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INTERVIEW: Douglas Rushkoff - Breaking Through - Pt. 2
Interview conducted by Jonathan Ellis
Introduction
Interview - Part 1
Interview - Part 2
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I was wondering if North Americans would adopt guerrilla texting in this way, instead it being used to vote for music videos. Two years ago the WTO protests in Montreal were big news, last year though the protests took place the same weekend as the big Rolling Stones concert and thus didn’t gain much press. Blogs are a good point though, it seems everyone has a blog, livejournal account, a message board, a webcam, is on friendster, one of several dating sites and more and while these may be a great forum for decisive thinking there’s still a barrier on interaction created by the computer. Seeing as how audio blogging is now available it’s just a matter of time before streaming video web journals become the norm. Thousands of people around the world doing their own version of the Daily Show.
Both Howard Rheingold and I have been writing articles about just this over at theFeature.com this week. It's a fascinating possibility. Probably a bit optimistic, but Blogs have forced a few major issues so far, that the mainstream media wouldn't touch. And people are using texting from cell phones to do some important activism.
The protests in Madrid following the train bombing were organized by SMS, as were much of the Dean campaign, the 2000 Manila "Generation TXT" demonstrations that toppled the Estrada regime, and, of course, most WTO activity. Voters register by SMS in South Africa, and political parties in India use SMS to communicate with party members.
Al Gore was thinking of starting a TV news channel to help give a platform to this user-generated media, but he's since surrendered that vision to a more 'produced' format. But it's inevitable. The age of public access media may finally be upon us. What'll be interesting is to watch how the mainstream attempts to discredit it.
But most of the Gen TXT activism still occurs largely outside North America, and it certainly is used in as much high volume as in the Eastern world where some people might send hundreds or even thousands of messages a month or even just a week. But we are getting further. We already have people editing video games to create short films. What I’d like to see is the application for personal webpages, when webmasters begin to create streaming visual poetry is when my eyes will begin to light up. This of course should bring us one step closer to everyone broadcasting live video from their cell phones or headsets, which would really change popular perception, after all, all the worlds a stage.
Bringing this back towards the sequential scene though, webcomics. Do you see yourself getting involved with that scene? You mention some blogs affecting change and I can’t help but notice that comics such as GET YOUR WAR ON having significant influence.
Of course, it'd be great fun to do a web comic. Get Your War On is a terrific use of the medium - and it's in a cut-and-paste style that doesn’t require drawing ability, in the traditional sense. So it opens up a visual communication medium for those whose ideas and passion may surpass their technical ability.
But what you're really getting at in the first paragraph of your response is the relationship of text-based to image-based communications and cultures. Really, for the past two thousand years we've been in literate culture - ever since hieroglyphs (priestly writing) became the alphabet. Literacy and text have - until very recently - been associated with populism, non-elitism and social justice. A people who can read and write can also read and write their history and future. It's a tremendous empowerment.
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As far as I'm concerned, the text-based Internet was much more empowering to a potentially wider number of people than the image-based Internet. While that might seem counterintuitive, the argument finds strength in that anyone who can read can also write. ASCII text is the same size for anyone who writes it. The image-laden web was not as much a communications tool as a marketing tool. Yes, it allows us to read comics online, which is terrific. But it tends to disable conversation, unless a rather complex piece of software is placed on top of the web, restoring the same functionality the internet had before the web even existed!
Luckily, there's a lot of web sites promoting conversation, now, and allowing for discussions to develop. But to put a comicbook online is a very different use of the Internet than what I'm used to, myself, and what I've been fighting for over the years. It's the creation of a fairly passive experience - it takes a person's hands off the keyboard, and back onto the mouse. And that's not what I feel a computer is really for. I get bored doing things like that on the computer. It's more of a TV-type thing.
Video and computer games seem like a more logical application of comics and sequential narrative to the computer screen.
Speaking of youth, you started writing fairly young but do you find as you get older you view youth culture more objectively or perhaps more and more as an outside observer then a participant?
I don't know if I ever really believed in a separate "youth culture." This sort of segmentation is really the work of marketers, not reality. The word "teenager" was invented by marketers in the 50's, you know.
So I don't feel like I've ever been involved in 'youth culture.' I've been involved in culture, period. Wet, fertile, dirty, lively, cross-pollinating culture. I mean, sure - when I was younger I had a bit more energy and brain cells to kill, so I could stay up longer with Tim Leary (then in his 60's and 70') or go to more parties. And there were young people around at those sorts of things. But I'm teaching at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, now, so I'm hanging out more with people in their early twenties than I did even when *I* was in my early twenties.
But "youth culture" is a crock. There's no such thing. It's manufactured by the people wanting to sell to teens. The only sense the phrase makes to me is that young people - some of them, anyway - are not as spoiled by the programming of our manipulators, so they are still more free than adults, by and large. But they are under more direct and sustained attack, so it's a harder position from which to battle for one's consciousness than adulthood. If you're an adult and not particularly rich, they kind of figure you're already in the fold.
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Perhaps the younger generations have a greater resistance to programming because of over-exposure – “We’re going out kids, the TV’s in charge, go to bed when it says”
Well, now you're talking about Generation X. We were the latchkey generation, raised by our television sets - the glass teat, as it was called. I wrote extensively about this phenomenon back in Media Virus and the GenX Reader. GenX resistance to programming was borne out of our deep exposure to public relations. As the first generation to grow up with state-of-the-art television commercials AND remote controls, we spoke the language of TV advertising like natives, whereas the adults making commercials for us spoke it like immigrants. So, naturally, we knew what was going on better than they did, and had the ability to resist.
But once all the GenX people became the new programmers, we didn't stand a chance. Kids today generally love being marketed to. Kurt Cobain shot himself, and rave is a mall phenomenon. America supports the war, and believes in the Passion of Christ. Perspective has collapsed.
That's why I wrote the comic, really - to give a good long wink to those young people who get what's happening. They feel really alone, right now. Or they're made to feel like some kind of geek - the way Jews were meant to feel back in the Middle Ages for not believing that Christ was the Messiah, or that the Crusades were a great thing. I wanted to let them know that there are others in the same psychic space as they're in - and that the future can still be ours. If we get a future at all.
How did you hook up with artist Steph Dumais for this project? I’d imagine lots of artists would jump at the chance to work on a graphic novel with you, particularly your first.
Weird - he was on my media-squatters list. It started as a fan list, but turned into a discussion about media and culture. And I mentioned on there that I was thinking of getting into comics, somehow. And he just volunteered. Then, when the actual opportunity came up, I looked at a few people's stuff - but Steph's felt the most human, to me. And that was important. Plus, he was able to do the most with the least amount of lines. His version of Zeke was vulnerable, weird and a bit doofy - which isn't how I first imagined him. But when I saw that rendition of the guy, it made the whole book seem more dimensionalized and self-conscious in a fun way. So Steph became my guy.
It was hard - I still haven't met him. And Steph wasn't making a lot of money, so during the BPM phase of publication (for which there was no money exchanged) I sent him checks to fund the drawing, which took him longer than the writing took me.
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Not only is this your first graphic novel but it is also Disinformation’s first graphic novel. How do you feel about being the first in what will hopefully be a number of new graphic novels published by Disinfo?
Frankly, it kinda sucks being the first. I'm very often the first. I've been the first novel on certain imprints, the first cover story on certain magazines…so companies often tend to work out their kinks on me. That's what you get for being 'ahead of the curve.'
On the other hand. Disinformation has broken through with unexpectedly good results in a variety of genres. Their big books of collected essays sell zillions of copies. And they have a DVD or two that are getting into the hands of the right people, as well. I've had a better experience, so far, with Gary and Richard (who run it) than pretty much anywhere else I've published.
I do hope they continue with the genre. I don't want to be the only one of these that they do, or it kind of sticks out in a funny way. Let it be the first of a bunch of things - with more of them by me, too!
Not only are the characters in Club Zero-G dealing with conflicts from all sides but they are also involved in a race against the clock, in this case the date of December 21st, 2004. What makes this date important?
Well, I ended up taking that date out. When I was writing the story (sounds like you've read the summary) 2004 was in the distance future. I was looking for a special singularity date - like Terence McKenna's TimeWaveZero date. It was a way to generate a ticking clock in the story - a moment of novelty where a certain cosmic window would open up. So everyone would be rushing to get things the way they wanted them to be for this special moment. But as I shortened the story from four books down to one, I found some easier, less mechanical ways to generate that suspense.
As for the numerology of the date, I never give those mathematical justifications away. Ecstasy Club has so many of them (all the characters names, every date, etc.) that I put a little program called "numbers" up on my website to help people deconstruct them.
One of the big questions posed has to do with affecting reality. Given the chance, what kind of reality would the club kids choose? But how about yourself? Given the opportunity, what would you do?
Well, I'd have to go 'meta' on that question. I'd create a world where everyone realized they were co-authoring reality.
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Which of course would, at first, result in several people rewriting the world so that they’d end up winning the lottery.
That's not rewriting the script, alas - it's just changing the ending of the same old story. Like a person getting over their drug addiction problem by giving himself and infinite heroin drip. But yeah, that's the way most people think about authorship, when they first wrap their heads around it. What they don't get is that none of writes the script, ourselves. It's a collaborative act. Like I've been saying since Cyberia: evolution is a team sport.
The crux of the novel also involves a rather familiar boy meets girl scenario. Gangly, unpopular guy in glasses seeks acceptance from the collective and attracts the eye of rich and popular girl who wouldn’t be caught dead talking to him if someone else was around. What is it about the geeky young man that you find makes him a suitable hero?
We're *all* geeky young men. Even big muscle guys - those popular guys in college - they're geekier inside than the geeks are. Real people are soft and squishy. So it seemed appropriate to have a hero who was vulnerable. I always saw him as a gangly teenager and an outsider. He's a "local" middle-class kid going to the prestigious, rich kids' college in his town. So it's strange - he's both more indigenous to his community, and less.
I was working with the "spoil sport" concept - the idea of the guy who sees through the game. He's the trickster - the shaman. That's generally going to be someone who isn't quite at the center. It's much harder for "popular" people to see what's going on around them, because everyone is looking in on them. Like I said at the beginning, that's why it's so hard for teens these days to gain any perspective, and why a story like this one could help change their conception of the power struggle they've inherited.
As to the popular viewpoint, you touch on this in Club Zero-G with Serena who realizes that she acts a certain way in the ‘real’ world because of how people see her and those she hangs around with. It sort of brings up a debate of perception vs. free will, if a collective is co-authoring reality and they see a certain person a certain way – how much of what they do is of their own free will and how much is influenced by others?
That's the central question of civilization, eh? It's certainly the question of the story. I try to deal with it in two ways - the first is the more sci-fi story, and the second is the social reality of the kids. Interestingly, the story still functions if you pull out all the sci-fi stuff. It becomes a story about social expectations, and how they weigh on a person's ability to make choices. The pressure of the social group can stunt autonomy; but without the group, there's no autonomy, either. So it's a question of learning to collaborate with people rather than just ruling them or submitting to them.
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As for the teens today, I feel they’re the biggest targets of the fear machine. Of the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mindset. Even when I was in high school, bomb scares were a tool of those who made the threats as a way to get out of having to do an exam.
Well, teens are adults in training. So a lot of social programming is directed at them. It's tricky, because such programming is the opposite of real education. And we're wondering why our high school kids are getting stupider.
Education may just have to become something countercultural - something we do after school. Theatre is great for that - it's what I did - because you get to communicate with brilliant playwrights from the past, and act out multiple possibilities and alternate realities. People today have to look outside the established institutions for their educations, these days. But there are a lot of us out here providing the textbooks.
Luckily for us. If there were one thing I could say to everyone still attending some form of educational system it would be that so many of the answers are OUT THERE. A treasure trove of knowledge is available to you but you need to seek it out for yourself instead of expecting it to come to you. You have to be willing to learn.
And just as many answers are IN THERE. It's a matter of balancing your own perceptions with those of others - and finding the ones that resonate. Back in the 60's, someone who recently had his first acid trip attended a Timothy Leary lecture in Berkeley. When Leary was done, the guy raised his hand and explained that he'd had his first psychedelic experience, and seen how the world really works. Only he didn't know what to do, now. Leary simply told him, "Find the others."
Introduction
Interview - Part 1
Interview - Part 2
Jonathan Ellis is Co-Editor in Cheif of PopImage and would like to graciously thank Douglas Rushkoff for this interview as well as Patrick Neighly, Anne Sullivan and Gary Baddeley for their assistance.
Jonathan Ellis can be reached at ellis@popimage.com.
PopImage
Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.
Rushkoff.com - Official site of Douglas Rushkoff
Disinfo.com - Official site of The Disinformation Company
Disinfo Store - Disinfo books, DVD's & More
Raisin Love.com - Official Site of Steph Dumais
Mad Yak Press.com - For more work by Patrick Neighly
Merchants Of Cool - Watch the full Documentary Online
The Omega Institute - Douglas Rushkoff will be appearing here in August along with Grant Morrison, Richard Metzger, Howard Bloom, and Paul Laffoley
Industrial
Archive - Read past Industrial articles
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