From Figure To Ground: How Humans Became Technology’s Tools

Digital technology is being developed with little or no awareness of the underlying operating system: corporate capitalism. New technologies are developed purely for their ability to extract value from people and places, instead of providing human beings with the capabilities they need to create and exchange value for themselves. As a result, we now live in a media environment where technologies use people more than people use technology.

One of the greatest promises of new media technologies was to unlock closed-ended narratives and offer people the opportunity to participate, actively, in the creation of a new human story. In this talk, media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff will use the lens of critical economic analysis to explain how this potential renaissance for human connection and flourishing was leveraged instead to amplify the most predictable, extractive, and dehumanizing aspects of the market. He will also offer a path for digital, transmedia, and other post-linear creators to retrieve the human values driving our work by restoring the cultural alchemy at its core.