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Doug Rushkoff in Austin

Doug Rushkoff will be speaking at the Paramount Theatre Wednesday night. Doug's an old friend of mine; I interviewed him a few years ago for the Austin Chronicle, and thought, in all modesty, that it was one of his better interviews. Here's one of my favorite bits from that talk:

JonL: Well, you throw a party, and you invite everybody to come, and you really have a good heart, you really want it to work. But the thing is, how do you accommodate the diversity, and how do you accommodate the fact that some people have bad intentions?

DR: There's so many models, even biological models. You figure we're all one body, right? And every person's a little cell. So okay, I want to have a gathering of cells, the good ones. Not the pimple cells and cancer cells, I just want nice ones coming in. And you know that after a certain point, you can invite maybe one or two negative people, and then hope the energy of the good group heals those people, or brings them around somehow.

But you invite five or six or seven, and you crash the whole thing, and it makes you feel really shitty. I always used to tell myself that I never want to live a life where, if I was tripping, I'd look at stuff and bum out. And one thing that does bum me feels like a lingering elitism ...

JonL: Within yourself?

DR: Yeah! I want to hang out with certain people, I don't want to hang out with others. But on another level, well ... shit, I'm a human being, I'm only on this earth for so much time. It's easier to look at images of starving people than images of fucked-up people. With starving people, at least you can say how do we get them food? What can we do? But what can you do about fucked-up people? And unfortunately, maybe half the people in our culture are fucked-up people. I mean, I'm fucked-up in my own little ways. But there's legions of unconscious people, people who are what I would call coerced by corporate America, coerced by television, coerced by the very systems of logic they've succumbed to.

Link to a press release about the Wednesday gig. Link to the event page, where you can buy a ticket.

jon posted this at 4:25 PM
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