KFM – DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

This is a new feature in which we get somebody we like to play that game Kill Fuck Marry with a bunch of different options and also interview them about whatever they’re up to. The regular interview comes first because that’s what makes the most sense, but if you want to skip straight to desert, thats fine by us. Just scroll down to where the Qs and As get tiny. Since the economy has made a recent decision to be in the shitter, we thought it’d be a good idea start off by talking to a media theorist, so we called up Douglas Rushkoff.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of a bunch of books on media and popular culture including Media Virus, Playing the Future, and Ecstasy Club. He created the hit documentaries The Merchants of Cool and the Persuaders and he knows a shitload more about most things than you or I do, including why you’re poor and probably always will be. I caught up with him in New York to talk about what’s going on with money.

Vice: The White House has been claiming for the past year that the economy is growing, that the unemployment rate is dropping and American workers are making better pay, but all this seems like complete bullshit. The national debt has soared to over 3 trillion, it’s impossible to find a job, college tuition, healthcare, rent, fuel costs are all raping our wallets on a daily basis. What’s the dill?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, there’s two big fallacies on which the pro-market faction is operating. The first is the idea that the metrics we use to measure economic growth have something to do with how well people are doing. Economic growth is measured with the Gross National Product, which stands for all economic activity. So if I shoot you and you (or your insurance company) have to pay someone to put your brains back in, that’s economic activity and it makes the GNP go up. If a factory comes to a town, puts three small local firms out of business, hires most of the town, pollutes the groundwater making the land unusable for agriculture, and then goes out of business putting the entire town out of work, it can still be measured as a positive for GNP. The money spent on mental health, environmental cleanup, and shipping in frozen food all goes into the metrics for growth. So death is growth.

The other problem is that the money system is itself biased towards moving wealth away from the poor and towards the rich; away from the worker producing value, and to the persons or entities with capital. That’s why we call it capitalism. In an appropriately scaled set of local economies, capitalism can work. That’s what Adam Smith was arguing for. But when you make one big mega-economy out of everything, and coordinate fiscal policy from within a single giant bank at the center of it all (the Fed), it’s as Big Government and tightly controlled as it gets. We are living in more of centralized, bureaucratically controlled economy than anything the Soviets ever dreamed of.

How much of the current problem is the Fed’s fault and how much owes itself to outside forces?

The current money crisis was set in motion 400 years ago when centralized currency was developed and local currencies were outlawed. This isn’t conspiracy theory—it’s just fiscal history. There used to be local currencies that functioned alongside centralized ones. This gave local regions a way to trade internally, and keep some of the value for the things they produced. Centralized currency pulls all value towards the center; this is why it was created. The amazing thing is that almost every economist I speak with has little or no knowledge of this basic history. They don’t understand the biases of the money they work with. They can calculate economic activity, but they have no concept of the relationship between this activity and real life. The people who did understand and implement it are long gone.

So the real problem is that the money we use just doesn’t work—at least not by itself. But it’s the only value we work with, and the only way we currently have of transacting. So every time we transact, we grow poorer. It’s the fault of dead people and the underlying rules of the economic game that everyone thinks are simply given circumstances.

OK, but is there a workable alternative to this system that isn’t you go off into the woods and eat bear meat for the rest of your life?
If you want an example of a current monetary system that works, I’d look at Fourth Corner Exchange—a sustainable community currency in the Pacific Northwest. They’re getting the furthest with complementary currency in the US. There was also a huge effort in Japan during their big recession to get care for people’s elders with alternative currency. No one had any money but everyone had time, so they set up a system where people earned Eldercare credits by looking after an old person. They could later spend these credits to get someone to take care of an elder in their own family, many miles away. People still use the system even since the economy has rebounded because the care ends up better and cheaper to do this way than to involve expensive centralized currency which you have to go borrow.

So it’s more or less back to bartering. Outside of plans like this, what’s the easiest way to make money in the current system?
It depends what kind of money you want to make. The easiest way to make “their” money is to speculate. Speculate through the stock market or commodities markets. In most cases, this means betting against companies and industries through “short selling”. It’s mean-spirited, but it works in a volatile BS economy like ours. The stock market is just a pyramid scheme. All you need to do is figure out which pyramids have reached their limits.

What’s the easiest way to ensure you’ll stay poor?
The easiest way to ensure you’ll stay poor is probably to get a job. Pay rates are calculated to keep you striving. Look in any Human Resources textbook of the past ten years. They believe if you pay someone just a bit less than they need to get by, they’ll hang onto the job most steadfastly.

Do you see any integrity in the whole starving artist vs sellout deal?
I think it’s important to remove oneself from that balance, lest it become obsessive. Businesspeople and advertisers are better at making people feel like they have integrity than real integrity is. Making or not making money at the art one creates is almost irrelevant. If you make no money with your art but then have to freelance at Ogilvy making banner ads at night, how good is that? Or if you’re a starving guitarist who spends all his money buying Chinese-made gear at NASDAQ-listed Guitar Center, what’s really going on?

I used to feel like Gary Panter, who wrote a manifesto arguing that the Bohemian Artist meme is dead, and that we should just sell out and infect the corporate system with our work. But I no longer feel that way. We just give them our best and most virulent stuff, and the market neutralizes its effect. It can digest almost anything. So far, the only ways to remain countercultural are to break laws, do drugs, etc. It’s the only undigestible activity.

All right, Kill Fuck Marry time. Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates.
Marry, kill, fuck (from behind)

Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter.
Kill, marry, fuck

Crap, that one was a gimme because she was the only girl. OK, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, the Statue of Liberty.
Fuck, marry, kill. I’d rather kill all, when the heads start to roll, they too must die with the corporations they support.

An action-packed screen play with two decent sex scenes, a poorly written, self indulgent addiction memoir, whimsical poetry.

Marry, fuck, kill.

The retail staff at American Apparel, Abercrombie and Fitch, Wal-Mart.

Marry, fuck, kill. But American Apparel employees aren’t necessarily attractive people, that’s just good branding. Abercrombie and Fitch employees aren’t attractive people either, they are Nazi youth. Look at the boys’ nipples in the ads. Not normal. But how do I kill a Wal-Mart? Or even fuck it?

American Idol season whatever they’re at by now, Rock of Love, America’s Next Top Model.

Kill, fuck, marry.

That one was genuinely surprising. Nuclear energy, coal mining, oil drilling.

Marry, kill, fuck.

JULIA WERTZ