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January 28, 2019: Douglas Rushkoff, author, "Team Human"

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This week: Douglas Rushkoff, author, Team Human

Links to Douglas:

• teamhuman.fm

• Team Human (book order page)

• On Twitter: @teamhumanshow and @Rushkoff

• Douglas's site: rushkoff.com

• Archives of Media Squat, Douglas's WFMU show (2008-9)

Recent Tech News

• The Facts About Facebook, op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg (WSJ, Jan 24): "We’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand."

• TechCrunch's response to Zuckerberg (Jan 26): "The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sown in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated [Zuckerberg] so much [that he] thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs."

• The Greatest Con Man in History (Bob Hoffman, Jan 27): "For years I have been saying that Facebook's numbers are a joke and that anyone who believes them is an idiot. But I've never thought the scale of their deceit was this deep. As I reported several weeks ago, in a recent 12-month period Facebook removed 2.8 billion fake accounts. If Greenspan is right, there are plenty remaining and Facebook is guilty of an enormous fraud. People should be going to jail."

• On the World Economic Forum, Kevin Roose writes: I went to Davos this year and came away with two main observations:
1) CEOs are *obsessed* with AI and machine learning
2) the private conversations they're having about automation and jobs are very, very different than the public ones Read the whole column. (NYT, Jan 25). "For an unvarnished view of how some American leaders talk about automation in private, you have to listen to their counterparts in Asia, who often make no attempt to hide their aims."

• And from Scott Galloway's newsletter (Jan 25): "Corporations need to be more transparent; consumers expect them to play a more positive role in society. The above is a decent summary of every talk at Davos... In the words of Anand Giridharadas, Davos is a fire safety convention that invites arsonists. Yes, in pursuit of "improving the state of the world," the World Economic Forum invites people who have made the most money while doing the most damage (Sheryl Sandberg's talk was titled "What Kind of Internet Do We Want?"). I don't know, Sheryl, maybe one that doesn't inspire genocide, polarization, or teen depression? A gathering replete with 25 people worth more than the Southern Hemisphere to discuss income inequality feels a bit obtuse. "

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