Author: Roy Christopher

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A Small Victory: How Rock Climbing Keeps Me Sane

In my “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, I tell people that everyone should have one “head-clearing activity.” Let me explain that by example. My friend Ben Hiltzheimer used to ride motorcycles. When he started learning how, he said that you can’t think about anything else while you’re negotiating the streets and traffic because all you’re thinking about is not dying. I have equated this experience to learning to ride a fixed-gear bicycle.

I started rock climbing a little over ten years ago, and since there’s a wall on campus at UT, I’ve been going in the last couple of years more often than ever. I didn’t realize it until recently, but this is my main head-clearing exercise. While on the wall, you’re only thinking about your next move, about how to position yourself to make the next hold. It’s as mental as it is physical. I can’t think about deadlines, paper revisions, book chapters, magazine articles, student issues, bills, etc. It’s just me and the wall. I do this for an hour or so three times a week, and during that time, I clear the mental cache and leave to start anew. This is what I mean by “head-clearing activity.” Find yourself one. It’s good.

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The video below is of a climb that took me all of fall semester to figure out. For those that don’t know, the routes are marked off with colored tape, so only specified holds are allowed to be used on certain routes. I’ve been stuck on the last two moves of this purple route for the last two months. Well, I finally finished it on Monday: A small victory. Here I am sending it clean on Tuesday [runtime: 0:50]:

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Rappin’ is My Radio: New Books on Rap Poetics

One of my favorite Hip-hop studio tales is from the recording of “Brooklyn’s Finest.” The story goes that Jay-Z and Biggie were sitting in legendary D&D studios in New York City listening to Clark Kent’s beat, a pen and a pad on the table between them. “They’re both looking at the pad like, Go ahead, you take it. No, you take it,” says Roc-A-Fella co-founder Biggs, “That’s when they found out that both of them don’t write.” That is, neither of these emcees write any of their rhymes down. They write, edit, and recite straight off the dome. Their method isn’t freestyling per se, but it’s still quite amazing.

Insight like this into the creative processes of Hip-hop is rare, but becoming more prevalent as the culture is recognized for what it is: the last salient, significant musical and cultural movement in history — and one that is now global in scale (Omoniyi, 2009). A few years back, Brian Coleman‘s book Check the Technique (Villard, 2007; née Rakim Told Me, WaxFacts, 2005) set out to fix this by providing liner notes to classic albums. “…it’s about talking to the artists themselves about their work as musicians, as creators.” he explains. “It seems to me that when you talk about music a lot of times, people tend to view the image of a group or at least the end product of their art, an album, as the most important thing. I think that the process of making them what they are as a group is as, if not more, important.” No question.

The books assembled here focus on language use, a tack that is often taken for granted in studies of Hip-hop (Alim, 2009), but one that is central to the culture and the music. Michael Eric Dyson (2004) puts it thusly:

Rap is a profound musical, cultural, and social creativity. It expresses the desire of young black people to reclaim their history, reactivate forms of black radicalism, and contest the powers of despair and economic depression that presently besiege the black community. Besides being the most powerful form of black musical expression today, rap projects a style of self into the world that generates forms of cultural resistance and transforms the ugly terrain of ghetto existence into a searing portrait of life as it must be lived by millions of voiceless people. For that reason alone, rap deserves attention and should be taken seriously (p. 67-68).

Enter How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-hop MC (Chicago Review Press, 2009) by Paul Edwards. This book is a collection of discussions with hundreds of emcees of all stripes about inspiration, techniques, writing, freestyling, flow, content, style, subject matter, etc. More specific topics like rhyme schemes, metaphors, rhythm, delivery, and collaboration are covered, and with a chapter each on working in the studio and performing live, contextual considerations are given due time as well. Comments, advice, and insight on all of the above from nearly everyone in Hip-hop who matters (including our dude Cage Kennylz) from every school and era that matters. Is your favorite emcee in here? Mine is. Here’s Sean Price on the art of flow:

Like Bruce Lee said, if the water is in the jug, it becomes that jug. If the water is in that bowl, it becomes that bowl. That’s how I approach it (p. 64).

It’s not all koans and riddles though. For instance, here’s Clipse’s Pusha-T on Jay-Z and writing in your head:

Anything that you’ve ever heard of anybody saying about seeing Jay-Z in the studio, what does he do? He mumbles to himself, he walks around, he mumbles to himself, he walks around, he mumbles to himself, then he’s like OK, I got it. It’s not like, stroll into the booth and [record immediately]–he plays with the idea. Paper and pen is nothing but comfort, to me it’s nothing but being comfortable and being able to look at it, digest it, and say OK, this is how it’s supposed to [go]. But if you can train your mind to do it without that, that’s dope (p. 144).

The next few pages go on to explain the reasons one might want to learn to write in one’s head, and techniques for doing so. How to Rap covers every technique in this way. Weighing in at over 300 pages and introduced by a Kool G. Rap-penned foreword, this is seriously the handbook emcees have been waiting for.

Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-hop (Basic Civitas, 2008) breaks down emceeing in a different, but just as useful and intriguing manner. He digs deep into the meter, rhyme, and rhythm of rap in search of its poetics. “In the hands of unskilled poets and MCs alike,” writes Bradley, “rhyme can be an impediment, and awkward thing that leads to unnatural sounds and unintended meanings. But rhyme well used makes for powerful expression; it at once taps into the most primal pleasure centers of the human brain, those of sound patterning, and maintains an elevated, ceremonial distance from regular speech” (p. 57). Emcees must stay elevated, maintain that distance, but not drift too far away.

Since rap is a battle-borne art form, emcees must continually add on with their contributions while maintaining the culture’s heritage. That is, a practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the rules. Thomas Kuhn (1977) described an essential tension in science between innovation and tradition: Too innovative and the theory is untestable, too traditional and it’s not useful. The same tension can be said to exist in Hip-hop, as if one “innovates” without regard to “tradition,” one is no longer doing Hip-hop. Where lyrical interpolations are concerned, one must not adhere too closely to the original source lest one be accused of biting. “What separates ‘biting’ and ‘enlightening’ is the difference between repetition and repetition with a difference,” Bradley writes (2008, p. 150) It’s a delicate balance to be sure, but one of which a violation is not difficult to discern.

Bradley, along with Andrew DuBois, continues his exploration of rap’s poetics with The Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010). This giant tome compiles over three hundred lyrics from over thirty years of Hip-hop. The editors shot here for diversity rather than inclusion, thereby showing rap’s poetic and stylistic breadth rather than just its sheer quantity, though the book does weigh in at just under 900 pages. It also sports an foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., afterwords by Chuck D and Common, and essays that contextualize each major era of rap music. The four eras according to the editors are The Old School (1978-1984), The Golden Age (1985-1992), Rap Goes Mainstream (1993-1999), and New Millennium Rap (2000-2010). Among the undisputed legends and usual suspects, other monsters on the mic include Jay Electronica, Ras Kass, Edan, Eyedea (R.I.P., Mikey), O.C., Big L, Pharoahe Monch, Black Sheep, Brother Ali, and the homies Aesop Rock and Chino XL, among many, many others. Bradley points out in Book of Rhymes that lyrics are to be taken and judged differently when spoken as when on the page, and The Anthology of Rap gives one a chance to do the latter. It is comprehensive, definitive, and essential to be sure.

And if you don’t think people care about lyrics anymore, these are Sean Price‘s final words in Paul Edward’s How to Rap book:

I think it’s going to get back to lyrics, man, and that’s good. I’m ready for that, I can rhyme. Redman, he can rhyme, Jadakiss, he can rhyme–it’s going to get back to them [MCs] who can spit real hard-body lyrics, lyrics that count—Talib Kweli and all of them, they spit bodies. I like those dudes (p. 312).

Word is bond.

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Here’s the book trailer for The Anthology of Rap [runtime: 3:12]:

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References:

Alim, H. S. (2009). Straight outta Compton, straight aus Munchen: Global linguistic flows, and the politics of language in a global hip-hop nation. In H. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim, & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Global linguistic flows: Hip-hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language (pp. 1-23). New York: Routledge.

Bradley, A. (2008). Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-hop. New York: Basic Civitas.

Bradley, A. & DuBois, A. (2010). The Anthology of Rap. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Coleman, B. (2007). Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. New York: Villard.

Dyson, M. E. (2004). The culture of hip-hop. In M. Forman & M. A. Neal (Eds.),That’s the joint: The hip-hop studies reader (pp. 61-68). New York: Routledge.

Edwards, P. (2009). How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-hop MC. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Erwin, J., Malcolm, S. A., Duncan-Mao, A., Matthews, A., Monroe, J., Samuel, A., & Satten, V. (2006, August). “Told You So: The Making of Reasonable Doubt.” XXL Magazine, 10, 7, pp. 89-102.

Kuhn, T. (1977). The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Onimiyi, T. (2009). “So I choose to do Am Naija style” Hip-hop, language, and postcolonial identities. In H. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim, & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Global linguistic flows: Hip-hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language (pp. 113-138). New York: Routledge.

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Apologies to Aesop Rock for ganking his “No Jumper Cables” lyric for the title of this piece (“Rappin’ is my radio, graffiti is my TV, B-boys keep them windmills breezy”).

[Top photo of Ras Kass by B+. Photocopy treatment by royc.]

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21C Magazine: This is Your Brain Online

I compiled my thoughts on a bunch of recent books about the internet, social concerns, and brain matters into a piece called “This is Your Brain Online: Recent Books on Cognition and Connection” for 21C Magazine, many of which have been hashed out right here on this site.

Here’s an excerpt:

Regarding public cell phone use, comedian Bill Maher once quipped that if he wanted to be so privy to one’s most intimate thoughts, he’d read his or her blog. Nancy Baym addresses this technologically enabled collusion of public and private, as well as the more traditionally debated clashes, in Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity, 2010). Baym’s is by turns all-encompassing, in that she covers nearly every epistemological viewpoint on so-called social media expressed thus far, and all-purpose, in that anyone can read this book and see how these structures of knowledge apply to their own use of technology. In her study of technology’s influence on social connections, she breaks it down into seven key concepts: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility. Sure, any time one attempts to slice up such a malleable and ever-changing landscape into discrete pieces one runs the risk of missing something. This process, one of closing off an open system in order to study it, is necessary if we are ever to learn anything about that system. Nancy Baym has collected, synthesized, and added to the legacy of digital media and indeed technology studies at large. This book is a great leap forward.

Many thanks to Ashley Crawford for the opportunity to contribute to 21C. Read the full piece here.

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A False Sense of Obscurity: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

Self-identifying as a Rush fan has often felt like admitting that I used to play Dungeons & Dragons or, as I recently proclaimed to the folks at Geekend 2010, that I used to solve the Rubik’s Cube… competitively. Well, I’m coming out of the nerd closet: Rush is one of my all-time favorite bands, and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010) finally tells their story.

Contrary to what some might tell you, Rush is not a legacy band. Sure, they have some old, dusty hits that people still want to hear when they see them play live (e.g., “Tom Sawyer”), but they’ve maintained the same high level of craftpersonship throughout their thirty-plus years together. With that said, most Rush fans have a favorite era. Some like the really early Zepplin-inspired proto-Rush of the the late 60s-early 70s. Some like the epic, über-prog late-70s Rush. Most like the shorter, airwave-friendly prog of the Permanent Waves (1980) / Moving Pictures (1981) era and hate the keyboard-riddled period just after that (the rest of the 80s). As Geddy Lee puts it in the movie, “There are certain periods of Rush that are more universal than other periods.” I can honestly say that my favorite Rush songs span their four decades.

Growing up, my uncle Lynn had made me aware of Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, and prog rock in general, so though I was always aware of Rush, I didn’t become a fan in earnest until my first record store job. My boss there, Jay Cobb, played them incessantly. Not only was his rabid fandom contagious and the music intricate and interesting, but it made me think as well. Like my favorite band at that time (Oingo Boingo), Neil Peart’s lyrics challenged me like few bands did. Presto (1989) had just come out, and it was a return to form for a band whose previous several years had left them without a formidable part of their edge and a noticeable part of their fan-base. Presto sidestepped the synths and brought Alex Lifeson’s guitars back to center stage. It remains one of my most listened-to Rush records.

Beyond the Lighted Stage was directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, both devout Rush nerds, and it shows. Through original interviews, archival footage and photos, and special guests, their documentary follows the band from their upbringing, through their chronic obscurity and flirtations with the mainstream, to their current goings-on. The special guests include celebrity fans — everyone from the willfully annoying Jack Black, Tim Commerford, and Jason McGerr, to the always articulate Trent Reznor, Gene Simmons, Kirk Hammett, and Les Claypool, as well as the surprisingly brilliant Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, and Sebastian Bach. The latter of whom says he was inspired to read by 2112 (1976). “I was into the story,” Bach says, “I read the back and it was dedicated to The Fountainhead, the book, and I went right out and bought The Fountainhead and read it. Not too many bands make a twelve-year-old go out and buy The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand! Goddammit, this rock band’s got me all fired-up about literature!” And so it goes with Rush and Rush fans.

I finally saw Rush on the 2003 Vapor Trails tour in Las Vegas, and yes, their career-spanning setlist included “Tom Sawyer.” It was when I told my friends about seeing the “world’s most popular cult band” (as Geddy put it) that I realized how nerdy it is to like Rush. It’s not quite like admitting that you solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively, but it’s not far off either.

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Here’s the official trailer for Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage [runtime: 2:19], which is now available on DVD and Blu-ray:

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Get Em to the Geek: Geekend 2010

I scarcely know where to start. Geekend is the beautifully geeky brainchild of Sloane Kelly, Jacob Hodesh, and Miriam Hodesh. 2010 marks the second annual meeting of what everyone familiar hopes will be many years of the interactive conference. It has just the right balance of size and intensity.

I didn’t get to Savannah until late on Day 2, so I roamed around downtown by myself Friday night. I stepped into a raucous karaoke session and had the biggest beer I’ve ever seen. No problem not finishing it because in Savannah, you can drink in the streets. To-go cups are a normal courtesy, and I took one and finished my beer, strolling languidly back to my hotel.

Immediately upon arriving at the Coastal Georgia Center on Saturday morning, I was rushed into the geek melée. Swag bag and badge in hand, I sneaked off to the speakers’ green room to finish the final tweaks on my presentation. People always say of SXSW Interactive that the best stuff happens in the margins, that the sideline conversations are always better than the panels and talks. Well, as much as it resembles SXSWi, Geekend is not quite like that. I’m not saying this because I was one of the speakers this year, I’m saying it because Geekend’s organization and size lends itself to round-the-clock stimulation. Sure, the chats in the hallways and at dinners are productive, enlightening, and awesome, but they do not outshine the scheduled talks.

My talk was called “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” and was loosely based on my previous post of the same name. It seems to have gone over well, and I had numerous inspired chats with attendees and other speakers over the rest of the time I was in Savannah: so many amazing people all in one beautiful city for a very limited time. From futurists (e.g., Frank Spencer and Scott Smith) and future-of-music geeks (e.g., Aaron Ford and Jack DeYoung), to indie entrepreneurs (e.g., Noah Everett and Scott Stratten) and big-media programmers (e.g., Oscar Gerardo and Craig Johnston), as well as just plain badasses (e.g., Maria Anderson, Zachary Dominitz, Pete Hottelet, et al.): It’s a pressure cooker of inspiration.

The closing after-party at SEED Eco-Lounge was the perfect, weekend-ending, chaotic spectacle: fire juggling, ribbon/curtain dancing lady (check the photos), loud, mashed-up hits, and literal dancing in the streets. Geek bedlam!

Geekend 2010 was one of those events where saying “thank you” to the organizers, the speakers, and all of the attendees just sounds ridiculous–but I’ll say it anyway: Thank you! See you next year!

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Here are a bunch of pictures I’ve gathered from the event. Many thanks to the camera-wielding folks I borrowed these from (e.g, Sloane Kelly, Jennifer Parsons, Josh Branstetter, and Rhiannon Modzelewski). And a special thanks goes out to Alex Sandoval and Rhiannon Modzelewski for hauling me around, taking me to the fair, and letting me sleep on their couch that last night. You folks are saints!

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The Essential Tension of Ideas

One of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas and thereby spurs innovation. Where the car used to provide this mass connection, now it hinders it. Increasingly, our cognitive surplus is sitting traffic.

Ideas are networks, Steven Johnson argues in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From (Riverhead, 2010). The book takes Florida’s tack, comparing cities to coral reefs in that their structure fosters innovation. Good ideas come from connected collectives, so connectivity is paramount.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas. — H. G. Wells

On the other end of the spectrum, in a recent post about Twitter, David Weinberger writes,

…despite the “Who cares what you had for breakfast?” crowd, it’s important that we’ve been filling the new social spaces — blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, messaging in all forms, shared creativity in every format — with the everyday and quotidian. When we don’t have to attract others by behaving outlandishly, we behave in the boring ways that make life livable. In so doing, we make the Net a better reflection of who we are.

And since we are taking the Net as the image of who we are, and since who we think we are is broadly determinative of who we become, this matters.

His description sounds like we’re evening out our representations of our online selves, reconciling them with our IRL selves, initiating a corrective of sorts. Coincidentally, in their sad version of “The SEED Salon,” a recent issue of WIRED had Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson discuss the roots of innovation (by way of plugging their respective new books; here they are discussing same at the New York Public Library). Kelly states,

Ten years ago, I was arguing that the problem with TV was that there wasn’t enough bad TV. Making TV was so expensive that accountants prevented it from becoming really crappy—or really great. It was all mediocre. But that was before YouTube. Now there is great TV!

It sounds as though Weinberger and Kelly are calling for or defending a sort of “infodiversity,” which one would think would be a core tenet of media ecology. As Kelly puts it in What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), “Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information” (p. 10). He continues in WIRED,

To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.

In science, Thomas Kuhn called this idea “the essential tension.” In his book of the same name (University of Chicago Press, 1977), he described it as a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation. Kuhn wrote that this tension is essential, “…because the old must be revalued and reordered when assimilating the new” (p. 227). This is one of those ideas that infects one’s thinking in toto. As soon as I read about the essential tension, I began to see it everywhere — in music, in movies, in art, and indeed, in science. In all of the above, Weinberger, Johnson, and Kelly are all talking about and around this idea, in some instances the innovation side, and in others, the tradition side. We need both.

One cannot learn anything that is more than one step away from what one already knows. Learning progresses one step or level at a time. Johnson explores this idea in Where Good Ideas Come From by evoking Stuart Kauffman‘s “adjacent possible” (a term Johnson uses hundreds of times to great annoyance). The adjacent possible is that next step away. It is why innovation must be rooted in tradition. Go too far out and no one understands you, you are “ahead of your time.” Take the next step into the adjacent possible that no one else saw, and you have innovated. Taken another way, H. G. Wells once said that to write great science fiction, one must adopt a perspective that is two steps away from the current time. Going only one away is too familiar, and three is too far out. As Kelly puts it in the WIRED piece, “Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.” A new technology, literally “the knowledge of a skill,” is–in its very essence–the same thing as a new idea. For instance, Apple’s Newton was too many steps ahead of or away from what was happening at the time of its release. I’m sure you can think of several other examples.

Johnson, who has a knack for having at least one (usually more) infectious idea per book, further addresses the process of innovation with what he calls the “slow hunch.” This is the required incubation period of an innovative idea. The slow hunch often needs to find another hunch in order to come to fruition. That is, one person with an idea often needs to be coupled with another who has an idea so that the two can spur each other into action, beyond the power of either by itself (see the video below for a better explanation). It’s an argument for our increasing connectivity, and a damn good one.

That is not to say that there aren’t and won’t be problems. I think Kevin Kelly lays it out perfectly here:

…[T]here will be problems tomorrow because progress is not utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expending possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now (p. 101).

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Here’s the book trailer for Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From [runtime: 4:07]:

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References:

Florida, R. (2010). The great reset. New York: Harper.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from. New York: Riverhead.

Kelly, K. (2010). What technology wants. New York: Viking.

Kuhn, T. (1977). The essential tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weinberger, D. (2010). “Why it’s good to be boring on the web.” JoHo The Blog.

WIRED. (2010, October) “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on where ideas come from.” Wired.com.

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Gang of Four Kinect Commercial

I guess it’s logical that the older you get, the more the music you grew up listening to is likely to end up in the last place you’d expect. Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” in Microsoft’s official Xbox Kinect televison campaign. Good friend and ex-bass player Dave Allen seems summarily nonplussed. [runtime: 0:32]

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Sandy Carson: Paradise Has Relocated

Longtime BMX homie and amazing photographer Sandy Carson has a show on display here in Austin at Okay Mountain Gallery. The opening on October 23rd was a bicycle scene reunion. We all gawked at Sandy’s photos, and geeked out on bikes, parks, and trails. A good time was had by all.

Here’s what the Okay Mountain site says about the show:

“Paradise Has Relocated” attempts to capture the lifeless remains and emptiness of a once thriving and historic island devastated by Hurricane Ike in September of 2008. Ike was the third most destructive and costliest hurricane to make landfall in the United States, destroying and flooding 75% of homes and landmass. The project deals with the physical dead space and ghostliness of Galveston- post hurricane. Each image whispers of an ordinary past lost to the ravages of Mother Nature. The everyday objects left behind in haste suggest former human inhabitation. The unoccupied landscapes, fractured structures and mundane interiors I have carefully composed compel the viewer to look beyond cultural stature and financial complexities, and question geographical location.

The geographic anonymity of my photographs prove that such devastation is not reserved for the third world but stand right on our doorstep. This is important to remember given the current state of world climate change. Unfortunately some believe that this may be the final blow for Galveston. With an already anemic economy and population decline that predates Ike by 50 years, survivors who are re-building or relocating, feel that their mythical land never fully recovered from the first Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

Sandy’s book Paradise Has Relocated is available from Blurb (where there’s also a full preview!). A percentage of the sales will go directly towards Hurricane IKE relief, so do good and buy a copy.

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Douglas Rushkoff: The User’s Dilemma

For over two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has been dragging us all out near the horizon, trying to show us glimpses of our own future. Though he’s written books on everything from counterculture and video games to advertising and Judaism, he’s always maintained a media theorist’s bent: one part Marshall McLuhan, one part Neil Postman, and one part a mix of many significant others. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (OR Books, 2010) finds him back at the core of what he does. Simply put, this little book (it runs just shy of 150 pages) is the missing manual for our wild, wired world.

“Whoever controls the metaphor governs the mind.” — Hakim Bey

Rushkoff agrees with many media thinkers that we are going through a major shift in the way we conceive, connect, and communicate with each other. His concern is that we’re conceding control of this shift to forces that may not have our best interests in mind. “We teach kids how to use software to write,” he writes, “but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves” (p. 13). We’re conceiving our worlds using metaphors invented by others. This is an important insight and one that helps make up the core of his critique. This book is more Innis’ biases of media than it is McLhaun’s laws of media, and it left me astounded — especially after reading several books on the subject that were the textual equivalent of fly-over states. Program or Be Programmed is a welcome stop along the way.

I first interviewed Doug Rushkoff in 1999. We’ve stayed in touch since and discussed many ideas over the intervening decade, but we haven’t recorded any of these exchanges. I used this book as an opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Roy Christopher: Program or Be Programmed seems to distill quite a lot of your thinking about our online world from the past twenty-odd years. What prompted you to directly address these issues now?

Douglas Rushkoff: I guess it’s because the first generation of true “screenagers” or digital natives have finally come of age and, to my surprise, seem less digitally literate than their digital immigrant counterparts. I’ve written a number of books applying the insights of digital culture — of its do-it-yourself, hacker ethos — to other areas, such as government, religion, and the economy. But I realize that we don’t even relate to digital culture from the perspective of cultural programmers. We tend to accept the programs we use as given circumstances, rather than as the creations of people with intentions.

So I wanted to go back and write something of a “poetics” of digital media, sharing the main biases of digital technologies so that people can approach them as real users, makers, and programmers, rather than just as passive consumers.

If anything in particular prompted me, it was watching the way smart writers and thinkers were arguing back and forth in books and documentaries about whether digital technology is good for us or bad for us. I think it’s less a question of what the technology is doing to us than what we are choosing to do to one another with these technologies. If we’re even choosing anything at all.

RC: You mention in the book that anyone who seems a bit too critical of digital media is labeled a Luddite and a party-pooper, yet you were able to be critical, serious, and hopeful all at the same time. What’s the difference between your approach and that of other critics of all-things-digital?

DR: I think the main difference is that I’m more concerned with human intention and how it is either supported or repressed in the digital realm. Empathy is repressed, the ability to connect over long distanced is enhanced. I go down to the very structure and functioning of these tools and interfaces to reveal how they are intrinsically biased toward certain kinds of outcomes.

So I’m less concerned with how a technology effects us, than how our application or misapplication of a technology works for or against our intentions. And, perhaps more importantly, how the intentions of our programmers remain embedded in the technologies we use. I’m not judging a technology one way or the other; rather, I am calling for people to make some effort to understand what the technologies they are using were made for, and whether that makes it the right tool for the job they’re using it for.

RC: You evoke Harold Innis throughout this book. Do you think there’s something that he covers more thoroughly or usefully than other media theorists since?

DR: I think he was better at looking at media shaping the nature and tenor of the social activity occurring on it, or around it. He’s the guy who would have seen how cell phones change the nature of our social contract on the street, turning a once-public space into lots of separate little private spaces. As far as media-ecology goes, he was probably the purest theorist.

RC: The last programming class I took was a Visual Basic class in which even the programming was obscured by a graphical interface: there was little in the way of real code. For those of us interested, what’s the first step in becoming a programmer now?

DR: I guess it depends on your interests. There are many different places to start. You could go back and learn Basic, one of the simplest computer languages, in order to see the way lines of code in a program flow. Or you could even just get a program like Director, and sequence some events. Hypercard was a great little tool that gave people a sense of running a script.

If I were starting, I’d just grab a big fat book that starts from the beginning, like Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing (Morgan Kaufman, 2008). You can sit down with a book like that and, with no knowledge at all, end up with a fairly good sense of programming in a couple of weeks.

I’m not asking everyone be a programmer at this point. Not this generation, anyway. That’s a bit like asking illiterate adults to learn how to read when they can just listen the radio or books on tape. I get that. But for those who will be living in increasingly digital spaces, programming will amount to the new literacy.

RC: Though you never stray too far, you seem to have come back to your core work in this book. What’s next?

DR: I have no idea, really. Having come “home” to a book on pure media theory applied to our real experience, I feel like I’ve returned to my core competence. I feel like I should stick here a while and talk about these issues for a year or so until they really sink in.

I’ve got a graphic novel coming out next year, finally, called ADD. It’s about kids who are raised from birth (actually, earlier) to be video game testers. I’d love to see that story get developed for other media, and then get to play around in television or film. There are also rumblings about doing another Frontline documentary. Something following up on “Digital Nation,” which I’d like to do in order to get more of my own ideas out there to the non-reading public.

I guess we’ll see.

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Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna (the filmmakers behind the film Zizek!) put this short video together to help illustrate the ideas in Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed [runtime: 2:18]:

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