Consciousness & Spirituality, Story-Telling & Narrative

Being Human Is a Team Sport

KINSHIP: An Online Course Talk with Douglas Rushkoff

There is an anti-human agenda embedded in our markets and technologies, which has turned them from means of human connection into ones of isolation and repression. Our corporations and the culture they create glorify individualism at the expense of cooperation, threatening the sustainability not just of our economy but our species and the more-than-human world which, in part, depends on our cooperation. In this workshop Douglas Rushkoff - author and host of Team Human - will reveal this agenda at work and invite us to consider how we can remake society. He will uncover how the intentional repression of humanity impacts diverse sectors of society, explaining how money went from being a means of transaction to a means of extraction and how education transformed from the ideal of learning into an extension of occupational training. Digital age technologies have only amplified these trends, making our systems more brittle and presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media influencing our votes. Luckily, there’s still time to think before we hit the switch and automate ourselves out of existence. Rushkoff will argue that we must reconnect with our essentially social nature, reestablish a place for humans in the emerging landscape and wider ecosystem, and forge solidarity with the others who understand that being human is a team sport.