The secret place AI can't see

A conversation with Douglas Rushkoff of Team Human

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Today we’re sharing an excerpt from my conversation with

Douglas Rushkoff

.

In addition to showing LSD-godfather Timothy Leary the world wide web for the first time (Leary’s response: “Oh my god, this is acid”), coining terms like “viral media” and “social currency,” and being called one of the top 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT (a title I’m sure he hates), Douglas just released the #1 internet book currently on Amazon, Program or Be Programmed.

I first emailed Douglas Rushkoff in 2019. The letter was several paragraphs long and ended with this:

Anyways, that's all. Feel free to read this and go 'That guy seems nice but possibly nuts, gonna go ahead and pass." or something of that nature, no hard feelings.

Wow this is a long e-mail,
Alex

Miraculously, he responded. We played email scheduling tag for a few years until I finally got my chance to speak with him as part of this series.

Here’s a video of one of my fav parts of the conversation in which we discuss rescuing the human from the machine, the absurdity of modern self-care, and how the spaces between moments are where we actually live.

The whole clip is worth watching, but these words in particular stopped me in my tracks:

The in between is where it happens.

It's less the meeting and more how am I getting to and from each of those meetings? And what am I thinking about in between? You know, it's like the ticks of the clock.

The computer understands the ticks, but human beings live in the moments between those ticks, in the duration that's not even acknowledged by the metrics.

And that's where it's at.
That's where human beings actually live.

This secret place that computers don't even know and AIs can't see. They can only see the ticks. They're quantized. But we're breathing in that space. And that's where, if there is some spiritual thing, that's where it is.

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