YouSaid · the spoken record

Douglas Rushkoff

lines on the record: 72
first: 2021-11-16
most recent: 2021-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Everyone want to panicked and run out and bought the masks. Of course. So what are they looking at? So then they have to think, all right, we have to manage.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was proper information what they should have said was right now we're in a mask triage situation And just like you're running to the store for toilet paper, you could be running to the hardware store and taking all the masks, but that would be a really bad thing to do. That would be really bad for the community. You've got to write now, think of this disease and the whole country rather than this disease and you right now. We want you to have resilience and have water in your house and food and be able to live for a week or two, but we really need these masks. If you've got them, get them to the hospitals. We're going to produce more. And hopefully by the time this disease is rampant in the country, if it gets that way, we'll have upped the production on masks so then you can have them when you need them.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we have to do is let people know look, the general public right now, you don't need masks. Who does need masks right now are these healthcare providers? So don't use masks. You should be okay, and these people will use masks. They're managing the disease. It is true. If you're wealthy, if you're Steve Jobs and you've got all the money in the world and you could live an ideal life, wear a mask, of course, right now, you know, because who are you going to contact us?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they were right, what they were right about was they looked so the CDC's job is to reduce the transmission of a virus through a community by whatever means necessary. They looked at the situation at the early moments of COVID and thought, you know, masks may or may not be of some minimal help in the general population who may or may not be even coming into contact with any COVIDs. There's like, you know, 300 cases or 1,000 cases in the whole country where meanwhile there are healthcare workers who can't get the equipment that they need. So if health workers are exposed, they have a higher likelihood of getting the thing. If they get the thing, then our hospitals are crippled and can't take care of people and the virus becomes more rampant.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just like anybody, our journalists get whipped up into a frenzy by COVID denialism and vaccine rumors that they end up trying to promote whatever it is the CDC is trying to say and the CDC has its own problems because the CDC is not thinking in terms of giving the public accurate information. The CDC is like our doctor trying to tell us the things that they need to tell us to get us to take our medicine. And that's different than journalism. You know, when I look at Fauci, he's looking for patient compliance. So that's what he's saying. He's not a journalist. Go deeper.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that that's, I think their argument, the only valid argument is look, we got really big and we're throwing so many articles into the fire in order to keep this going that the New York Times used to be able to write one paper a day and now we're writing the equivalent of like five papers a day because of how much we have to update the site in order to get stuff that have less adequate monitoring and control over stuff.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people, you know, people are sending me this. Look, look, oh my God, you've got to talk to them on your podcast. This is really important. You know, don't get the vaccine. It's hard to then have actually you should be reading this instead. So now it's like I'm telling people to watch news hour with Judy Woodruff. They're pretty normal. You know, NPR stays stays kind of as centrist as it can right now. You know, there's some places, BBC is pretty straightforward. But, you know, if I'm telling people's scary moment”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're playing into the schools open schools closed, schools, masks, schools not. That's a bigger headline. It gets more clicks, but you've ended up for whatever reason, whether it's your politics or your need to get clicks, you've misrepresented a story. And once you do that once, how do I trust them? No, does it mean that I'm going to go to, you know, Rand Paul or whoever's his, you know, or Alex Jones site about, you know, and I can read about there's one website that was talking about these doctors were talking about how the COVID vaccines have these eggs in them that hatch aluminum parasites.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, as someone who's been traditionally progressive, I get really upset when I see the way MSNBC or CNN will even slightly slant or misrepresent a story in order to get the most impact. Because once they or the times are doing it, then where are you supposed to turn? You know, so when I see a piece in the New York Times that, you know, the headline and the first few paragraphs are arguing that, oh, you know, when Israel opened up its schools, its elementary schools, COVID rates went up. And then you finally read all the way down and you go to the links and find the studies. And it's like, okay, when Israel opened its bars, its restaurants, its theaters, and its public schools, COVID rates went up.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that's going to happen, I guess, is as deepfakes and other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish between what is being said and what is not. We're going to again, just as we did before any video existed, we're going to rely on the integrity of a journalist and the integrity of a publication to measure the reality level of something. And we're not there yet. We're still just looking for the opinion that makes us feel the most delightfully angry than we are, whatever the hard truth might be.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that what we say matters or that because our text can look all like it's in a substack that means it has equal value to everything else that's up there and it just doesn't”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really done by a real art, you can see, oh, that's design when you read something by a real writer, you can go, well, that person knows how to write. The same thing is true of journalism. There's this stuff that you learn either in a journalism class or in journalism school about sourcing and what does it mean to have two sources for everything and what is it what is off the record and what is on the record how does all that work and I remember in the early days of the net I would go and talk at high schools and colleges and the question I would always get was you know what makes what makes your journalism any better than my journalism why should you have all these readers and I don't and I'm like because you're a fucking sophomore in college just spouting off you know what I mean and and I've worked at this you know I didn't answer it like that but that's the real thing and and the tools create the illusion”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I started to feel like was yes, it's great for everyone to be able to type what they're feeling and stuff. But just because you can type doesn't mean you can write, right? And just because you can write doesn't mean you should write. It was like in the old days, in the old days, the late 80s, early 90s, the only people who could write a book were the people who were willing to sit and type a whole book, you know, when it was hard. You couldn't just cut and paste things. It was a whole big thing or even on a Commodore 64. It was still a whole big thing. And it's like the tools made it really easy for people to type lots of words, but that didn't necessarily make them writers any more than Adobe Photoshop makes somebody into a graphic designer. Yeah. You know, an amateur can now do some cool effects. But when you look at something.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One way to filter it is to filter ourselves and our own expression. You know, I remember when blogger came out and Blogger was like the first, one of the first web blogging platforms, Evan Evan Williams later of Twitter did it. And I was at a conference talking to Evan about it. It was just a baby platform. And he was like, oh, are you going to use this? And I was like, wow, I don't think I should use it. I'm already a journalist. I'm on the New York Times Syndicate. It wouldn't be fair for me to go in there. This is a place base. You know, it's for, you know, amateurs in the best sense of the word. For them to do it and talk. It's a social network. It's not for some professional journalist to be, you know, I have a platform. It's not right. And he was like, no, no, it's for everybody. It's for everybody. You could use it the way you use it. And, you know, I played around with it some, and I mean, I ended up with a blog somewhere on my website, I guess.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you'd go to a party i mean in the old days even a big important party and there might be some press there or a photographer there and that was like they were working they were working the party they had to cover the party for their immediate you know because madonna showed up or you know whoever some pers so they're they're there you know but now i look and i see wow all these kids are working journalists in their life they're reporting and i get it and then you go to your device because you want to know what's happening i guess but you're not in touch with what's happening you're reading reports from amateur journalists on their day on what's going on is this this i'm gonna talk about obsessions”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say first by not insisting that we find the answer to these tools in these tools. Every conference I go to now is about how are we going to kind of retrofit the blockchain to solve the problems of the internet or what wellness apps can we create to help people manage their screen time? And it might be that technologies, digital technologies are not the solution for digital technologies. It may really be as simple as Sabbath, you know, having a day when you're not plugged in. Not to be anti-tech, but we can bring our technologies along with us in certain ways, but not in other things. I was just watching, you know, my daughter got home from this party and all people were doing at the party was, you know, typing into their phones and taking Instagram pictures and all that. And it used to be.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hands across the world, crashing of the Berlin Wall. Or today, you could say digital technology is a one zero, yes, no, you know, right, wrong. Choose one of the above cookie cutter medium so people's lives and politics and approaches end up getting that way. Or were we already kind of in a technocratic, scientistic culture that had killed God since Nietzsche and the computer comes along? And of course, there we are. There's the realization of that worldview. So I would say it's like both kind of affect each other. But what you have to do then is like, so you get, we get what we asked for, right? We got our post God, Nietzschean computer automated soul killing, auto-tuning technology. And now, okay, how do we mitigate some of that? How do we retrieve that which is being left behind in this new environment?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's hard to know whether the media and technologies that emerge and are successful because of a pre-existing cultural affordance for that thing or whether the new technology or medium comes and then makes us all like that. So you could say the printing press and the book led to all the sorts of individual perspectives and individualism that then characterized the Renaissance. Or you could say people were kind of getting into the idea of being individuals and they made things like the book and the printing press and perspective painting popular because that's what they were ready for. Or you could say television was a global medium and brought everyone together. And that's why we got that kind of Oprah Winfrey like.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now McLuhan used to write a lot about media environments that we kind of live. Neil Postman did too, the idea that culture is like the medium on which the bacteria grows, that somehow we're in an atmosphere of this kind of extremism and polarization. And then I'm obsessed with how do we engender a more human, softer, more flexible, empathetic approach to living when we're in an environment that's this rigid. And whether or not we'll be able to do that or whether humanity itself is just going to succumb to this kind of bizarre operating system.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm obsessed with what feels like a totalizing polarizing fascistic environment, right? Politics aside, whatever people's views, I feel like they're getting so bizarrely entrenched that everyone's everyone, you know, has this sort of almost this might makes right enforcement of values and ideologies. There's a stiffness to everybody's approaches. And whether it's their business plans or their social agendas, I used to think, oh, you know, when I'm kind of on this side of things, I look at, oh, look at that other side. They're being all stiff. Or if I'm on that side, then I look at this side and go, oh, they're being all stiff. Then when I get kind of more McLuhanesque about it, you know.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was that. It was a cultural explosion. And my advice to the regular listener reader person, the person like me is honestly go to real media for your information. Go to social media for your play.”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We contaminated Twitter, the internet. We contaminated the internet. These were play spaces. They built the internet app for scientists to be able to communicate with each other. What did the scientists do with it? They ended up telling like fantasy Star Trek episodes and sharing recipes and took a network where every note is going, hello, who are you?”
2021-11-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT