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Douglas Rushkoff: Real virtue against virtual reality

The digital guru, hates the way that the market has stolen cyberspace â¿“ although he still answers his e-mail.

Gareth Evans
Friday 22 June 2001 00:00 BST
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I'm trying to wake people up, really. Trying to reduce people's level of fear of change, trying to help people recognise that the reality they're living in is open source, rather than a closed standard system," explains Douglas Rushkoff. "I'm exploring the way people create and communicate their values in an increasingly accelerated and chaotic world. I'm a pro-intellectual populist."

Rushkoff is on a roll. Explaining his mission to fight the current, dystopian downturn in the possibilities of the virtual world, the self-confessed workaholic looks much younger than his 40 years. Alongside a string of speaking engagements, he's in London to promote his new novel, Bull (Sceptre, £10.99): a dark fable of corporate appropriation and sold-out hacker idealism, played out against the bovine markets of the dot.com explosion. He's electric with ideas, throwing them out in free-form associations.

An immensely likeable analyst of the zeitgeist, Rushkoff is at his best in building up the big picture – of how media and market interventions deep into the psyche are paralysing the huge communal potential of the digital age – and then suggesting left-field ways of addressing the threat. Throughout the Nineties, his influential non-fiction looked positively on subjects such as the cyber-awareness of teenage computer gamers.

Rushkoff chose a political reading of the new digital domain, rather than the spiritual leanings of writers like Erik Davis (in Techgnosis). And he proposed ways of fighting the machine – global unions, for example, to parallel the planetary reach of the multinationals – grounded as much in real life as in any virtual front line.

"I'm not so concerned with media, but I am concerned with commerce," he says. "Speaking or thinking against the market now is to be an enemy of the state. So, with taking Sabbath, I try one day a week not to buy or sell anything."

Now he's putting his own money (or at least his earnings potential) online, with his second excursion into fiction. Unlike The Ecstasy Club, his acclaimed 1997 tale of West Coast ravers, addicts and cyber-freaks, Bull is a back-East, Wall Street parable that embodies its anti-market message in its production and distribution.

The book appears in the UK this month, but the text also starts a Web residency from the US in July, courtesy of the Yahoo Internet Life site. Suitably retitled Exit Strategy (given that it's suggesting ways out of the market mindset), the Web version is a rave-culture-inspired remix of the printed British edition.

But the keynote is collaboration. Continuing his well-established, anti-commercial involvement in US culture, Rushkoff is opening up the text by encouraging readers to make additions to the existing footnotes. The best of them will feature in the final, hard-copy US printing. The footnotes appear because the story is framed as a document of our times discovered two centuries later.

"I think it's the best way to experience the book, as an anthropologist 200 years from now commenting on our time," he argues. "It's a way of bringing the private vision into the public space. So we have a collective project that is envisioning, by inference, a society that is beyond misogyny and greed and so on."

This wished-for future is very unlike the world probed in the novel. Rushkoff wrote it for the friends ha has watched being co-opted into the system, while all the time claiming it was "just a game".

Bull plays on all the shadings of its title – taking in ritual sacrifice and cattle-head hallucinations – in its portrayal of a society of instant commodification. When the old hacker and new suit Jamie Cohen is approached by former friends with a network system, Teslanet, that will take democratic, open-source access to its conclusion, the scene is primed for a topical take on moral responsibility and the limits, if any, of greed. Essentially a comic-satirical narrative of ideas, Bull is delivered in the lucid, energetic and accessible style of Rushkoff's non-fiction.

"In fiction you can tell scarier truths," Rushkoff suggests. Underpinning the critique is an examination of alternatives, possible corners of hope – in short, exit strategies from the maelstrom. The novel also runs with several strands of Jewish enquiry, both historical and social: the rights and wrongs of contemporary behaviour, the uses and abuses of the Talmud.

As it mirrors the biblical story of Joseph, Rushkoff explains, Bull documents the "search for some connection to an ethical template or value system that continues. But it's not going to be Judaism as it was traditionally practised. It's going to be the ability to wake up from the slavery of pyramid building. That's the central metaphor. Joseph brought all his brothers down and they ended up as slaves building pyramids for Pharaoh. Here Jamie brings his hacker buddies down and they end up building investment pyramids for venture capitalists."

Rushkoff's exploration of possibilities for a radical Judaism continues in a new book (Nothing Sacred) he is writing; and in meetings with religious groups, temples and rabbis, in order to rethink the faith in light of current crises.

It's part of a daunting programme of upcoming projects. They include a graphic novel, Club Zero G; a new edition of Cyberia (currently available via his website); a Rushkoff anthology with Robert Topping (the former Waterstone's Manchester manager and an early champion of his work); an interactive murder-mystery series for the BBC drama lab; slots on CBS and National Public Radio; and a documentary of his critique of marketing, Coercion. "Japanese students at New York University read it as a textbook in how to do it," he says. "I'm asking, did it lose that much in translation?"

Is it too much, managing such a diverse professional portfolio? "I hired this assistant and it just allowed me to do more work," Rushkoff notes shrewdly. So he's looking to scale down and pace himself – difficult perhaps for someone so keen to communicate, and so concerned about the threats.

"I think it would make my work better if it was informed by a more grounded, real-world existence," he goes on: a desire that comes directly out of his years of pioneering immersion in the seas of code.

"It makes me realise how truly sacred real space is. I spend really very little time in virtual space. The only thing I really do is answer my e-mails. I don't actually send e-mails, but I answer them, every morning between six and 10. I get maybe 300 a day. I try and engage with readers and so on as much as is practical. But it's gotten beyond that. I'm starting to resent it now. I've never really enjoyed the virtual – except as an idea."

Douglas Rushkoff, a biography

Douglas Rushkoff (www.rushkoff.com), "a propagandist for humanism and human evolution", was born in 1961. Currently Professor of Virtual Culture at New York University, he is the author of seven books, which have been translated into 15 languages. His non-fiction work includes Media Virus: hidden agendas in popular culture; Cyberia: life in the trenches of hyperspace, Playing the Future: what we learn from digital kids and Coercion: why we listen to what 'they say'. He has also written two novels: The Ecstasy Club (soon to be a film) and Bull (published next week by Sceptre, and serialised from July on the Yahoo Internet Life website); and he recently made a documentary, The Merchants of Cool, about corporate marketing to teenagers. A prolific columnist, syndicated in 30 countries, he is media literacy consultant to a number of non-profit organisations, and adviser to the UN Commission on World Culture. He lives in New York's East Village.

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