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Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff · Douglas Rushkoff

The Internet Felt Like This in 1994. AI Might Be Our Last Chance.

April 2, 2026·22 min·1 clip
Douglas Rushkoff, a longtime critic of transhumanism, finally uses AI to build his website, questioning if he's betraying his principles.
Rushkoff begins in the ordinary mess of keeping a site useful. He wants articles, clips, books, archives, an embedded Team Human monologue, and enough transparency for visitors to see alternate themes. Claude keeps the work local at first, which matters. This is not him surrendering everything to a platform. It is him building files he can inspect before publishing. The site is already live at rushcoff.com, with a searchable archive, a changeable structure, and an editor that can turn a pasted talk link into an upcoming event. The fantasy gets oddly practical. He can picture asking for a Team Human page with an embedded YouTube video, or a prompt that lets people search across his body of work. Then the ecological worry catches up. Based on what he has read and been told, he expects the energy and water cost to feel huge, almost like a long luxury flight. The answer comes back smaller than he thought. He says the Claude work was just under five dollars, while leaving room for subsidies, hidden externalities, and costs that are still being undercounted. That caveat keeps the excitement from getting too neat. Rushkoff is not calling AI clean, harmless, or redeemed. He is asking whether total rejection might miss a useful edge. By the end, the website has become a bigger question. If AI can spot patterns at a scale older tools could not, can it help rebuild virtual infrastructure for good? He treats the critique as justified, but resists writing the ending too early. The mood is hopeful, uneasy, and still testing itself.

As heard by us

A careful case for judging AI by what it can do, and what it quietly costs.

Rushkoff treats AI less like a finished product than a practical test of purpose and price. He describes using Claude to rebuild his website, with a searchable archive, a changeable editor, embedded media, and a theme menu, and says the job took about five hours instead of a…

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Why you'd press play

A reflective talk about AI, energy, and whether faster tools can still serve human life.

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