Douglas Rushkoff feels responsible.
Rushkoff is a Gen-X writer and thinker who was part of the initial wave of tech advocates in the 1990s who sold the world on a future online “I was part of the initial wave of people who said: ‘Come on in, the water’s fine,’” he tells me.
Three decades on, the world looks very different. Corporations have woven themselves into the fabric of our daily interactions, supercharged by the internet and social media. Now, it appears that artificial intelligence will help corporations program humanity faster and better than ever before.
Rushkoff sees that as an opportunity. “It’s like digital media finally has a character,” Rushkoff says of AI.
Over the course of his more than thirty career, Rushkoff has written books that heralded the joys of the internet and warned of the perils of the corporations that sought to control it. In 2010 he wrote a slim volume called Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. It was full of practical and meaningful advice for living in a digital world.
The commands were simple and easy to understand: don’t always be online, don’t sell your friends, tell the truth, you can always choose ‘none of the above,’ live in person, one size does not fit all, be yourself, you are never completely right, and share, don’t steal. Rushkoff’s philosophy and a warning were contained in its final command: program or be programmed.
According to Rushkoff, humans should be literate about how machines work and understand that it’s humans who build machines to service them. Not the other way around. Some of that comes down to learning programming languages, or at least how if-then statements work, but it’s bigger than that. “Learn to recognize the biases of the media that they’re using. It’s that simple,” he says.
The book sold well but, he says, was misunderstood. “When the book first came out…it became a ‘learn to code’ thing. It became an argument for STEM,” he says. “We should know something about how technology works. But [the book] was an argument for liberal arts, for how we think critically about these environments. I don’t think anyone quite got that. I don’t think anyone got that, that sort of McLuhan-esque demand that we look at digital media as an environment that’s changing who we are, that’s changing what it means to be human.”
He just published an updated version of the book that includes an extra command that’s all about AI: “Value the human.”
“The best thing about AI is it’s giving us the ability to finally look and say, ‘Oh, these technologies act on us.’ You need to get all the way to the science fiction place of ‘there’s an AI in there doing something to me’ to understand that, really, all technologies are doing something to you,” he says. “They’re all trying to program you in one way or another.”
Rushkoff’s first big book was Cyberia in 1994. It was an early exploration of internet culture that, according to its author, was over by the time it hit the shelves. “At the end of that book, Wired magazine had just published their first issue,” Rushkoff says. “Until that point, Mondo 2000 and the psychedelic world had been kind of running internet culture.”
There was a dream in the early 1990s of what the internet would be and what it could do for humanity. “Internet culture was so much about the unbridled potential of the collective human imagination. Networked together, what are we going to do?” But Rushkoff also saw the warning signs. Corporations began to circle and they asked a different question entirely.
“What happens when we migrate the most propagandistic techniques of advertising and marketing and public relations to interactive environments?”
Rushkoff says that Gen-X counterculture is partly to blame. “We in the 90s, rave counter-culture, are largely to blame for not bringing forward the social justice agenda of the 1960s with us,” he says. “A lot of the people I talked to in the rave moment were saying ‘We have the agenda of no agenda. All are welcome. Feel this thing and it will unfold naturally.’
According to Ruskhoff, the ravers looked at the punk movements of the recent past and found them too political and too reactionary. “We pushed the government off the net, …we didn’t realize, when you get rid of government, you create free reign for business,” he says. “That deregulation didn’t just mean no censorship of my LSD trades on email, it meant no restrictions on Intel and Amazon and Facebook. So we were politically naive as we went into this, and we did not establish a rigorous set and setting around the development of the internet.”
As the internet marched forward, the California culture that helped shape it merged with other weird West Coast ideas and became something new. “So the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, self-improvement, part of California culture stayed but got married to this kind of libertarian, Ayn Rand capitalist thing,” Rushkoff says. You come forward 25 years and you end up with these dissociated anarcho-capitalists as feudal lords of these landscapes.”
One of the unpleasant facts about the internet is that it was made by humans who designed it to act on other humans. When we talk about why YouTube shows us things we don’t want to see, we complain about “the algorithm.” When Facebook feeds us a string of AI slop, we bemoan “our feed.” But the simple truth is that we see all this stuff for a reason: a human being designed it that way.
“AI provides a really coherent metaphor for what I’m talking about. AI doesn’t do any of the things that people are afraid of, but AI demonstrates to people that this medium adapts to what you’ve done. It changes. It learns you. You’re in a feedback loop,” Rushkoff says. “So you have an army of super fast artificial intelligences that have no agenda of their own, but have the agenda of Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg.”
This proliferation of AI may supercharge all the things many of us hate about the world we live in now. “If you get more eyeballs from people by making them anxious, then make them fucking anxious, make them violent, make them hate their neighbors, make them impotent, do whatever you have to,” Rushkoff says. “And I feel like people kind of get that now. So the feedback loops I was talking about in 1999 when I was saying, ‘This is like advertising, but imagine an advertisement that could iterate based on how you respond.’ What happens then? I was saying, ‘You’re going to get more extreme versions of yourself.’ Which is where we ended up.”
He points to Twitter, now X. “Look at the total propaganda environment of Twitter/ X now,” Rushkoff says. “[Elon Musk] owns the thing. He sends you his own messages. He sends you the messages of the people he wants you to see, no matter what stream of conversation you’re in. The ads, the bots, are the worldview that he wants you to have. It’s hard to be on that platform and not think: ‘Well, that’s the world.’ Even if I’m saying something else, the air that I’m breathing in here is that awful techno-fascist, bullying, mean, troll, cruel.”
Rushkoff tells me he’s alarmed by how far this thinking has spread. “Even the progressive left has adopted the programmer’s paradigm of, ‘How do we get people to be more aware of the climate? How do I get people to eat better?’” He says. “Once you’re talking about ‘how do I get people to do something?’ You’re saying, ‘how do I program people?’”
“We adopted that understanding of humans as programmable by our systems rather than our systems being programmable by people,” he says. He hopes that this new edition of Program or Be Programmed will push this paradigm shift forward. He hopes that AI will help them see that a better world is possible and that all of these machines are human inventions and that humans should be at the heart of everything we do.
“If technology really can do all these tasks, all this stuff, if they really do have way more utility value than humans, then do we want to double down on our utility value as our core offering, or do we want to start looking at human values? What do we offer that they can’t?”
You can find Program Or Be Programmed: Eleven Commands for the AI Future wherever books are sold.
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