Douglas Rushkoff Response — Our Tech Defines Us
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and a documentary filmmaker who is focused on digital issues like our dependence on technology and how this affects our lives. His most recent book, Team Human, was published in 2019 and takes the stance that the ways technology works are actually “antihuman” and that we have to become aware of and actively work against this in order to sort of take back our humanity.
This perspective comes through loud and clear in his article “We’ve spent the decade letting our tech define us. It’s out of control” for The Guardian.
Rushkoff states that a lot of what we learn about the “antihuman” innerworkings is kind of outdated in the sense that the decisions to start along this path were made years ago. We can’t really stop it, because it already happened and now we are living within those consequences, so we have to acknowledge how this is the case and try to take back what we can.
One of the consequences Rushkoff explains is how algorithms were developed to tailor our online experiences to us, which ensures that we keep using it because we grow familiar with it, and divides us because we each are interacting with a different internet or digital space, essentially. Rushkoff explains how this is dangerous because it gives us a sense of in vs. out groups, of us vs. them, which really damages our possibilities for human connection.
Every Digital Studies course I have taken has in some way been concerned with understanding where data comes from, how it is used, and how to protect our own data. The more data we sacrifice actually limits our online experience. But as Rushkoff says, we do not “go online” anymore; we are never really offline (2019). So anything that affects our online self really affects our whole self, and our lived experience can become informed and determined by our online experience. The separation of “online” and “in real life” is not clear, maybe even nonexistent. The Digital Studies curriculum really seeks to inform us of this so that we can be educated on this and understand steps we can take to protect our privacy, our data, our autonomy, ourselves.
This is directly related to Meredith Broussard’s concept of technochauvinism. Technochauvinism is the belief that technology is the best solution to anything, and if we buy into that, then we are giving up more and more of ourselves with the idea that is is more convenient and ultimately better than any other way of being. This will just further divide us into our different worlds.
