THE DEFECTOR

Doug Rushkoff was one of tech's founding optimists. Now he's renouncing the digital revolution. He says it's the only human option.

- Malcolm Harris

THE MEDIA STUDIES building at Queens College is small and dark, with low ceilings and narrow corridors. It was built more than a century ago as a residential school for incorrigible boys, and a certain atmosphere of neglect remains. When I visit on a January weekday to see Douglas Rushkoff, who teaches here, he guides me around a stack of fallen ceiling tiles to his office in a back corner of the first floor. The Wi-Fi in the room is spotty, so he uses an Ethernet adapter to plug his laptop into the wall. The only evidence that we haven't traveled back to the '90s is that when it's time for class, no students show up. Instead, Rushkoff opens his laptop and brings up a grid of faceless black boxes.

This is the first course meeting of Digital Economics: Crypto, NFTs, and the Blockchain. Rushkoff is a good sport about teaching on Zoom, though it's a shame his class of mostly undergraduates can't fully appreciate the 62-year-old-media-studies-professor look that he's absolutely nailed: black V-neck, cropped gray hair. He launches into an impassioned half-hour lecture in which he urges his students, only three of whom have their cameras on, to see through the social construction of money he pulls out a dollar bill and waves it in front of the laptop screen, saying, "This is not money. This is a piece of paper that we use to represent money" and to probe what he calls the "big question" of his life's work: how power travels across media landscapes.