Team Human: Douglas Rushkoff in Conversation with George Monbiot

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, in conversation with George Monbiot, explores how the technologies designed for human connection risk becoming agents of isolation and repression

Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Digital-age technologies, in particular, present the greatest challenges to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost! Rushkoff reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us all to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity. Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, documentarian, and world-renowned public intellectual. He has spent his prolific career thinking about how new media and technology are impacting culture, business, and the economy. Named one of the world’s 10 most influential thinkers by MIT, Rushkoff has written 15 bestselling books and coined such concepts as “viral media,” “social currency,” and “digital natives.” He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. George Monbiot is a writer and an environmental and political activist. He has been named by The Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, his more recnt books include Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013) and Out of the Wreckage (2017) Presented in association with Virtual Futures (VF) an events series that continues the work of the original cyber culture conferences that were hosted at the University of Warwick in the mid-90s. Today VF continues to connect audiences with one of the most important intellectual and cultural developments of our times – the technological extension of the human condition http://virtualfutures.co.uk