The Agenda

They Are Not Us, They Are Them

by Douglas Rushkoff (excerpted with permission from Disinfo.Con DVD, available February 2007)

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who believe there are two kinds of people and people who don’t believe there are two kinds of people.

I used to be the kind of person who believed there were two kinds of people. There was “them” and there was “us”—the others. And, boy, we work pretty hard to make sure people know we’re the others.

Counter-fucking-culture. I am a card-carrying member. I got a counter-culture medal, for a war against “them.” The easiest way to marginalize oneself is to become a counter-culture. We got our medals, we have our cards, we have our devil heads—here we are! And who are the real others?

What I mean to propose is that we’ve won. Period. We’ve won. They—whoever “they” are—have surrendered to us. All we need to do now is declare victory. And that is, essentially, what is happening. We are slowly declaring victory. We are realizing that we’ve won. The days of, bless his heart, Art Bell, really did end on New Year’s Day. How many books are put out saying: “Doom is coming, doom is coming!” Who are the best at saying that? The Christians. Two thousand years. Done! Over! Doom and gloom! You need it, to hang on to the difference. The saved and the damned. The ones who are going to make it through the bottleneck at the end of the time-wave and the ones who aren’t. Well, I think everybody makes it. This is the 21st century, and duality is over. Duality is passé.

It’s hard, I admit, to be in the so-called counterculture these days, because the minute we do something, “they” figure it out, and it’s at the mall in two weeks—right? And we don’t want that, because it’s our thing. How dare they? They are not us! They are them!

Duality is over. Duality is passé.But the main reason we decided they are “them” is because they are doing it with money rather than with real conviction. They do it with money: buying the thing that we really believed in.

That’s their way of surrendering to us. Money is the only thing that they know to have value. So they are throwing it at us:

“Please! Let us wear a piercing! Let us have a tattoo! Let us listen to the right music! We want to be like you!” That is what they are saying with their money. This is the way they are surrendering to us.

But we won’t take it because they are so mean! And they are so wrong! “Teach us,” they say, “teach us. We don’t know how. We have money. Here. Take our money.”

“We don’t want your moneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!” But if one of us goes “Oh, well, maybe I’ll take a little of their money,” the response is “Oh no! He’s one of them now! He’s one of them! He took their money!”

Sigh. The fact is we’re all human beings here. On this whole planet, we’re all human beings. I think the battle, if there is one, is no longer “Us” against “Them.” I think it is “Us” against “It.” And I will try to define what that “It” is.

I am going to talk a little bit about how we got to this place, why we are so entrenched in “Us” and “Them” thinking—and then how to potentially break it.

How we got here is easy. We basically invented technology as a way to control the natural rhythms of nature. We have lights so we can stay up at night. We have heating so we can live in cold places. We have airplanes so we can pass through ten time zones in ten hours; melatonin so we can fall asleep when we get there; Dexedrine so we can wake up the next morning; and Prozac so we can live in a life that has defeated so many cycles.

Then we developed media as a way to control populations. We have stores, and associations, and commercials, all of which is really “programming.” And that’s why the stuff on television is appropriately called programming. “They” are not programming the set or the schedule, they are programming the viewer. You choose your programming from one of three, now four, eight or twenty stations, but it’s your programming. “How do we want to be programmed today?”

Now the main way we got programmed is through stories. We all know how stories work, back from the Bible and before, through to Dristan commercials today. You create a character the audience likes, someone they can identify with, let that person make some decisions that get him into danger of some kind, and then come up with an answer. Like Dristan. Like Arnold with a big gun. Like Christianity. Like family values. Whatever it might be. Get the audience with as much tension as they will tolerate, then give them the answer. And they will accept your answer, because they are captive viewers.

Things like the Internet changed the way we related to the media space that was programming us.Well, what happened next was the invention of interactive devices. Things like the Internet changed the way we related to the media space that was programming us. Thus this “thing” happened. Quite simply, it started with the remote control. The remote control made it so that if you are being pulled into a corrosive story, where you are going to be sold a gun, an ideology, a candidate, or a pill—now you could use the remote and get out. Boom. Deconstruct. Take apart the image. You’re not stuck in the story anymore.

The remote control to me is the same moment in history as the Zapruder film. It was a way of creating discontinuity. The death of Kennedy itself was discontinuity, and then we saw it, frame by frame by frame by frame. So media, instead of creating a story and programming us, was being taken apart and breaking down the story, promoting the discontinuity and making people ask questions.

The joystick was the next invention that led to a more chaotic and, I would argue, level playing field in media space. If you think back to the first moment you played any kind of video game it was probably, for most of you anyway, Pong. There was a black and white screen, and you move this white box up and down, and you went: Wow! This is amazing, this is a revolutionary moment. Was it because you were thinking, “I love table tennis?” “I want to be able to practice table tennis without a partner around so when the Chinese come and we have another tournament we’ll be able to beat them?” No. You were thinking: I have control of the pixel. That was the magic moment. And it changed our relationship to the screen.

So the remote control was a Kennedy-like deconstruction moment where we were no longer stuck in the story. The joystick was a demystification moment, a Pong moment. And the other devices are, of course, the computer mouse and the camcorder, which now instead of just receiving media we can put out media. It turns the medium into a Do-It-Yourself environment. And the kind of event-story I would tie to that would be the Rodney King tape, which changed the way people looked at CNN. The Rodney King tape changed the way “They” looked at CNN too. All of a sudden, any story, anywhere, can come up and media space is two ways. Cameras everywhere.

If you remember the early days of the Internet—text only, actually—it was a chaotic, joyful place. We could roam free through the media space and we could do our own kinds of pattern recognition. Tying this to that, that’s linked to this, this is linked to that—which is how a conspiracy culture emerged, because we were making connections we had never made before.

Meanwhile, there were some people who were threatened by the Internet, threatened by this chaotic media space, threatened by the free-flow of information. Of course, companies. So they needed to change the public perception of what it was. And what do they decide to call this thing? Communications Revolution? No. They called it an Information Revolution. Why would they do that? Because information can be commodified. Information can be bought and sold. But it was not an Information Revolution, this was a Communication Revolution. We were the content of this thing, not “information.” What are the big issues now? Copyright law and copyright protection.

So OK, this is an Information Age then. But then they had to undo the demystification of all the kids playing with their pixels. How did they undo demystification? Well, re-mystify it. Look at Windows 98. Do you think anybody knows how that works? No, a machine makes it, actually. No one knows how that works. It is a big interface. Look at the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet. The World Wide Web is flat—with a sign that says “Can’t Get Through.” The World Wide Web interface is not Do-It-Yourself, it’s Read-It-Yourself. Sit alone and click through it—and you get drawn inexorably to the “Buy” button.

For the most part, Attention Deficit Disorder is an adaptive strategy to a world where you are programmed everywhere you look, so you start pulling away.Then they had to undo our ability to deconstruct. We’re all deconstructing, playing with the remote, moving from channel to channel, leaving when the commercials talk. So what do they call this? Attention Deficit Disorder—and I am sure there are some real people with some real thing. For the most part, Attention Deficit Disorder is an adaptive strategy to a world where you are programmed everywhere you look, so you start pulling away.
We are, in this sense, in the midst of a coercive arms race. Our machines and our programmers develop a new strategy for compliance, and we then develop a new counter measure; then they develop a counterattack for that, so we develop a new countermeasure for that.

Look at any of the commercial worlds we live in. We’re all now hip to malls—that they are designed in a horrible architectural way to pull us in and make us buy more stuff. So now for us hip, NPR, Utne Reader, simple-people, they’ll make South Street Seaport, or Quincy Market. “It’s a historical mall, so you can feel good about taking your children there.” Instead of going to Toys-R-Us you go to Ye Olde Kite Shop, which is probably a subsidiary, and buy the same thing. And then for those of us that are smart enough to know that—“OK, I don’t want anything like that at all, no frills, no nothing”—we go to Price Club, Home Depot, one of those splaying warehouse stores. But the warehouse is a theme! Oh, you think that it is a coincidence that it looks like a warehouse, or that it is a warehouse? It’s not a warehouse, it’s a store. But they have little pallets, and ladders going up and down, “I am getting the real thing here,” you say, “got right through them!” Go to a design meeting for a warehouse store sometime. “Should we make the shelves out of metal?” “No, no, no, woooooooood….”

One thing I have been arguing for, in the various places I argue, is the Sabbath.Now that machines are responsible for designing the environment and our consumption experiences, it gets a little scarier for me. In other words, if we have machines designing information architecture websites, using pacing-and-leading techniques, using permission marketing techniques, or using one-to-one marketing techniques, then we end up getting drawn into perverse acceleration of ourselves. What is the counter to that? I would say the counter to that problem is realizing that there is no human being behind it. So the object of the game now is to find the humanity. Cherish the humanity. If anything, augment the humanity.

One thing I have been arguing for, in the various places I argue, is the Sabbath. It’s a really old recipe that sounds really Christian and square. But maybe the ancients figured out that if people spend more than six days in a row involved in buying, selling and commerce that they go a little mad—that they can lose it. And that if every seventh day you rest, you have one day where you don’t buy or sell anything. And like Mr. Rogers says, celebrate the fact that you are OK just the way you are. Just the way you are without doing anything. Then it’s harder on Monday morning for “them” to compel you to act—by “them,” I mean the machine.

Joy itself is experiential, not aspirational. If you have to do something to get joy—then that’s not joy.The other thing for us to realize is that joy itself is experiential, not aspirational. If you have to do something to get joy—then that’s not joy. I promise you: every time you have to do something in order to get the thing you want—and I don’t just mean open the door to get in the room—I mean every time you have to aspire to joy, the thing you are aspiring to is not joy.

The reason why we’ve won is that the world is looking to us for the authentic joy that they’re missing. The ravers, the punks, the goths, the weirdos. And at the same time, we’ve noticed a heated pool might not be such a terrible thing, or a Lexus, or whatever it is. If we want to hang onto our grey Ford Escort from 1974, we have to realize that was a choice too. But they are looking to us for authenticity; they are looking to us for fun.

I say, let them in! Take their money. It is corrosive to everything that we think they stand for. Let’s accept their surrender. And even if they don’t think of it as surrender—or if they get upset that we call it that, we can say “Oh no, we’re the ones who lost. Don’t worry. You’ve won.” Can you imagine if we were that secure of ourselves? To let them think that they won? We’re not, though. Not yet.

I went through a weird shift over the last couple of years. I was a very much a let-it-rip New Age type of guy. “Follow your bliss, everything is gonna be fine.” Especially as the Internet happened. I thought, “counterculture is coming, it is going to be great, it’s all beautiful, go-go-go.” And then I looked at some of the people who were using some of those same words—corporate libertarian yucky people. “Go-go-go” became the new language of faith for the NASDAQ—which will crash, I promise. And I was like “Aww, that is terrible!” So I went back to Judaism for a while, I thought, “there’s gotta be something in there…” Where is the ethical template? How do we draw the line? How do I differentiate between what I am saying and that yucky thing that “they” are saying?

The problem is, I thought that the go-forward mentality of a techno-libertarian type would lead to fascism, finally. We have that example: Hitler. It happened in this century. “Shit happens,” which is what my Grandmother says about Hitler, “shit happens.”

So we don’t forget, we watch out, draw the line in the sand. And finally we stand up. “Duality is real because if you don’t believe in duality—look what happens.” I believe the opposite is true today. I think duality is what made Hitler. There is Us and there is Them. Insiders and Outsiders. Aryans and Corrupt Blacks, Jews, and women. Us and Them.

I think that in the 21st Century the side that will win this “thing” is the side that no longer needs to see the “other” this way.

We are not Counter-Culture—if anything we are Pro-Culture, right? “They” are counter-culture, I am not counter-culture—that’s horrible! Why accept their label? That we are a marginalized, ghettoized, counter-culture? No.

I think the way we should define “Find the Others” is not to find the Other Ones Like Us, but to find the Human Beings in the others.Which is why I go back to find the others. “Find the others.” What did Timothy Leary really mean? Well, he might have meant to find the others like us. But we’re not “others,” we’re us. I think the way we should define “Find the Others” is not to find the Other Ones Like Us, but to find the Human Beings in the others. We still haven’t found them, we’re scared of them, we’re angry with them, and we hate them. But they are begging us. They are looking for us. They are desperate to find us. Well, let’s find them too. But not the machine that’s calling itself “them.” Let’s find the People. I like that. Find the Others. We’ve got the “Us” down. From now on, let’s find the “Others.”

The Disinfo.Con DVD will be available February 2007. In the meantime, you can rent the double DVD from Acme Video (137 Brook Street, 401.453.2263). We just returned the video, painfully over due, but the meager fine was gladly paid and worth it. If Disinfo.Con is not available, Acme Video has other fine cinematic achievements to choose from, not to mention a nice stock of local work.