely off its tracks.

Program or Be Program is a time machine to a moment of opportunity 15 years ago. At the time, a chance to pre-read the rules of engagement in order to mindfully approach our tech.

Re-reading it in 2024, in addition to its new text, elicited, for me, a total spectrum of emotion. On one side, sweet relief that the biases are all laid out for us. There’s no mystery. We know what our tech wants from us. And on the other side of the spectrum, utter frustration, as if we totally blew it.

Yet now, excitingly and optimistically, we’re presented with another opportunity. Another chance to reapply these commands amidst the emergence of AI.

I’m eager to not just continue reflecting upon these commands, but further, inquire why we didn’t embrace tech’s anti-human biases, and ultimately what we can do better this time around.

It’s not too late.

With that, I’d like to welcome to the Zoom stage window, author of Program or Be Programmed: 11 Commands for the AI Future out this week, Douglas Rushkoff.

A Snippet —

MK: This past summer, you were caught in the spin cycle of the podcast Substack post content whirlwind.

I find myself too often programmed, getting demanded for more and more and more, whether that be other people or whether that be myself.

How did you turn off that spin cycle?

DR: For me, it took a willingness to risk everything.

So, in the good old days, I know this sounds freaking insane, a journalist could get a contract with a magazine for like a year or two. And this is what I would do. They say, Rushkoff, we want you to write a thousand words or a 1,500 word piece about technology and society once a month and we'll give you like $3,000, like $2 a word to do this thing.

And you would have that and you might have a publisher or I got a gig doing commentaries for NPR, and between three or four things, there's enough money to live your life through these sort of entities. And I was lucky to get under the wire so I could depend on a lot of these entities, but the entities are pretty much all gone.

And as a journalist, even a super respectable place like The Atlantic, you can write a thousand word piece for $200 and it's like, oh man, how am I going to live?

So I, like many migrated to the self-funded beg for your supper, you know platforms: Patreon for the podcast and Substack. I moved from Medium where I used to get paid to Substack to make my own little thing.

And I can feel, and we don't need to go into the cues of it, but between the business models and the way ads work and the way subscriptions work, I can feel Substack wanting two pieces a week.

And I can feel Patreon wanting at least a podcast and some other content drop a week, and this many cross promotions with other podcasters, and I got to then do three Instagram posts and a LinkedIn thing.

And I could feel the implied pace of the machine impacting my pace of living. And I realized that I mean, I can, but I, at my best, I'm not writing two Substack pieces a week.

I'm not going to impose myself on people two times a week.

They don't need to hear from me two times a week. They really don't.

Honestly, I believe I say deep things. I think about them a long time. I craft the things that I write so they work on two or three levels — like Program or Be Programmed. It's working on three levels at once.

It's not that it's dense, but it's multidimensional stuff. And honestly, it takes a while to unpack.

If it's good writing, it should take a while to unpack.

So I had to say, I'm not going to use these platforms the way they're asking me to use them.

I'm going to write one or two Substacks a month. I'm going to go back to doing Team Human, my podcast, really every other week, the way I used to.

I was doing it every week and my producer said, you know, we're getting a lot of email from people saying it takes a week or two to really digest everything that happened in that episode. Can you slow down? Can you slow down because they don't want, “Oh, no, there's a whole other one.”

So I'm doing that and I wrote a nice note to everybody saying: Look I'm gonna be doing less content. Drop out if you want. It's really okay. We'll make this work. It's all good.

And I slowed it down and ended up back in that beautiful exploratory place.

I meet about one person a month who I really, really have to do a Team Human conversation with, and I have about one or two big independent ideas that I want to share in a monologue once a month.

And when I go down to that pace, life naturally supports it.

I'm never searching for the idea or who can I interview next? It just happens in the natural unfolding. And then you get this much more organic and supported rhythm.

The easiest thing to get to conform is the technology.

The hardest thing to get to conform is your nervous system is the sun is the sky is your life, you know?

So Program or Be Programmed really means understand the technology well enough to use it in a way that's compatible with you and your creative cycle, rather than trying to conform your humanity to it.