Team Human

Playing for Team Human Today is lifelong activist, warrior, and witch Blaed Spence AND writer, professor, and author of Slow Media, Jennifer Rauch.

Today’s show continues our ‘live from the road’ series as Douglas brings Team Human to the Bunk Bar in Portland, Oregon for an event in collaboration with XRAY radio.

Douglas opens with a monologue arguing that politics are still stuck in the television age. What might politics look like when we are not reduced to mere spectators but instead become engaged as active participants?(@1min30s)

Blaed Spence joins Douglas on stage for a conversation about the subversive act of looking away from our screens and into each other’s eyes. For Spence, it’ about embracing the opportunity for the awe, wonderment, imagination, and ultimately, true connection. (starts at @12min30s)

Author and professor Jennifer Rauch then joins the stage asking us to imagine ourselves as more than just “eyeballs and wallets.” Like Spence, Rauch argues that looking away from our devices and engaging in Slow Media practices creates the space for us to use all media more thoughtfully and autonomously. “We’ve internalized the logic of faster, more efficient, more production, but there is a whole world of experience that is beyond quantification.” (starts @ 39mins)

This episode ends with a group conversation and audience Q&A. (@67mins)

More on our guests:

Blaed Spence is a lifelong activist, warrior, and witch — a change-agent who’s worked extensively with Starhawk and the Reclaiming Collective in the U.S. and Canada; an alum of the Apple Multimedia Lab, founding partner of Wired Magazine, Senior Designer at Paul Allen’s Interval Research; and an operative of the rEvolution working to dismantle the patriarchy and predatory capitalism from within the belly of the beast.

Jennifer Rauch is the author of Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart and a Professor of Journalism & Communication Studies at Long Island University Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in the Huffington Post, Medium, and Urban Audubon.

Check out Rushkoff’s regular column on Medium for essay versions of this and other show monologues.

Team Human happens each week thanks to the generous support of our listeners on Patreon. Your support makes the hours of labor that go into each show possible. You can also help by reviewing the show on iTunes.

On this episode you heard Fugazi’s “Foreman’s Dog” in the intro thanks to the kindness of the band and Dischord Records. Mid show you heard R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time and Throbbing Gristle’s “Walkabout” (See Team Human Episode 67 with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.) Our outro features the Mike Watt ’s beak-holding-letter-man.

Order Team Human the book and manifesto, now available everywhere!