Soledad: What is cyberculture? Who makes up cyberculture?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, to me, cyberculture comes from the people who've been raised and educated since the advent of interactive technology. Now you can say cyberculture is from all the businessmen who bought computers and went on the Internet and made websites. But to me, cyberculture is not cyberbusiness, cyberculture is young people. People who were raised with Nintendo joysticks in their hand, and with computer mice, and who look at the world differently as a result.

Soledad: How do they look at the world differently? Why aren't they the equivalent of the youths back in the 60s and 70s?

Rushkoff: Well, I say the main reason is because television sets have been demystified.

Soledad: What does that mean?

Rushkoff: It used to be whoever it was, Walter Cronkite or whoever, can get into your home, into that magic box, can actually speak to you and have his picture in your living room, was doing a magic act. That's a magic act on the order of what a priest could do with transubstantiation and a little wafer. I mean, this is magic stuff. But now if you're actually moving around the pixels yourself on the screen, you no longer see television as the mystical act. You don't see it as the gospel truth being piped into your home. It's just some guy putting up his Super Mario, some guy playing with a joystick and making his version of the world. And when you go out on the Internet and exchange all your own ideas, and move around and navigate through the world yourself, you don't look at what they say with the same seriousness anymore. You start to take your own point of view a bit more seriously.

Soledad: What makes you an expert on this cyberculture?

Rushkoff: I think there's no such thing as an expert on cyberculture. To me a cyberguru is an oxymoron.

Soledad: Which is what you're called often.

Rushkoff: Which is what I'm called. But you know people called me a lot of things in high school too, and it turned out not to be true, I promise you. But it's not true. The whole idea of cyberculture is that we are all our experts, that we don't need priests, we don't need gurus to tell us. Sure, there are a lot of people willing to walk in right now and be almost like cult leaders, and tell us, "Oh no, the Internet is a very dangerous place, and the Internet is a very complex place. And you need a very select group of cyberguru advisors to tell your business how to go out there. To make sure your child doesn't go out and masturbate themselves into oblivion online." Those things don't happen, it's actually a very safe place and a very easy place to get around. That's why the mission of a show like this is to demystify cyberculture, is the whole point. I mean, it's an easy bias.

Soledad: So when you go out as a consultant and get paid big bucks by big corporations, what do you tell them? I mean, how do you demystify this audience for them?

Rushkoff: I actually upset them. I usually get hired once by a big company, a media company to tell them how are we going to program youth culture. And I tell them, give up. It doesn't work anymore. Your techniques of coercion and trying to coerce a culture aren't going to work anymore. What you have to do is just make a good product, tell us what it does and charge a good price.

Soledad: What! That's ridiculous.

Rushkoff: What does that mean? What about brand names? What about this? So you know I'll go once, maybe twice, and that's about it. But all I'm really doing is telling them to stop trying to program us into submission. That it doesn't work anymore, and it's not serving a positive social service. And there are people who will hire me to try to convince their bosses that's true.

Soledad: How does the Internet and the Web, all the new technology we are creating daily, how does that fit into the concept of demystifying the media, and also the people, Gen Xers not willing to be programmed?

Rushkoff: Well, I think a lot of it has do with changing the way we look at technology. Most adults, most people raised before interactive media, look at technology that acts on them. It's a way for their boss to make them work more, a way for someone to give them information. Thanks to this interactive age we're talking about, people think of technology now as an extension of themselves, as a way for them to act on the world. And that's a very different thing. People like to say this is the Information Age. It's not the Information Age, it's an interpersonal age. It's an age where people are beginning to reach out through technology and resocialize.

Soledad: You talk about resocialization in your new book The Ecstasy Club, which we will do a little plug for right now. Tell me a little more about the book briefly and the whole rave scene.

Rushkoff: Well, to me the true cyberculture is electronica, is rave culture. For viewers that don't know, raves are really gatherings of thousands of young people playing music made by other young people in their garages with computers and samples, samplers and synthesizers. And it's people going to a party and dancing with each other in a giant group. Really people experiencing in some ways a group thing, a group spirituality. It's almost like Woodstock, except without the stage, without the heroes, without Hendrix playing his guitar, just everyone looking at each other. And what Ecstasy Club is about is a group of very idealistic young people who move into a warehouse in Oakland and start to live this rave lifestyle. Through the Internet, through drugs, through computers...

Soledad: We won't give away the ending, but in some ways it doesn't end very well for some of them.

Rushkoff: Well, it's kind of a comedy.

Soledad: That kind of leaves it for people to run out and buy it.