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Douglas Rushkoff, an interview with Boing Boing

Notes from an interview he did with Boing Boing.
• renewed interest in Tim Leary and the use of psychedelics for spiritual discovery
• you now get psychedelic fundamentalists
• new things that get discovered have to be evangelized because we have access to share-technology
• Hegelian dialectic - combative/oppositional has had it's day - we must engage with knowledge/our opposers. Find alternative ways of understanding and applying experiences.
• Reality is an open-source proposition and are up for discussion, they are not laws - this is the basic thing he thinks he is writing about in all his media. We still have the opportunity to engage in mankind's next renaissance - as programmers of it.
• Bible as comic book - people inside the panel -gods outside the panel. When the gods reach into the panel they show up as a burning bush. Added modern storyline. Modern echoes to the echoes of the Bible stories. Daily, modern relevance - God tells us not to sacrifice our children to false idols / sending our children off to war for oil. Modern characters are breaking free, not acting like their Biblical counterparts did in the past. The modern characters show how we can take control of our own lives and create an alternative optional ending. We are guiding the story, not just being subjected to old options.
• story: dream job to test video games - Logan's Run twist - when you turn 17 - they replace you.
• New agents signed with - John Brockman - agent to the greats, he prods you and you soul search - Easy Rider, not taken psychedelics - he wants to be part of the control group - that you can be weird and profound without drugs.
• Working on now - updating McCluhan's ideas - there's a shift in the media and how we think about our world now. "Get back in the box" - business book - how to be a capitalist in post-capitalism. The cut and paste dreams of Burroughs has come to pass, what happens when we have moved from oral, to literate, to secondary literate culture. The way we link to things provides us with our context and meaning.
• What happens when you add sensualized-currency to media - money is a media - it changed everything.
• CCTV - the excuse for spying on the people is 'terrorism' - it's a kind of intimacy. The bias of the medium: is intimacy.
• gadgets are being invented for psuedo reasons now - an excuse to develop ways of interacting with our world in the future 100 ways from now - what use would we put these things to
• Used the phrase 'Slouching Towards"
• www.rushkoff.com

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