Verdict first: this is the most useful book I have read about the present decade, and it is shorter than it looks.
Douglas Rushkoff wrote Team Human in 2019, which is two years before the generative AI wave and three years before the platform-algorithm catastrophe fully arrived, and the book has aged the way only correct books age — the examples have dated, the thesis has sharpened. The thesis is one sentence. The digital economy has been designed, incrementally and without a villain, to extract value from human connection rather than to serve it, and the project of our time is to notice this and refuse it. Everything else in the book is a hundred small arguments for why that sentence is true.
Rushkoff writes the book as a hundred and fifty short chapters, most of them two pages long, each one a self-contained argument. The form is deliberate. He is writing for a reader whose attention has been degraded by the thing he is criticizing, and he meets the reader where the reader lives. Two pages. Open it anywhere. Read the section. Close the book. Do something with your hands.
What works: the structure. The refusal to be comprehensive. The willingness to be blunt without being shrill. Rushkoff is not a doomer and he is not a techno-optimist and he is not an anarchist. He is a media theorist who has been watching this particular movie for thirty years — since Cyberia in 1994, when he was hopeful — and he has earned the right to say, now, what he saw.
What doesn’t work: the ending. Rushkoff gestures, in the final sections, toward a Team Human — a movement, a coalition, a we. The gesture is weaker than the diagnosis. He is too honest to tell you how the coalition forms, and too kind to tell you what it costs.
What still works, despite the above: the usefulness. I read this book and then changed three things about how I work. Stopped treating the feed as news. Stopped treating the notification as conversation. Stopped treating the algorithm as taste. None of these were new ideas. Rushkoff just arranged them in an order that made the refusal feel possible.
Read it in one afternoon. Two pages at a time. The form is the argument.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of Team Human will really enjoy A Very Good Novel: Coronavirus — my novel about what the pandemic did to the human side of us, and what the screens did after, and what was left when the two things stopped distinguishing themselves. Rushkoff’s argument, but with characters. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
