Reality is Open Source, Find the Others, Those Weird Fun Mutant People and Create the Weird.
This is probably the the official unofficial motto of Team Human podcast with Douglas Rushkoff. “Team Human is a podcast striving to amplify human connection. Each week we are engaging in real-time, no-holds-barred discussions with people who are hacking the machine to make it more compatible with human life, and helping redefine what it means to stay human in a digital age.”
It was towards the beginning of this year, when I reached out to Rushkoff and joined “Team Human”. In the email telling him a little bit about myself and few projects that I do. I nervously slipped in that I do these mashup videos using audio clips from the show and hope that it was alright with him.
Generally speaking I never worry about ripping and remixing Digital Media of any kind. I am a remix artist, my unformed mind was shaped and molded by Napster. RIP : A Remix Manifesto and Everything is A Remix are my Gnostic Gospels of Cyberia. I play freely and without concern in my digital garden of Eden.
But this time, philosophical idealism is banging its head against the direct experience of actuality. I had this idea of who Douglas Rushkoff was, from his books and clips online. His voice seems very much inline with my inner monologue about life in the trenches of hyperspace, my intellectual hero. Surely it goes without saying this was alright with him.
If I ever made something out of my content, thoughts, poems, my songs of eternity, surely I wouldn’t give a fuck, if some young punk wanted to rip and remix the shit out of them.
I code reality with my dreams, Dreams code me with reality, After all life is but a dream, inside of dream, when its all said and done I am just a pen.
I celebrate the remixed imagery of our digital media and take pride in my keen appreciation of the folds within the creases of our wrinkled wasteland popular culture. Down and Out in cyberspace as a way of life.
Rushkoff emailed me back, and said “This is really cool!”. I exhaled in relief. We both went on with surfing the digital waves of chaos and living our lives. I didn’t really want to bug him, so I left things at that.
But about a month ago now, I received a email from Rushkoff, asking if I still did the Team Human Video Mashups. I replied “Hell yeah!” and he invited me to join the team human slack channel, no purchase necessarily. How did he know that my broke ass need a little break?
They say never meet your heroes, and maybe its never email your heroes? But in this use case he was as chill and cool as I thought he would be. After all, Reality is Open Source, Find the Others, Those Weird Fun Mutant People and Create the Weird. And I found my little digital vacation home in the Team Human Slack channel.
This has been a long time coming, and I did a different version of this for my side project Psychedelic Sundays. But this is Find The Others w/ Douglas Rushkoff.
In 1968 Timothy Leary in a series of lectures Berkeley, and in the question and answer section, a young women stood up and asked him for some advice, she recently engaged in her first psychedelic experience and she felt she understand things about people and the world that she didn’t know before, she saw how we are all connected, how conventional understandings of reality were so limited and predetermined. What should I do now she wanted to know. Leary answered with only three words “Find the Others”
The audio clip is from Douglas Rushkoff’s monologue from Team Human EP. 15 JULIE HOLLAND MD “FINDING THE OTHERS”.
For the full show: http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-15-ju...