The Job Hasn't Changed

Now is when our commitment to community, mutual aid, and each other matters more than ever

Photo by Precious Plastic Melbourne on Unsplash

The goings on in the greater world have a lot of people upset or even frozen, and I’m getting a lot of pressure to respond more directly and forcefully to all of that.

So, in short, yes: the US government is shifting toward fascism and what we can call techno-oligarchy. Among other things. that means government and business being joined to the point where business leaders make policy to promote their own businesses, the collapse of government agencies that either provide essential services or conduct oversight, and those functions getting relegated to private sector cronies who bend knee to the sovereign.

That’s why Bezos pulled content from the Washington Post, and why we saw folks like Mark Zuckerberg abandoning fact-checking for their algorithmic publications, and establishing themselves as supportive members of the court during the coronation.

Internationally, we get a mafioso-style territorial sectioning of the globe. The equivalent of our crime families are Trump’s US, which controls from Greenland through Canada and Gulf of America through to the Panama Canal. Russia gets Eastern Europe, and China gets Asia and much of Africa. Three global territories, sometimes friends and sometimes enemies (alliances depending on whose power needs to be balanced), straight out of 1984.

Right now, that means undermining the Eurozone to turn each of those countries into individual vassal states, getting more than half of Greenland’s 55,000 people to vote for independence from Denmark and membership in the American protectorate, clearing Gaza for a Trump Dubai, and promoting other authoritarian regimes throughout the world under the guise of free speech and fair elections.

Meanwhile, it requires distracting citizens from all this by stoking fear of immigrant and transgender contamination, issuing decrees making it illegal for states to mandate covid vaccines (none actually do), and continuing to curtail women’s rights as if their sexual freedom really were the problem all along.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do what we can to slow or stop all this bad shit from happening. But we shouldn’t act as if this is a surprise. As if now is somehow a game-changing pivot moment. A whole lot of us have been shouting from the rooftops for a whole long time while this incremental descent into madness was occurring, and it goes much deeper and longer than Donald Trump and America’s technocratic extremists.

Like many of you, this is what my own work has been about for a long time. The bio for my first website said “Douglas Rushkoff promotes human autonomy in a digital age.” In my book of 1994, Cyberia I warned that the emergence of the internet gave us a “window of opportunity” to seize the engines of reality creation before business doubled down on the same old extractive capitalism. Media Virus argued that we now had the tools to promote the hidden agendas of our culture - and had to learn memetics before it was used against us. My 1999 book Coercion begged us to stop using digital tools as Skinner boxes of influence or we would create “extreme” versions of ourselves. By 2007 I finishing Life Inc about the dangers of corporatism, along with a guide for how to engage in mutual aid, local currencies, cooperative enterprise, land trust, and in 2012 I finally released Present Shock, which explained exactly how the “narrative collapse” of interactive media would amplify the grievances of the Tea Party movement, and turn them into paranoid conspiracy theorists with aims on government and apocalyptic fantasies.

My last book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, tried to explain the mindset of the tech billionaires before it was too late - so that we could simply leave their platforms rather than turning them into our default civic spaces. I thought if people recognized that these men really do mean to leave us all behind, we would stop supporting their efforts. And I’m just tracing myself, here. If you do the same for your own work, thoughts, and posts, you will notice the same thing.

And the answers folks like Astra Taylor, Tyson Yunkaporta, Helena Norberg Hodge, Vicki Robin, Nora Bateson… all of the guests on Team Human were offering in their books and articles would generally get poo poo’d by reviewers who saw mutual aid, local organizing, land stewardship, cooperative enterprise, complementary currencies, ecstatic experience, or love as “unscalable” and unsatisfactory responses to the division of wealth and climate change.

I’m not here to say we told you so, but that — for many of us (including most of YOU) working for mutual aid, grass-roots connections, and collective coherence — the job hasn’t changed. If it’s more noticeable and urgent now, if you feel that the things you’re seeing on TV, hearing about in podcasts, and perhaps already witnessing, out the window, on the streets or in your own life and those of your friends have tipped things to a place where you want to take action? Then join! You’re in the right place!

You’re on Team Human, whether or not you listen to my podcast of that name. We’re here to give each other the support, encouragement and examples we all need to find the others. Connect with them. Do stuff, make stuff, and - most important - be together in ways that count. If you want to do the political thing, fine, go do that. But you can also make a big big difference in your own and everyone’s world by tending to your loves ones, and widening your network of loved ones every day. There are other methods, but the Team Human method is social, mycelial, rhizomatic, connected, compassionate and, yes, satisfying and fun. It’s okay to feel good.

So if I’m not responding with appropriate shock and horror to the events on the screen, it’s because I’ve been watching this happen for thirty years. This is it. Even if we didn’t experience so much of this in America lately, we are largely the result of this happening to other people since before our founding and right through to today. This is how it is.

But we still have the chance to make what want of this. To find each other, and through those connections, through our co-metabolizing the collective trauma, finally tend to each others real needs — reducing our dependence on the corporations we can’t trust and the institutions that have crumbled under their own weight. The more we depend on each other, the more we also reduce our impact on the climate and the legions of enslaved humans who are digging out the planet’s remaining resources.

I’m in this for the long game, and I hope you are too. I hope you can support this Substack (I will keep the main articles free even if you can’t) but more important, just show up. For us, yeah, but for the people in your life and beyond who will benefit from your presence. I’m honored you’re here, and look forward to more.

We can do this. We’ve been doing it all along.