The argument in the first bit starts with Rushkoff suggesting that people increasingly often find themselves forced to make choices that go against their better judgment because they believe that these choices are the only sensible way to act under the relevant circumstances. Here’s an example:
[I]n New Jersey, Carla, a telephone associate for one of the top three HMO plans in the United States…is paid a salary as well as a monthly bonus based on the number of claims she can “retire” without payment. Without resorting to fraud, Carla is supposed to discourage false claims by making all claims harder to register, in general. That’s how Carla’s supervisor explained it to her when she asked, point-blank, if she was supposed to mislead customers. She feels bad about it, but Carla is now the principal breadwinner in her family, her husband having lost a lot of his contracting work to the stalled market for new homes. And, in the end, she is preventing fraud. How does Carla sleep at night, knowing that she has spent her day persuading people to pay for services for which they are actually covered? After seeing a commercial on TV, she switched from Ambien to Lunesta.
The book, or at least this part of it, will attempt to evalute the generation and interpretation of the circumstances that engender this kind of ethical dissonance. Rushkoff calls the generative worldview corporatism, a mindset in which we adopt a role more like that of a share-holder than that of a member of a society. Under this mindset and the resulting set of real-world circumstances, “it’s as if the world itself pushes us toward self-interested, short-term decisions,” and the “more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that–all things being equal–we’d prefer not to make.”
Author Douglas Rushkoff
However:
[These choices] are the false choices of an artificial landscape–one in which our decision-making is as coerced as that of a person getting mugged. Only we’ve forgotten that our choices are being made under painstakingly manufactured duress. We think this is just the way things are. The price of doing business. Since when is life determined by that axiom?
Contrariwise, Rushkoff insists that “corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.”
If that’s right, then there is nothing less than a critical need for designers to help redesign the map. We’ve got to not only design things that “human-centered,” but that are centered around the kinds of humans we want to be.
The great Bill Moyers anticipated this discussion back in 1996, when he told us that “for all our frailties, despite the strange ways we make decisions and the bizarre means by which we have to raise money, despite our byzantine paths to creativity, we are free–you and I–to regard human beings as more than mere appetites and America as more than an economic machine.”
That sentiment should be writ large in each of our design playbooks.
