The media research constructing at Queens Faculty is small and darkish, with low ceilings and slim corridors. It was constructed greater than a century in the past as a residential faculty for incorrigible boys, and a sure ambiance of neglect stays. After I go to on a January weekday to see Douglas Rushkoff, who teaches right here, he guides me round a stack of fallen ceiling tiles to his workplace in a again nook of the primary flooring. The Wi-Fi within the room is spotty, so he makes use of an Ethernet adapter to plug his laptop computer into the wall. The one proof that we haven’t traveled again to the ’90s is that when it’s time for sophistication, no college students present up. As an alternative, Rushkoff opens his laptop computer and brings up a grid of faceless black packing containers.
That is the primary course assembly of “Digital Economics: Crypto, NFTs and the Blockchain.” Rushkoff is an efficient sport about educating on Zoom, although it’s a disgrace his class of principally undergraduates can’t absolutely admire the 62-year-old media-studies-professor look that he’s completely nailed: black V-neck, cropped grey hair. He launches into an impassioned half-hour lecture wherein he urges his college students, solely three of whom have their cameras on, to see by way of the social building of cash—he pulls out a greenback invoice and waves it in entrance of the laptop computer display screen, saying, “This isn’t cash. It is a piece of paper that we use to symbolize cash”—and to probe what he calls the “massive query” of his life’s work: how energy travels throughout media landscapes.
Outdoors of this Queens Faculty classroom, Rushkoff is a broadly cited theorist of the web, recognized for his prolific and influential writings on tradition and economics. He will get the occasional pupil who acknowledges his work—“He’s a well-known creator,” one writes on Price My Professor, “simply do a Google search”—however most of them are busy folks logging in to class from their telephones, extra desirous about fulfilling their diploma necessities than within the dense collage of Rushkoff’s ebook covers taped to the wall behind his desk.
That his class is probably not his college students’ first precedence doesn’t hassle Rushkoff a lot. He’s made some extent of touchdown at Metropolis College of New York in Queens after a educating stint on the far costlier, prestige-mongering, personal New York College. In a portion of his lecture, he hints on the trajectory his mental life has taken:
“I used to be fairly freaking excited within the ’90s in regards to the potentialities for a brand new type of peer-to-peer economic system. What we might construct that may be like a TOR community of economics, the good Napsterization of economics in a digital atmosphere,” he tells his college students. However extra lately, he continues, he’s turned his consideration to one thing else that this new digital economic system has created: “It made a bunch of billionaires and an entire lot of actually poor, sad folks.”
This sort of rhetoric is a part of a current, decisive shift in route for Rushkoff. For the previous 30 years, throughout greater than a dozen nonfiction books, innumerable articles, and varied media tasks in regards to the state of society within the web age, Rushkoff had at all times walked a tightrope between optimism and skepticism. He was one of many authentic fanatics of expertise’s prosocial potential, charting a path by way of the digital panorama for many who shared his renegade, anti-government spirit. As Silicon Valley shed its cyberpunk soul and devolved into an incubator of company greed, he continued to advocate for his values from inside. Till now. Final fall, with the publication of his newest ebook, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff all however formally renounced his membership within the guild of spokespeople for the digital revolution. So what occurred?
{Photograph}: Clark Hodgin
It’s, usually talking, a troublesome time to keep up a straight face as a diehard advocate of decentralization. A few months earlier than I come to see Rushkoff, the cryptocurrency alternate FTX, run by a cabal of tasteless pyramid schemers blathering platitudes about artwork and neighborhood, collapsed, torching billions of {dollars} within the course of. These web capitalists proved to be worse guardians of the general public curiosity than even the company robber barons of yore. (Some weeks after my go to, Silicon Valley Financial institution failed and almost dragged the worldwide monetary system down together with it—a direct results of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.)
Confronted with such irrefutable proof, Rushkoff isn’t simply mendacity low or altering the topic the way in which perennial techno-optimists typically do. His conversion is deeper. “I discover, loads of occasions, digital applied sciences are actually good at exacerbating the issue whereas additionally camouflaging the issue,” he tells the black packing containers that symbolize his college students. “They make issues worse whereas making it appear to be one thing’s really modified.” Nonetheless, as he talks, I can often catch a glimpse of Rushkoff reverting into his former persona: the inveterate Gen X techno-optimist, the person who can’t resist the untested promise of ever newer instruments. Close to the top of sophistication, he begins instructing his college students to not use ChatGPT to jot down their assignments, then halts abruptly, as if unable to go on. “Effectively, really,” he says, reconsidering, “we’ll determine it out.”