User:Colm/rushkoff-encoding-decoding-notes

Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

Menace

February 22, 2016 6

That’s why this moment matters. We are creating a blueprint together—a design for our collective future. The possibilities for social, economic, practical, artistic, and even spiritual progress are tremendous. Just as words gave people the ability to pass on knowledge for what we now call civilization, networked activity could soon offer us access to shared thinking—an extension of consciousness still inconceivable to most of us today. The operating principles of commerce and culture—from supply and demand to command and control—could conceivably give way to an entirely more engaged, connected, and collaborative mode of participation.

That's why this moment matters

February 22, 2016 6

It is that thinking itself is no longer—at least no longer exclusively—a personal activity. It’s something happening in a new, networked fashion.

Call to our intellect

February 22, 2016 8

This is uncomfortable for many, but the refusal to adopt a new style of engagement dooms us to a behavior and psychology that is increasingly vulnerable to the biases and agendas of our networks—many of which we are utterly unaware we programmed into them in the first place

Uncomfortable

February 23, 2016 9

Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential.

Shortfall of the alphabet

February 23, 2016 10

But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do.

Capability of the computer era

February 23, 2016 10

Like the participants of media revolutions before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us. And so we, too, remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us.

Without learning how they work

February 23, 2016 10

As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.

Monopoly

February 23, 2016 11

The difference is in the nature of the capability on offer—namely, programming. We are not just extending human agency through a new linguistic or communications system. We are replicating the very function of cognition through external, extra-human mechanisms. These tools are not mere extensions of the will of some individual or group, but tools that have the ability to think and operate other components in the neural network—namely, us.

Extending human cognition

February 23, 2016 12

The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition?

The digital age

February 23, 2016 12

The way to get on top of all this, of course, would be to have some inkling of how these “thinking” devices and systems are programmed—or even to have some input into the way it is being done, and for what reasons.

Get some inkling of how these thinking devices are programmed

February 23, 2016 13

a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box.

Black box

February 23, 2016 13

humble spirit in which it is offered: ten simple commands

In terms of relatability, this is where Rushkoff makes a mistake?

February 23, 2016 15

turning the click of the shutter into an act of global publishing

Xpub

February 23, 2016 16

I. TIME

If anything, because our conversations were asynchronous, we had the luxury of deeply considering what we said

Asynchronous

February 23, 2016 18

email found a person when he or she wanted to be found

Found

February 23, 2016 19