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Jewish Public Forum Archive
Welcome to the
Jewish Public Forum Archive, where you will find materials
published under the auspices of the Jewish Public Forum, including articles by, and
interviews with, Forum participants.
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Interview with Douglas Rushkoff
From its inception in 1999, the Jewish Public Forum was to be a different kind of
Jewish institution. Seeking to generate fresh thinking about the social, political,
cultural and technological trends affecting ethnic and religious identity and community,
it is an unprecedented effort to broaden the conversation about the Jewish future by
engaging leading figures in academia, business, the arts and public policy, most of whom
have not been involved in organized Jewish life.
Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist, is professor of media culture at New York University's
Interactive Telecommunications Program, and consults, lectures and writes in a wide
variety of settings and venues throughout the world on new media and popular culture. He
spoke at the Jewish Public Forum's June 2000 conference, "The Virtual, the Real and
the Not-Yet-Imagined: Meaning, Identity and Community in a Networked World" about the
enormous democratizing possibilities of new media, and about the simultaneous danger that
the Internet is increasingly designed to distract individuals from independent thought. He
suggested that Jewish ritual and text could help sustain a "media literacy"
a critical distance -- that could counter such dangerous trends.
Shari Cohen, Director of the Jewish Public Forum, sat down to talk with him about these
ideas, his own struggle with Judaism and his ideas about the Jewish future and the Jewish
contribution to an increasingly global society in a period when an orientation toward
survival is no longer viable.
Rushkoff (http://www.rushkoff.com) is the author of Coercion,
Playing the Future, The Ecstasy Club, Media Virus and Cyberia.
His new novel, Exit Strategy, will be published next year.
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SC: You engage in a creative interpretation of Jewish text and tradition in a way that
very much resembles CLAL's approach. For example, I know that the novel you just finished,
Exit Strategy, is based on the biblical story of Joseph. In what way?
DR: As I interpret the story, young Joseph was something of a brat who, as a result of a
preordained and fateful encounter with his brothers, ended up in slavery. Then, because of
his ability to forecast trends, he was elevated to prime minister of Egypt, and ultimately
put in a position to invite his own people to join him down in Egypt, as they say.
But he had forgotten the iconoclastic teachings of his fathers there was no Judaism
yet and, with no ill intention, ended up falling into a different sort of slavery
altogether. The Egyptian mindset.
His worldly success inadvertently made him responsible for bringing the Israelites into
slavery. He invited them to Egypt to survive the famine, but the only part of the
collective psyche to survive was the survival instinct itself. Ive always looked at
that slavery not as 400 years of physical bondage but as a kind of a mental slavery -- a
loss of values and a complete absorption into culture of idolatry, profit and money. This
is the only truly negative sort of assimilation -- assimilation in which we lose the
ethical template that is Judaism. So I look at Joseph and Moses as bookends to the pit of
slavery: Joseph is the guy that forgot and Moses is essentially the same person waking up
four hundred years later when he witnesses an injustice.
Exit Strategy is about a bratty young hacker -- the brattiest and youngest of his posse.
In an attempt to make them proud of him, he ends up taking sole credit for a hack that the
group had done together. The hackers, out of anger, arrange for him to get caught by the
secret service, and he becomes quite infamous. Instead of putting him in jail, the
authorities make him go on TV and confess to how terrible it is to be a hacker. His
descriptions of the emerging cyberculture prove so prescient that he is noticed by a Wall
Street firm, and he eventually earns a job as a technology forecaster the
Chairman's right-hand man. His success allows him to invite not only his old hacker
buddies, but the public at large into the culture of market fascism that I think
were approaching today.
SC: Whats market fascism?
DR: Market fascism is a society where the only common denominator is money; where
everything has an objectified monetary value and where people think of themselves as
commodities. It's a world in which we think of human desire and aspiration as a form of
consumption or production.
SC: What makes it fascist?
DR: Its fascist in that anyone who disagrees is considered a traitor -- an enemy of
the market. To criticize the values of the market is to question the current valuations.
To question those valuations is to risk the collective portfolio. Say whatever you like as
long as you don't hurt the stock market.
SC: What would an example of that be?
DR: Even in real life, over the past few years, whenever I wrote an article in a computer
business magazine challenging the way the Internet has been used as a public relations
tool for the NASDAQ exchange, or showing how most Internet companies have no real
revenues, or explaining why an "exit strategy" is really just a carpet-bag, a
lot of people would call me, write articles about me and publicly say very, very mean
things about me and my work. It was as if my articles in themselves were partly
responsible for hurting the American economy and for hurting the investment pyramid
talk about building pyramids. People who build pyramids are slaves. That's the whole
point.
SC: So I interrupted you in the middle of the story.
DR: I wont tell you the end of the story, but its the Joseph story and then he
wakes up. It ends a little differently and there's even a little Benjamin in there.
SC: That means that you see the possibility for some kind of rekindling of ethical
underpinnings for contemporary society. It is interesting the way you put it because I
dont have the impression that you are someone who thinks about going back to what
had existed before. Are you saying the Joseph forgot and then Moses remembered, so there
was something from the past that was restored?
DR: Well Moses remembered that he was asleep. When you wake up to a new day, you are
still, in a sense, returning to the state of consciousness that you were in before you
fell asleep. Perhaps my most controversial belief is that the awake human being is
intrinsically ethical. Naturally ethical. And the sleeping human is not. I think we can be
hypnotized. I think we are developing technologies specifically for the purpose of
hypnotizing people into this market fascist mentality -- into investing more or buying
more and that scares me. I dont think its a matter of going backwards to the
ethical template of our fathers, but using the tools of our fathers, resonating with them,
even extending them, in order to stay awake while participating in a culture that means to
put us to sleep.
This novel marks the end of a search through Judaism for an ethical matrix that could work
in modern times. I started to experience Judaism as a watchdog religion, Jews as the
"canary in the coal mine." Judaism is the "shit happens" religion --
the religion that says "dont go too far." Or if everyone else is going too
far, we Jews stay just a bit on the sidelines, to make sure civilization doesn't run
itself off a cliff. Like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, watching the campfire while everyone
else screamed in the woods. The modern equivalent would be, "If you hang on, if
you've still got a bit of Judaism working in you, then youll never get completely
lost in the market reality. At least you are taking Saturdays off, to touch real
life."
SC: Do you connect your own Jewishness and the stuff that you take on as a writer to that?
DR: Its certainly a role I play in media theory and hi tech business circles. I have
very strong views about media literacy and the importance of media being used to form
communities rather than just to push propaganda and marketing. And many of the techniques
and safeguards I talk about can be found in Jewish practice.
For example, the Jewish initiation itself is not an act of faith, but a demonstration of
media literacy: the bar mitzvah means you can read the code. Only then are you allowed to
work with Torah. After you know its language, its very construction can become transparent
to you. Or look at the minyan. Why do 10 people need to be present when you read Torah?
Because it's not supposed to be an individual's journey, but a group's. As we know now,
watching media alone makes you most susceptible to its more manipulative effects. Watching
it in groups, and breaking it up into little pieces what Jews call parshas
keep us aware of the meaning, rather than simply entranced by the story. It allows us to
deconstruct the narrative. We remain emotionally distanced from our own mythology. Even
the cherubs on the ark were meant to keep us from placing an idol there, as our
predecessors did.
These distancing techniques keep us from getting hypnotized, or from worshipping some
graven image. In Jewish practice, I found many safeguards against the same negative
tendencies that emerge from the misuse of computers, media, and networking. I think
technologies can isolate us from any sense of community or shared values. They can be used
to frighten us, make us tense and competitive ultimately dropping us way down
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Instead of developing self-actualization or empathy, we are
reduced to a survival mode. We feel at risk, hungry and insatiable.
SC: But can't technologies be incredibly enabling?
DR: Of course they can be. That's why their misuse gets me so upset. Technologies are
enabling as long as they are hooking up people with other people. But right now most of
the money and attention being spent on the Internet is going towards developing techniques
to make you feel very alone when youre on line, so that you buy stuff or,
better, invest in Internet companies.
If you have friends and youre enjoying yourself or if youre conversing with
other people on a bulletin board, then youve got no need to buy anything. If
youre sitting with your loved one watching TV, youre not going to be as
vulnerable to an advertisement for the latest sexy blue jeans because youre already
getting laid, right? But if youre alone at home watching that same ad, you think,
"Maybe if I buy this or if I buy that
then I will get a woman." Sadly, once
you're reduced to this mindset, even the object of your desire is reduced to an object.
Marketers, advertisers and others who wish us to worship images use media in very specific
ways. These ways almost always involve attacking a person on the level of unworthiness and
isolation to make a person anxious, helpless, and desperate for a solution. Media
programmers of this sort mean to induce regression: a childlike, helpless state of mind.
That's why they prefer an isolated, passive viewer, who doesn't even understand how the
technology has been put together. A person who doesn't know the evening news is an edited
program is much more susceptible to its bias. A person who can't read for himself must
believe more of what he is told.
The fact that Jews are not supposed to read the holy texts alone we're not even
supposed to read the Talmud by ourselves is also fascinating. It forces us to be
social and interactive with our stories and laws, rather than alone with them. It's more
like participating in a chat room or newsgroup than sitting passively on a Web site. We
can maintain some critical distance. We are invited to think and comment. The text is kept
alive. Transparent. Open source religion.
SC: I know that you associated yourself with a group of tech writers who called themselves
techno-realists. You were calling for a middle ground between those who were in favor of
unfettered development of technology, driven forward by the market, and those who
completely opposed the encroachment of new technologies in all areas of life
(http://www.technorealism.org). Did this fit in with your take on Judaism?
DR: Sure. I considered that perhaps this is what Judaism has been promoting for 5000
years: participation with consciousness. Get as immersed as you want, but don't lose your
free will. (Think of Pharaoh and his hardened heart. That's the slave state to avoid.)
Basically one foot in, and one foot out. Because the Jews were strangers in a strange
land, they always ended up having one foot in and one foot out. So I really related to
that as a media theorist someone who loves what media can do, but sees the pitfalls
in its misuse.
And because I was publishing so many books, and lecturing on these ethical questions, many
people began coming to me for advice. Advice about their lives. Spiritual advice, really.
People take media very seriously -- especially young people -- and they read my books and
they want the answers. Although I'm pretty certain there are no final answers, I figured I
should at least avail myself of the 5000 years of thinking thats been done on these
very topics (even if they didnt call it "media literacy" or the
"ethics of technology" at the time).
I was also interested in Shabbat from a very practical standpoint. I realized a
couple of years ago that I was getting too strung out by my work, and too wrapped up in
the stakes. I thought that Shabbat would be a good way to disconnect for 24 hours a week
from the whole work-a-day, commercial reality. Reset.
SC: Did it work?
DR: Yes, quite well. I think its helped keep me from falling into the market mania
that seems to have gripped so many of my cyber-friends. Its part of what allows me
to see it. Now I really advocate Sabbath in my books and my talks. I call it the
"one-seventh rule" so they dont think its too religious and get
freaked out by it. It's not about religion, as much as taking one day off a week where you
dont buy or sell anything you dont produce or consume. Twenty-four
hours to celebrate the fact that you're okay even sacred just the way you
are, without doing a thing (http://www.rushkoff.com/shabbat.html).
SC: Do you do that?
DR: For two years, in fact, I did it quite religiously going to temple every Friday
night and Saturday morning. Now I just take the day off, and look for things to do with
friends that don't involve spending or working. It's a great challenge. But I used to do a
traditional Shabbat.
SC: And what happened, because you tell this in the past tense?
DR: Well, as I said before, I wanted to check out Judaism as an adult. So I joined a
conservative shul in Greenwich Village, and went every Friday night and every Saturday
morning for a year. It was my commitment to myself, and to the religion of my father. But
as I got more involved, I felt that the shul was much more inwardly focused and political
than it needed to be. Even cruel in the way officers jockeyed for power or plotted to get
the rabbi fired. The institution was spending more energy on itself than it was on its
members. And the practice itself three hours every Saturday morning started
to feel extremely static, even numbing. Unchangeable. Symbolic and not really alive.
SC: Why did you associate what practicing Judaism had to offer with what Judaism had to
offer?
DR: Doesn't everyone? It's very hard to distinguish between Judaism and the stuff that
goes on in temples. I grew up thinking they were the same thing -- that Judaism is this
thing that happens in the synagogue.
SC: So where are you now in your thinking about this?
DR: Im looking at Judaism as something that brings you half way across the great
existential abyss. In order to make it the rest of the way, youve got to let go of
it. Judaism is a very tricky religion that way. I think Judaism is much more like Buddhism
than we give it credit for which is why we lose so many Jews to Buddhism, most
likely. Judaism, too, is a process. Its a scary process its a dark one,
sometimes.
SC: Whats scary about it?
DR: Because I suspect that Judaism is actually the process by which one gets over the
belief in God. Thats really what I think it might be. Judaism is the process by
which we move from child sacrifice to global cooperation from fear of God, to
worship of God, to expression of God. We are moving into what could be called a
"virtual" stage where you realize God is in everything or not at all. Evolution
moves us from the concrete idols to the words and ideas and, eventually, to
pure love.
Moses himself was denied entrance to Canaan because he couldn't make the evolutionary
leap. He was of the wrong generation. It's all explained in that moment when God tells
Moses to bring forth water from a rock by using his words. Instead of doing this, Moses
bangs the rock with a stick a technique that had worked for him earlier. In short,
the reason why Moses couldnt go into Canaan was because he wouldnt stop
banging a rock with a stick. He couldnt even get from the stick stage to the word
stage.
Likewise, we Jews used to have a God who could actually smell the sacrifice:
"thats good, thanks for the goat." We moved past that, and it's time to
move again. Just look at the way God changes throughout the Torah. That's an indication of
the direction we are to go.
SC: Why is the God-is-in-everything-or-nothing-at-all phase necessarily problematic for
Judaism?
DR: Its not problematic for Judaism, it's a problem for temples and nations. Judaism
will always remain as a primer an instruction manual on how to get through
this phase. It can serve individuals or whole societies. But I think that a certain part
of Judaism is over. Its only our attachment to the pain and suffering of our
ancestors that keeps this part alive. We endured so much pain, and we have experienced
such terrible persecution, that we feel responsibility for the Jewish word, the Jewish
name, and our connection to our tribe. But I fear that tribes eventually serve as cults
directed more towards their own preservation than the preservation of the people
within them. While tribes do allow for a certain sense of warmth and connection, they
ultimately cost us more than they give us in a modern, cooperative global culture.
I know this is a terribly arrogant way to address the survivors of the great tortures. My
own grandparents. Survivors of the pogroms and the Shoah. They worry that without a Jewish
State, and a Jewish tribal identity, we will be flushed out and killed. But how dare we
let the actions of the world's most deranged people dictate how we practice our religion?
We are not just a race, no matter what Hitler believed. Judaism is something that gets
thought up. Remembered. Realized just as Abraham and Moses did. Its obsolete tribal
function is detrimental to its very life.
I believe were moving into a global culture now, anyway. In a sense, there really is
the potential for a great, positive "Jewish conspiracy." As I practice this
religion, as I analyze Torah, meditate on the Shema, I become increasingly convinced that
the object of the game is for us to become one world. That we are really supposed to. Only
what we have to do in order to make that happen, I think, is give up on the idea of making
it one "Jewish" world. We actually have to drop our ownership of Judaism in
order to get what Judaism wants. We gift it to the civilization of which we are a part.
Choose everyone.
SC: What would be left? There would be a process that people were going through that might
or might not be pushed forward by people who have historically been called Jews?
DR: The books will still be there. I think the books will survive. There will be people
practicing Jewish ritual. People are going to do that because they love it or grow
through it. People will practice Judaism or study certain aspects of Judaism for what it
has to offer. You do it for what the process offers you.
SC: So you have a tribal form of Jewishness, to which a lot of people dont
necessarily subscribe. You have a ritual form of Jewishness where people might decide
Shabbat is a good thing and they institute it in their lives it might do great
things to make them more human in their lives. And theres a sensibility -- something
that is being done for the world, which is dismantling tribalisms?
DR: The kind of Jews I imagine emerging in the near future are Jews who are iconoclastic
to the core. They reject any tendency towards mindless worship or idolatry. I think
Judaism today, as an institution, is as responsible and as guilty of that sort of worship
as any other religion on the block. And I do believe there is a path prescribed by Torah
that allows an individual to liberate from his or her own tribal and ethnic allegiance
into something much broader.
SC: You have said that what you try to do in your work is to help diminish peoples' fear
of an uncertain future a future that doesnt look like the past, and to help
encourage a sense of play.
You seem to want to help overcome the problem of institutions which come to be
devoted to their own preservation in order to get to a place where it is possible
to exist in a much more disorderly institutionless environment. How would that world look?
DR: There would be very few maps static maps. You'd end up moving through the world
more by navigating by your awareness of currents and your recognition of patterns than by
referring to static, archaic pictures. It's the difference in the way a cartographer looks
at the ocean from the way a surfer does, who is actually navigating the waves.
SC: But where is the ethical underpinning in that? Is it fluid? Is it internalized?
DR: I think that it has to be internalized. That means growing up as individuals
and as a people. Children need parents to tell them what's ethical. Adults should know it
from the inside. But an ethical sensibility is internalized only by people who have the
luxury and ability to move out of survival mode. Many Jews are unnecessarily caught in
survival mode: even though they are financially fine, and anti-Semitism is at an all-time
low, they are worried about their survival because they think the Cossacks or the Nazis
are going to come around the corner. They are worried about the survival of Jews as an
officially listed "people." When theyre stuck in survival mode people
dont have fun, and can't touch the beauty of existence. They experience only
existential despair.
When I talk to groups of wealthy people (meaning almost any Americans), I tell them
look: if you know youre not going to starve to death and you know youre going
to have a roof over your head no matter what, and your kids are going to go to school no
matter what, then the rest is pure self-actualization. Its all about how much fun
youre going to have before the grim reaper comes and takes you away. And fun is not
trivial at all.
Because if you start looking at life this way -- as play -- then youre freed up to
do a lot of truly meaningful stuff. Let's say youre worried about the people
starving in Rwanda and you decide youre going to fly down there and work with them.
Well, for them its survival, but for you its "play" because you
dont have to go down there at all. Anyone who does that kind of charity work is
doing it because they find it rewarding on a level of self-actualization.
When youre not worried about your survival as an individual or as a race
you have the luxury to behave ethically because its just more fun to live
that way. It is more fun than the compunction to behave ethically because some cop is
going to put you in jail for stealing the bread or some god is going to throw you in
purgatory for screwing someone elses wife.
SC: You are frustrated with Jewish institutions. What can an organization like CLAL do in
your opinion from what youve seen?
DR: I think the best thing that CLAL can do is determine what it is we want to contribute
to society and civilization at large: in other words, what is the Jewish contribution to
the whole? Should our ethical and spiritual insights be gifted to the world as Judaism or
as something else? In other words, could we be so humble that we give away our religion to
the world without even taking credit for it? I think that's the way its going to
have to work. We are not going to get credit for it its the only way other
people will accept it. They won't take it if we insist on branding it "Jewish."
So it should not be gifted as this Jewish package with our return address on it -- but we
should give its great jewels as anonymous charity. It's a higher act of mitzvah to give
charity when no one knows you gave it. It has to be sort of like that. We have to give our
greatest gifts to the other religions and other peoples. Thats one thing CLAL can
do. And two you can figure out a healthier way to preserve Jewish texts and the
essence of Jewish rituals than synagogue. I think we have to figure out what comes after
synagogue.
SC: Why is it hard to know what that looks like?
DR: Its hard because I cant really picture it its hard for me.
What is spirituality without the building? Ive been so trained to think that Judaism
happens in a building. Programmed to give money to keep the building going.
SC: Does it happen with ten other Jews?
DR: I dont know.
SC: Does it just happen everywhere?
DR: If we're lucky, it happens everywhere all the time. Thats why I think that the
stage we have to move into is a pollination stage: where the flower that we think of as
Judaism will die, but the seeds are going to get spread everywhere. I think what we have
to do is decide what those seeds are what are the seeds of Judaism that we are
going to now pollinate the rest of the planet with. We can't mistake the flower of Judaism
for the essence of its life. I don't know what the seeds are, exactly, or what they will
be called. Im a pretty bookish person, so I always think of Torah as our gift.
SC: You just said the gift was the process of getting people to give God up.
DR: That's what's taught in the Torah. And maybe we have to do that by example. Be the
first religion on your block to pollinate. Shed its skin.
SC: Just to clarify youre saying this because this is what you think has to
happen in the world more generally, not because you care about the specific, more narrow
question of what the Jews should be doing?
DR: Its the same argument I made to the Lutheran priests when they had me keynote
address their World Christian Convention last year. I spoke to a thousand Lutheran priests
and told them the same exact thing.
SC: What you are proposing is radical, even given CLAL's long-standing claim that
Jewishness in this era will not be experienced and expressed primarily in the synagogue,
but instead in work, play, family and community life.
DR: We have been victimized for so long. Its so hard to accept that it seems to be
working out for us. And everybody is scared that if they admit it's working out, they're
going to get clobbered in the back of the head by a board. It happens every century,
right? Its just that darned Jewish experience. There are people alive today who
experienced something like that in Germany. They probably read this, and think I'm making
an argument for assimilation which certainly didn't work out too well for German
Jews of the 20th century. But I'm not arguing for conversion to Christianity -- not at
all. I'm aiming for the ultimate mitzvah for the Jewish people.
Its going to be hard to openly discuss what the Holocaust was what Shoah was
until after everyone who experienced it is gone. Even the kind of conversation
were having now its premature, when there are so many people alive
today who have suffered so greatly for being Jewish. These people are our own parents
who suffered so we might live. The kinds of things we're talking about can so
easily be interpreted as disrespectful or ungrateful for their great pain. But thanks to
them, we live in a different world now. A world that not even they can fully appreciate.
Read the end of the Torah from Moses' point of view, and you'll see what I mean. Its
a different generation thats going to have to do this.
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