Cyber Means No Guru

Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

You can call Douglas Rushkoff a writer, consultant or a futurist—he is equally successful in all three categories—but I think that the most appropriate title for him is – interpreter. Technically belonging to Generation X, Rushkoff dedicated one of his books to his parents, for letting him watch the TV as much as he wanted when he was a kid. Later, in equal quantities, he consumed rave culture and Internet-ional society and today he makes money interpreting Gen Xers and its mix of TV and computers to the CEOs of the companies eager to sell to the young.

As always when a new name appears on the horizon, Rushkoff quickly got his followers as well as opponents. Some specialized cyber-magazines hate him. Salon calls him Faith Popcorn of his generation, and Wired does not like him, either. Rushkoff says that this happens because he is trying to demystify cyber-culture. Since publications like Wired are practically founded on the grounds of mystification, this animosity becomes explainable.

This 36-years old New Yorker is currently promoting his sixth book, his first novel, Ecstasy Club (HarperCollins). This is a story that mixes Grateful Dead, trips, rave, computers, porn, conspiracy theory and almost anything else that could make a book bestseller.

Yes, the Ecstasy Club is superbly written and it is almost impossible to put it aside once you started reading, but...all Gen X ideals fall apart in this book and the heroes sell themselves out to Cosmotology sect (sounds familiar?). Although he flew previous night from Europe, where he taught another group of rich folks how to become even richer, Douglas Rushkoff looks fresh and active on the morning we meet on Victoria Street. As he puts it, he likes to talk when he has an audience.

DT: Do you want people to adopt your ideas?

DR: No, I want people to have fun with my ideas, I am an entertainer. That’s what someone once asked, “Are you a priest, a writer, a philosopher?” No, I’m just an entertainer. If I have a purpose, it’s to reduce the level of fear that people have about technology, media, and the way the culture is changing.

DT: Some are seeing Information Technology more as a goal than as tool. How do you use Internet?

DR: Right now, sadly, the Internet for me is 150 messages in my Eudora Inbox, out of which 50 are really angry about something. Whether it is KKK, that starting writing to me for some reason, or Mac users who are angry because of my article from Guardian where I explained why I switched to PC. I’ve got over 400 messages regarding Mac, including one dead threat. So, the Internet to me is a stage I passed through, my entrance to the idea that the world can be one thing, that we have to network ourselves somehow. But I got so much into it, that I want to spend some time with the real people now.

DT: Everybody is talking about this great network, about this total communication that comes with the Internet. But I cannot read Japanese, nor French, nor Hungarian sites. So, there is still that, the biggest barrier of them all – language. Are we really communicating?

DR: We started to, and English is becoming a generic language. So, when people somewhere are worried, “Oh, this is a cultural imperialism from the West,” maybe it is true on one hand, but America is loosing its culture on the other hand. It will not exist anymore, because American culture will be just one binary, generic language.

DT: What is the Internet today: just another medium or a counterculture?

DR: Media itself is just an extension of culture. I don’t see a division. Media to humanity is a honey to a bee, a dam to a beaver-our natural extension. At the beginnings of media, we needed someone in charge, CBC or Walter Kronkite, whoever-they were the parents, the protectors. Now the media has turned from the playground where we were watched into playground where we all stand, where we can interact. The Internet was countercultural, as long as the idea that human beings can express themselves to one another without supervision was a countercultural idea. But it’s less and less so. I don’t think it is a separate space, I think it’s a mutation of the whole space.

There will always be the broadcast media, where people just want to relax and watch something, but it will be forever affected by knowing that they are not the only ones that can do it anymore. There are not priesthood media anymore, except for some high-tech magazines who want to establish themselves as a priesthood media and to remystify the technology that was demystified by the Internet. I hated that image that media tried to impose on me, that I was some kind of cyber-guru guy. There is no such thing: cyber-guru is an oxymoron. Cyber means no guru, it means it’s all out for grabs.

DT: Ecstasy Club starts as a documentary about new generation, but ends almost as a preaching, as a lecture about more traditional ways of life. Are you distancing now from the culture that made you famous?

DR: Partially. This is my equivalent of War of the Worlds. It is a stab in the back, but more than that it is a poke. I was just as responsible as everyone else for blowing up this balloon. That’s chill: we were all taking ourselves a bit too seriously. That’s fine, but if you go too far, it gets nutty. I can’t pull myself any longer. Media portrayed me a lot as disembodied, Max Headroom, little media genius guy, traveling all over, making tons of money. I am not making that money. Yes, once I got $7,500 for delivering a talk at the same conference where Kevin Kelly [executive editor of Wired magazine] got $20,000 to deliver a talk. They told me they got off cheap with me. This is not an attack on my old friends, but an attack on something that becomes fanatical, exclusive religion. There are psychedelic people out there saying that if you haven’t had an LSD or DMT experience, you will not make it into the next dimension. That’s as just much crap as saying that if you don’t accept Christ, you’ll not gonna make it after the Apocalypse. I wanted to break that circle and have a little fun, too. Usual mistake than many people today make is that you can be happy in discontinued way. I wanted that too, I was taking as much drugs as I could, to break through...And we would dance and dance and dance, “Our group is going to make it tonight, we will break through time, we will make contact...” Nah, it won’t happen like that. It’s gotta be married to real life.