Team Human - with Douglas Rushkoff & George Monbiot
15 February 2019| British Library, London, UK
Virtual Futures presents media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, in conversation with George Monbiot, to expose how the technologies designed for human connection risk becoming agents of isolation and repression.
Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Digital-age technologies, in particular, present the greatest challenges to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy.
But all is not lost! Rushkoff will reveal the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invite us all to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.
Partnering with The British Library.
Speakers
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, documentarian, and world-renowned public intellectual. He has spent his prolific career thinking about how new media and technology are impacting culture, business, and the economy. Named one of the world’s 10 most influential thinkers by MIT, Rushkoff has written 15 bestselling books and coined such concepts as “viral media,” “social currency,” and “digital natives.”
George Monbiot has been named by the UK’s Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He is visiting professor in the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University.
