Douglas Rushkoff

July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Media Virus, and Innovation From the Inside Out. We asked him about writing and publishing in the 21st Century.

FUTURIST: Do you think the book has a future?

Rushkoff: Well, you've got to distinguish between the failure of Capitalism's scarcity model to generate income and the supposed failure of books to interest people. What we're really wrestling with on a fundamental level, if you want to talk futurism, we're looking at the end of the broken and ill-conceived model of economics. Economics is based on a renaissance ideal of monopoly currency creation. As in, the currency that would be created by a central authority that was interest-bearing and that really came into existence in order to perverse the status of the elite in the face of a rising middle class so that they could invest from a distance in the enterprises of other people and maintain the aristocracy without working. That's worked really well for four or five hundred years, but now we have technologies that make artificial scarcity really obviously fake, instead of maintainable through various myths. The role of publishers in trying to maintain that Capitalism has changed that job from distributing books to trying to prevent the distribution of books. That's a bad position for anyone attempting to promote prosperity.

FUTURIST: What can publishers do to re-imbue their industries with value in an era when tools have more economic value than words?

Rushkoff: They have to look at what is still scarce. For me, I make maybe ten times my book advances speaking than I do on the book. That's a revenue stream that my publishers deserve a share of. I end of doing the speaking. They don't know how or really want to participate in that. If they started asking for it, a lot of authors would go crazy. But if they integrated my speaking gigs with book publicity, they would sell a hell of a lot more books. Every time I do a big talk, I have to arm wrestle the publisher to help me sell a thousand, five thousand books to the people who want them. They want them at a discount because they want 5,000 copies. In reality, if I'm going to get $5000 on a talk, my publisher should get half of that money and should help me administrate the talk and getting books out. While the book isn't scarce, I'm scarce. I can only be in so many places. So there are a lot of different experiences that attend the book that they should be participating in to think about the book as a way to promote a set of ideas. How to work with those ideas is limited.

FUTURIST: Speaking of different access points, you're credited with creating the world's first open-source novel. What did you learn from that, in terms of what you would recommend that authors do now and what should they not do?

Rushkoff: I should have just found the money and programmers and done it myself, rather than go through Yahoo Internet Life. [Because Yahoo Internet Life died but my book could have kept living. So when Yahoo died, eleven thousand people's comments died and the project itself died. Unfortunately, or fortunately, our books last longer than our publishers. I rarely publish at a company with the same editor that bought my book because even they turn over so much. I would suggest people maintain independence, do things themselves, because corporations can lose money, turn off the server or let a project die and you as the author or content creator lose your long tail. The other thing, understand that what people want to do is create a community around your project rather than change your project. They want to be creative, but they want to add something as well...we're living in an increasingly DIY culture.

FUTURIST: In your talk, you mention Andrew Keen's book. In that book, he brings up a really interesting point, which is that old media is based on the concept of gatekeepers and that gatekeepers add value to all media by keeping out some spontaneous activity and refining it, making the stream a little more coh