Douglas Rushkoff helps me to better understand the cultural and psychological effects of media and technology on society. Known for coining terms like “viral media,” “digital native,” and “social currency,” he has long advocated for renewed human agency in our rapidly evolving world. Photo credit: Rebecca Ashley

I read this essay with a sense of relief. Yes, it feels disorienting when the federal government dismantles institutions, defunds agencies, and upends social norms. But that unease isn’t just felt by progressives—it crosses the political spectrum. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, want the same basic things: autonomy, security, and a fair shot at economic opportunity. Many of us share a growing frustration with financial and tech elites who extract value from our daily lives.

Douglas Rushkoff draws on history to argue that today’s chaos might not be the beginning of authoritarian rule, but rather the peak—or “concrescence”—of a 40-year cycle of neoliberal, corporatist dominance that began with Reagan. 

Rushkoff says we can start to reclaim our agency by “denaturalizing” the present—seeing it as a constructed reality, not an inevitable fate. He outlines four steps:

• Gain agency: Believe in alternatives.

• Reclaim social reality: Collaborate to change the system.

• Cultivate awe: Connect with meaning beyond the current order.

His call is for solidarity—not left or right, but people against systems that no longer serve them.

""But right now, even before most of us feel the impact of all this tomfoolery, we all know that what’s happening is WEIRD. This doesn’t feel right to anyone. It’s strange. It’s strange. It’s strange. This is weird in the way ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna predicted. The rate of novelty - of strangeness - has increased exponentially. We are becoming estranged from the world in which we live, and this not-rightness is palpable by everyone. Even those who were hoping for positive change through the dismantling of the administrative state don’t like so much change all at once. Even the change is changing.""

""But we have a lot in common all the same. We all know that there’s a layer of financialization sucking the majority of value out of everything we do. The bank, the landlord, the shareholders, the private equity firms who seize the financial gain from the work that we do.""

ARTICLE: Uniting in Universal Weirdness