The right-wing pundits on the Sunday morning news shows this week seem to think that the best critique of John Kerry and of the Democratic Convention, voters, and ticket in general is the notion that most of the party's supporters are still just voting "against George Bush." The idea, here, is that voting against something is not enough to carry the day.

Ridiculous, I say.

I am voting against George Bush. I'm sure Kerry has his problems. If any of you who regularly read this blog went to college with the man, I'm sure you wouldn't have been friends with him. He volunteered for the military, for chrissakes. How many people who you relate to went to Ivy League colleges in the 60's but, instead of trying to get out of service, dropping acid, or conscientiously objecting, actually went to Vietnam and then volunteered for gook-shooting duty on a boat? Sure, I would have preferred someone like Kucinich. But I'm a weird-ass lefty pinko artist writer, and I doubt the Democratic party will ever support a candidate with whom I truly resonate.

As I realist, I understand that Bush is a problem on a very different order. And I believe it is okay to vote purely to rid the nation and the world of a dangerous, misguided, deluded sociopath and the rapacious clique who control him - while there's still enough integrity in the voting system to exercise such authority over the executive branch. This may be our last chance to use our blogs and our voices towards such a purpose.

Indeed, the attack on Democrats who are voting simply to get rid of Bush strike me as hollow as early attacks on Jews and early Christians who believed in an abstract God. To the polytheistic peoples around them, these monotheists were basically atheists. The God they believed in had no form. They were understood simply as iconoclasts, who very purpose seemed to be to smash the idols that reigned reality.

And if those of us voting against Bush must be understood that way, it's fine with me.

9:49 AM | link | 45 comments

 

Science told us it couldn't happen, but guess what: a future Rushkoff is making her way to this dimension.




4:19 PM | link | 34 comments

 

Just got passed this one from the Center for Cognitive Liberties and Ethics. Frightening?

In brief, yesterday The Independent issued a story: "Children to get jabs against drug addiction":
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=544439
stating, among other things:

"A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal."

"Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme."

"Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years."



8:50 PM | link | 17 comments

 

I'm doing a workshop of some kind at the Omega Institute in a few weeks, along with Howard Bloom, Paul Laffoley, Richard Metzger, and Grant Morrison, all under the general Disinformation umbrella.

The description on the Omega site explains that the weekend "offers us a rare chance to interact with a disparate, yet thematically cohesive group of "out-of-the-box"thinkers, and discover creative new strategies for navigating the zeitgeist of the new millennium."

Sounds fine, but what do you think I should do? I believe we'll each be given a two hour slot to make whatever mayhem we choose. Paul Laffoley will show some of his art, Howard Bloom will make a speech about some wonderfully apocalyptic scenario, no doubt. Grant will probably explain how to make a sigil (how to do magick, basically).

I'd love to raise the dead or take everyone into an alternative dimension, but neither is in my bag of tricks at the moment. I could go political, spiritual, technological, media... My hope would be to demonstrate the principles of 'open source reality' rather than simply talking about them.

So - if you were coming to such a thing, what would you want to do with me for two hours?

11:42 AM | link | 19 comments

 

Two great new interviews with me have gone up in the last week. I think they both cover some new ground.

Madghoul.com
"...I do believe that those who can see - those who are willing to see what's going on in this world, and feel obligated to do something about it - they are outcasts. I'm not sure whether they're outcasts because of how they feel, or whether their status as outcasts makes them uniquely capable of seeing how things are."

Bakers Dozen
"...But when the story, the genre, the medium, and the theme all merge, then it's magic. (Or magick.) Then you're really happy that there's an audience who won't be attracted unless you create an artifact worthy of attention - because you only get there if you've worked out the kinks, and gotten your own agendas out of the way of the characters' or the story's. Ultimately, if you're going to play around with myth, you've got to disappear."


8:31 AM | link | 4 comments

 


I'm doing a single event to promote the launch of my new graphic novel, Club Zero-G, at Barnes & Noble on 8th Street and 6th Ave, NYC, Thursday July 15 at 7:30pm.

Please come if you'd enjoy such an event. I'll probably talk a bit about the ideas behind the comic - and maybe try to figure out a way to read some of it. Perhaps those who want to can go out for a beer or something afterwards.

The book itself is meant as a little challenge to consensus reality, and a shove towards taking the plunge into world creation. You can find out more at http://www.clubzerog.com or the interview at http://www.popimage.com/content/rushkoff.html

If you want a copy, order it online at Amazon, Disinformation.com or through your local comics shop.


6:37 PM | link | 12 comments

 

Like most of you, I receive many fake emails from people spoofing Ebay and Paypal, asking for account information, passwords, credit card numbers, and more. Their art, complete with site logos and characteristic fonts, is quite good - good enough to fool many users. And so is their url spoofing, which usually has ebay.com or paypal.com somewhere in it. Sometimes, they'll even create a link that appears to end in ebay.com - and only if you copy the link beneath it and paste it into a browser, you can see it goes somewhere else.

But the dead giveaway on almost any of these fraudulent emails is not the painstakingly simulated appearance or the sophisticated coding, but the grammar! That's right, these people just aren't competent in the English language. Unlike the copywriters at places like Paypal and Ebay (usually former tech journalists) these crooks don't use proper tenses, have great trouble with agreement, and use diction that sounds like language in translation. Find the two dead giveaways in the email, below:

Dear eBay Member,                                                                   

We wish to inform you that for the next two days we shall upgrade our database servers in order to increase our efficiency in managing eBay users accounts and to secure the transactions.

To avoid any possible errors that might occur during this process we advise you to check if your account is active and the registration information are correct by clicking the following link:

http://cgi3ebay.com@eBayISAPI.dll?&MfcISAPCommand;=EnterConfirm&UsingSSL;=1

Thank you very much for your cooperation!
Marry Kimmel,
eBay Billing Department team.

3:22 PM | link | 27 comments

 

I've been doing lots of interviews, lately. Two or three per day, mostly by email. And about all sorts of different things. Here's an excerpt from one that just got posted, about Club Zero-G, at Newsrama.

How did Rushkoff return to comics, like so many lapsed readers before him? "A friend from San Francisco told me that I had been quoted in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. I started reading him after that, and we eventually met up and confessed we were each other's fan. My friendship with Grant is probably most responsible for getting me interested in actually writing for this medium."

So what can readers expect from Club Zero-G, his first foray into the form? "I guess what they can expect is an argument for open source reality; for the idea that we are creating the reality we are living in. I see comics as a safe haven for mythic constructs - for stories in which we can create allegories for really big ideas. They're our society's equivalent of the Bible, really, or of shamanic storytelling. It's a freeflowing dreamspace, where very iconic and symbolic things can take place. So I've ended up using the medium to tell a story about reality as a dreamspace," he says. "Which I honestly think it is, anyway."

4:40 PM | link | 10 comments

 

I've been on the road - playing keyboards with PsychicTV and shooting additional interviews for my Frontline documentary.

We played two gigs this weekend, one in DC and the other in Pittsburgh. Nothing against DC whatsoever, but the gigs were like night and day. Surprisingly, though DC was a super-professional venue called the 9:30 Club, with great sound and an able-bodied crew, the experience paled in comparison with the show we did at a bizarre little garage-becoming-a-performance-space called The Eye (or Thee I).

As soon as I walked into the Eye, I knew we were in for a treat. The vibe was just, well, homey and alive and friendly and special. So was the dressing room, complete with a PsychicTV Set, and Psychic Cross embossed bananas!




The people were great, and somehow the fact that we were playing in a giant concrete room with sound reverberating against every surface didn't seem to matter. (Our sound man, Scott, also had something to do with that.)

So, thanks Pittsburgh for special evening that I know I'll always remember.

For the record, I spoke to soundman Scott after the second gig, to see if it really was so much better than the first. He said that although the energy of the crowd was certainly better in Pittsburgh than in DC, the shows themselves were virtually identical - or at least of identical musical value.



So although it felt as though we played so much better in Pittsburgh, we actually played the same. It was the experience of this music that was so different. To me, this suggests that the music itself is just the medium for a very different kind of exchange. It's not a completely value neutral medium at all - but it is also the potential carrier for kind of transmission between people that can't just happen by itself. Like the bread on which you put the peanut butter.

The music may be the medium, but in this case it wasn't the message.

8:50 PM | link | 9 comments

 

I'm doing three gigs in the next week or so as keyboardist with Psychic TV - thought I'd mention them here:

Washington DC: Friday June 25, The 9:30 Club
Pittsburgh PA: Saturday June 26, The Eye
New York NY: Saturday July 3, The Bowery Ballroom

more info

8:47 PM | link | 1 comment

 

I'm just back from the Media Ecology Association's fifth convention, where I delivered what was, for me, a daring keynote challenging media ecologists to claim 'money' as a medium.

Media Ecologists believe that there's no such thing as a value-neutral medium. TV, the Internet, and even cell phones each have various propensities and biases because of the way they work. The same must be true for money - particularly the kind of money we use here in the United States, which is created by fiat and costs interest to borrow. (There are many examples of currencies throughout history that have worked in other ways, with often better results.)

If true media literacy is the ability not only to read and interpret but to author in that medium, then we should engage in the creation of alternative, complementary currencies. Money needn't only be understood as an economy - it could also be understood as an ecology.

So, I had a good time with that one, and then got a big surprise: in honor of Neil Postman (an amazing scholar and one of the founders of media-ecology) the association decided to create an award honoring someone whose work and life exemplified the values he lived by. And while I would have been delighted simply to have been one of the names that came to mind, I ended up winning the award - The Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

How much better does it get? Not much, really. I couldn't think of an aspect of my career I'd want recognized more than that. It's why I got involved in this whole writing thing, anyway: to participate in the great conversation, and encourage others to do so, too. And while I don't know that I'm quite ready for any sort of lifetime achievement award, I can certainly use the encouragement to stay on such a course.

Neil was a student of Marshall McLuhan, and later said of him, "Marshall McLuhan liked me, but he wouldn't have liked my books."

Neil didn't really like my books, either. Not the first ones, anyway. They were too optimistic and uncritical, in his opinion. But he did like Merchants of Cool and Coercion, ardent critic of electronic media that he was.

And while I may not share all of his trepidations about new media, I certainly see myself as a media theorist in the public service - doing whatever is necessary to raise the level of conversation, communication and, most of all, compassion. Without an occasional troupe of ready participants - of which I count anyone reading this post as a member - that wouldn't be possible.

7:57 PM | link | 19 comments

 

Just back from the BEA (Book Expo America) - the giant book industry conference. It really was a zoo. After five minutes in the convention center, I felt like quitting writing. Sales people pushing 'units,' tens of thousands of titles, cheesy convention-floor displays, acres of wasted carpeting. Books shipped and sold like oil or steel.

The weirdest part were the autograph sessions. They line up forty authors at little tables at the end of long roped-off lanes. Then conference attendees line up for free autographed copies of books (a one-dollar donation to charity is reqested). A majority ask for a signature and date, only. Why? Because they're going to sell them, either on Ebay or in their stores.

That's right - immediately next to the signing area (itself a football-field of lanes) is a huge "shipping area" where people can load their books into boxes, and then wheel them over to a temporary UPS facility. So the book-accumlulators simply get as many books as they can carry, load up their boxes, then return for more copies.

I'm sure it's good for the book business, on some level. These are mostly independent bookstores, just looking to make an extra few thousand dollars a year by selling promotional copies of new hardcovers. (I used to buy "cut-out" - so named for the notch in the jacket meant to prevent returns - promo albums from the local record dealer, too.)

Even then, the scramble for sellable product had little to do with books - I mean, with the words inside the books or the order in which those words appear. The longest lines were cooking and gardening authors, whose high-priced, photo-filled books would garner more on resale.

In spite of it all, I did manage to find a number of people who care about the state of books and the ideas they transmit. Cheers to independent publishers, like Disinformation, Amok Press, and Softskull, whose publications continue to break open new minds, and whose determination to run interference for authors like me keeps literary culture alive in the midst of this marketplace.

Meanwhile, in a related saga of the relationship between ideas and the publishing business, Featurewell and Nation Books have just released a volume called Killed:Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, in which one of my own killed stories has been published along with those of George Orwell, P.J. O'Rourke, and Betty Friedan. They're having an event in NYC (I wasn't asked to read, but I'll do my best to be attending) on Tuesday, June 22, at B&N; Astor Place, followed by a book party at KGB Bar.

11:20 AM | link | 11 comments

 

I'll be doing some stuff in Chicago this weekend, celebrating the launch of Club Zero-G, the graphic novel, as well as the paperback release of my book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.

There's a Disinfo/Club Zero-G launch party this Friday evening at a club called SUGAR, 108 West Kinzie at North Clark St. 6-8pm.

Then, Saturday, if you're at the BEA, - a big book convention - I'm signing with the "graphic novel" group at 11am, then in the Crown booth for Nothing Sacred at 1:30-2p, and finally back at the Disinfo booth to sign and give away Club Zero-G posters at 3pm.

No time for play Saturday night, sorry. I fly back to NYC Saturday evening.

8:31 PM | link | 7 comments

 

One of the prerequisites for a civic reality is self-sacrifice. I don't mean martyrdom, but the ability to put the needs of the community over one's own, if even only temporarily. The reason the rock lobsters survive on their dangerous single-file trek across the ocean floors is that any one of them is willing to draw a would-be attacker away from the line, at the risk of its own life.

One of the downsides of American consumer messaging is the implied notion that "you deserve it." A better house, a tastier gum, a bigger portion. After all, we're into freedom here in America and, unlike the founding fathers who may have understood freedom in a more dimensionalized way, today we understand freedom as "free to be me." It's the freedom to be an individual - personal freedom. Singular autonomy.

But freedom, like evolution, is not an individual affair. It's a team sport. Unless everyone is free, no one is free. And to keep everyone free, everyone must be willing to sacrifice. Living in a free society with democratic principles means being willing - even looking forward - to participating actively, not simply receiving benefits passively. The latter aren't really any fun, anyway. Whatever we may think of Kennedy today, he was right when he told us to ask what we can do for our country, rather than the other way around.

The danger of literalist Christian fundamentalism in this country, as I see it, is not that people believe in the sanctity of Jesus Christ; it's that they accept the notion that Jesus's sacrifice was less an example than a proxy. As in, "Jesus made the supreme sacrifice so that we don't have to." Now, that's a bastardization even of the Pauline interpretation of the crucifixion - though it may not be inconsistent with Mel Gibson's more recent effort at literalizing the passion. And, of course, there are also those who would point to the suffering of millions in the Shoah as proof that the necessity for self-sacrifice was already paid in more than full, so that this is now the season to reap the bounty that God has bestowed.

Both of these conceits dovetail frighteningly well with the underlying premise of marketing - which is probably why religious fundamentalism and the marketplace have made such compatible bedfellows in American politics. Sacrifice nothing, give yourself everything. You are the only individual who matters - maybe you and your nuclear family - so buy everything you need for yourselves, share nothing, get tax relief, and hire Africans to fight your wars.

I'm not sorry to say it doesn't work that way. In fact, a world in which you are ready to make sacrifices is a much more fun place to live. Just as a relationship that doesn't make you more vulnerable is hardly worth having, a community with no presumption of individual sacrifice for the greater good, is not a community at all.

6:14 PM | link | 23 comments