The penultimate speaker in KLRU's 2007 Spark Series is the ever-fascinating Douglas Rushkoff, a hugely prolific author, teacher, and documentarian who's written extensively on new media, pop culture, religion, and technology as it pertains to society in general.

Rushkoff first exposed the world to the emerging cyberculture phenomenon with his 1994 book, Cyberia, and has since published at least ten best-selling books, including Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism (2003) and Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1994), where he first coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "viral media." His latest book, Get Back in the Box: Innovation From the Inside Out, urges businesses to return to their core competencies instead of obsessing about rethinking, rebranding, or repackaging their products.

He's also served as host and writer of two critically-acclaimed Frontline documentaries--The Merchants of Cool, a report on the marketing of pop culture for teenagers, and The Persuaders, which provides a glimpse into the radical new ways that marketers are targeting consumers-- and served as a frequent commentator and columnist for a variety of TV, print, and radio programs, including NPR's All Things Considered, CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, and Discover magazine.

Read on for our email interview with Douglas Rushkoff! He'll be speaking at the Paramount Theatre tomorrow evening at 7:30pm. Tickets are available online, and we'll be giving away a pair later in the afternoon.

Right off the bat: what will you be talking about at the Spark lecture [tomorrow]?

I suppose that depends a bit on what happens between now and then. I feel particularly comfortable experimenting in Austin, and feel more invited than usual to share whatever might seem most pertinent at the moment. More of a real-time, live, consideration of our state than a canned lecture.

As far as a plan, though, I'm hoping to address how we miss the opportunities offered to us by new media, how we've come to accept social constructions as given circumstances, and why - even though deep down we know better - we seem incapable of acting on our knowledge. We are, most of us, fully aware that our unnecessary addiction to cash and oil will soon cost us our way of living. Resistance from those we exploit - whether it's people or the planet itself - will inevitably break through the insulating dream we're so intent on maintaining around ourselves. The iPod earbuds will only block out so much noise before problems make themselves known to us.

I want to look at the ways in which we've been programmed to ignore the warning signs, the history of social control, and its modern incarnation in marketing and propaganda.

Photo by Johannes Kroemer

What topics are you currently exploring in your research, publications, and other projects?

Well, my most recent book, Get Back in the Box, was a call for businesses to consider learning about the industries in which they are involved. It sounds sarcastic, I suppose, but I was offering a new model for American business, based in becoming really good - really competent - in the thing that the business supposedly does. This would make businesses much less dependent on marketing and corruption, and much more capable of innovating effectively. I made a lot of arguments against outsourcing, because more often than not companies outsource the thing that they're supposed to be good at. Then they lose touch with the thing they used to do, and lose the ability to improve. It was considered extremely controversial - which is a sad thing in itself. Competence as radical.

I'm also working on a comic book called Testament, which revisits the Bible for its relevance to our current plight: sacrificing children to false gods, leaders who exploit idolatry to enslave people.... That's also being considered controversial, because I make so-called radical interpretations of the Bible, such as telling the story of how Lot had sex with his daughters. Only it's not truly radical, because it's written down in the Bible just that way. But it's a lot of fun because I get to come up with modern allegories for things, such as RFID chips implanted in everyone's arms that are used to track them and enforce the military draft.

Right now I'm very interested in Corporatism. I'm thinking about it less as a global system perpetrated by companies than an ideology embedded in our culture and thinking. How did it get there? Why does it persist?

Let's talk about one of your latest projects, a comic book series, Testament, published by Vertigo and recently nominated for an Eagle Award (congrats!). What's this story about, for our readers who might not yet be familiar with it?

The story concerns a group of people who are basically draft-resisters. They yank the RFID tags from their arms and decide to live as "free" people. But that gets pretty difficult when currency is tied to having one of those chips. So the whole book becomes a great allegory for slavery in the Bible. In the Bible story, Joseph (the Israelite hero), teaches Pharaoh about abundance and scarcity, as well as how to charge people later for the grain they get today. Joseph is the one who created the conditions for his own people to become indentured servants - which isn't looked at so much by most Bible readers.

So the comic keeps juxtaposing our modern characters' stories with the analogous ones from the Bible. The modern characters even play the parts of the Bible characters, and slowly become aware that they're living on two timelines at once.

Why choose the comic book as your medium, instead of, say, a novel?

Well, my main reason for doing this as a comic was to have gods who live outside the panels. The action of the comic occurs in "linear time," inside the panels (those boxes in which the pictures are drawn). And the meta-story of the gods, who are attempting to influence the action or gain believers, that happens outside the panels. The gods aren't allowed to enter the panels, except as elements or subtle energies. A god might try to shove his arm into a panel, but as it crosses the panel border it just turns into fire or water.

Comics are an ideal medium to tell a story that has both mythos and chronos - that both transcends linear time, yet also attempts to chronicle history.

It's very cool of you to offer to the comic in digital form for folks who can't afford to buy it. What's your motivation for writing Testament, since it's clearly not to reap the profits?

What's the motivation of anything? Who was it - Einstein, I think, said "All great things are done for their own sake." Even studying Torah, according to the Talmudists, was best done "for its own sake."

I guess my immediate motivation is to make the Bible more relevant to people - to make it less exclusively a book for proving nationhood or the existence of God, and more of what it was intended to be: a entrance to a deeper understanding of the human journey. I also want to show that the problems we're going through today aren't new at all - they were addressed a couple of thousand years ago, and options remain the same: wake up, or die.

The latest post on your blog rails against Windows Vista and the digital rights management protocols built into the OS. Is Microsoft shooting itself in the foot by continuing, if not escalating, its efforts to restrict free distribution of content?

Rails? I don't think I railed. I was more sad, than anything. I mean, I'm not friends with Bill Gates, but I'd think all those people working in that giant company could somehow get around the petty obstacles set before them by corporate America, and develop an OS that actually works for the people buying it.

Vista is so very crippled by its digital rights management protection of Microsoft's fellow corporations that consumers will simply have to turn to other operating systems. Not just because they want to get free content, but because they want their computers to work right.

Are you in favor of allowing the unregulated dissemination of music, video, and other content that may be owned by corporations? Or is there some kind of middle ground or easier way for these companies to share their libraries while still retaining some kind of ownership? Or, as it becomes increasingly more difficult for marketers to reach their target audiences, will ownership eventually play less of a role than simply getting the public to be aware of your content?

Music can be created by someone who then receives compensation for it. It used to be that a person needed a big company to distribute that work. Now a person doesn't need that big company anymore. The big companies - instead of helping distribute music, are now more concerned with blocking the distribution of work. They are in the protection business. Most of all, they are protecting themselves - attempting to preserve a role for themselves in a landscape that no longer requires them.

What they should be doing, instead, is learning how to identify and develop talent. Something done by a label should be higher quality - think Deutsche Gramaphone - because it has the benefit of all those great experts. But most labels are now really just law firms, who know little about music. It goes back to basic competency in the industry that they're supposed to be running.

So you finally gave up on Vista and installed Linux. You also predicted that 2008 "will almost certainly" be the year of Ubuntu, much like last year saw the widespread proliferation of Bittorent. But they're two very different things, aren't they? One is a piece of software that's fairly easy for the layman to install and get up and running, while the other is, from the way I understand it, a complicated operating system that requires a seriously different paradigm of operation for the user. Look at Apple: they've spent millions with those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials and their older "Switch" campaign just to try to get people to adopt the Mac OS. You hinted that a "new age in computing" is on the horizon, but is critical mass or awareness enough to convince the "general market" to make this change? Or do we need an entity, a company, an action committee -- however you might describe it -- to champion this change? Are we at the point where word of mouth is sufficient advertising?

Well, the general market, as you call it, doesn't know about bittorrent either. But it did reach a critical mass, and I think Linux will reach that over the next year or so, as well. I generally tend to find things only a few months before the masses jump on - and I'm not particularly tolerant of difficult technology. So if I'm using Linux, I think pretty much anybody can. It's certainly easier than Vista, though it might be harder than Mac right now.

Still, to get MacOS you need to have a Mac. They're nice computers, for sure - but not everyone can afford them.

Isn't it actually kind of "cool," (if you want go there) to be able to grab an old, super lightweight laptop that nobody wants (because it can't run Vista) and then throw in a CD that self-installs a totally easy-to-use operating system. For free? With software better than Office, for free? Isn't that better than shoving a machine into a landfill and making more mercury pollution?

I think it just happens. No action committee required.

Where do you see the future of sites like Myspace, where's become nearly impossible to filter out what's social marketing and what's social networking?

I find it hard to distinguish between Myspace and the web itself. It's just a microcosm of all the personal pages out on the greater web. And the same questions can be asked about both.

The challenge is to be able to filter, and move between things without getting trapped in all the fake marketing stuff. But so many real people are just marketers, now. Paid shills of one company or another. I mean, look at this interview. Why are we talking about my work? So we can discuss the issues within it, or so I can sell more copies of something? I like to think the former, but I wouldn't even be invited to speak to you if I didn't have some participation in the market as well.

Has viral marketing, which you first discussed back in 1994, gone too far, in light of recent mishaps like the Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle?

Yeah, for sure. It's gone too far in that you'll end up in a conversation with a friend that turns out to be something he's been paid to talk about. I've had that happen to me more than once. And it's really disconcerting. Of course, the conversation always becomes about whether it's ethical to pretend to be "just talking" about something when you're really being paid by a company to talk about the thing. Commercials embedded in the fabric of our lives.

Humans as advertisements. Argh.

My 1994 book wasn't called Viral Marketing - it was called "Media Virus!" And I really didn't see it as a guidebook for marketers to sell products as much as an exploration of the way information spreads through an interactive, living, mediaspace. Sure, there are "intentional" viruses - but most are spontaneous.

All this viral marketing going on - or at least 90% of it - wouldn't really qualify as viral, in my estimation. It's just word of mouth. A media virus is a very specific phenomenon, and requires someone to break a rule of media while simultaneously expressing a repressed cultural sentiment. Like what's happening with Imus right now. That's a virus. An Apple ad campaign is just an ad campaign.

Is there an inherent conflict between spirituality, like the "self help" movement, and capitalism?

Not at all. That's the awful part. There's certainly a conflict between true spirituality and capitalism. But the "self help" movement, as exemplified by the Secret and other such get-rich religions - is the extension of capitalism. That's largely what my next book will be about. Spiritually speaking, there *is* no self. It's about getting over the illusion of self.

Capitalism and self-help are about aggrandizing the self. "Self-actualizing". What a crock, really. What a way to perpetuate pyramid schemes.

What are your predictions or thoughts on the next "hot" method of advertising?

Oy. I've got no idea. I don't even like trying to think about it.

What projects are you working on next?

The book on corporatism is the biggie - right now I'm calling it "Corporatized." And a second comic book, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. Plus I'm doing a new column for Discover magazine, which is proving to be a lot of fun.