Transcript: Douglas Rushkoff at Ofcom

Douglas Rushkoff is one of my favourite media theorists by far. His computer nerd spin on social engineering and the Gamer Ethic have inspired me greatly; I also like the fact that he’s no stranger to the power of the metaphoric realm; his graphic novel Testament is a great exercise in trying to infer the supersystem we seem to find ourselves in. 

I’ve been posting comments on his blog for quite some time, some of which you can read in hetnieuwenederland.wordpress.com blogposts below. Often times my ‘critique’ (born in fanboyism, I must admit) towards him boils down to: OK, then let’s build this new social currency system with a nice 2.0 toolkit already :-) That, and I think he might be falling for a vintage hippie-mindtrap: idealising the right-brain perspective on things to the cost of the left-brain, instead of actively seeking synergy between the two. I look forward to further discussions on these topics, immensely :-)

For me, making this transcript was a nice exercise in getting my typing freak on, since I would love to start blogging (again), just like I loved talking with ‘tweeps’ from the UK and America in the #leweb backchannel (I am an avid user of twitter.com/kruithoph) By the way, that was a conference where a ‘2.0′ evaluation of money systems was sorely lacking, again. Apart from the wonderful almost-bitchfight that broke out between Paulo Coelho and Orange CEO Didier Lombard: Lombard called Coelho a liar for alledging that free online copies of his books actually improved sales. The beautiful thing was, he started some kind of leverate in which the laws of thermodynamics dictated that the market would work in a certain way.

I’d say yeah, if you believe in a basically entropic universe. The idea of ‘value extraction at the periphery as the basic  method of traditional business structure’ feels very close to this. 

Thanks for some excellent material Douglas. May your booksales soar :-)

Without further adieu, may I present to you a must-read IMHO on the topic of New Media:

Douglas Rushkoff at Ofcom Conference, London, Friday November 21st 2008

or

http://tinyurl.com/rushkoff-ofcom