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

In this episode of Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff reflects on his first hands-on experience with AI, prompted by both personal necessity and a growing responsibility to understand the technology he's long critiqued. Faced with a crumbling personal website and a chaotic archive of digital content, Rushkoff turns to Claude, an AI assistant, to rebuild his site in just five hours—dramatically faster than the months it would have taken manually. He confronts the ethical and environmental concerns surrounding AI, including energy use, labor exploitation, and data extraction, but finds the actual cost of his project to be minimal—under $5 in tokens. This personal experiment leads him to a hackathon in a Brooklyn vegan restaurant, where activists and mutual aid pioneers use AI to prototype tools for community resilience, like a dynamic peer-to-peer sharing platform. Rushkoff draws parallels to the early internet era of 1994, questioning whether we’re in another moment of transformative potential—or just another cycle of technological exploitation. He warns of powerful forces like Larry Ellison’s Oracle, which has built a surveillance infrastructure tied to government and military data, and cautions that AI’s potential for good depends on who controls it. Ultimately, he argues that AI isn’t inherently evil, but its impact depends on how we use it—whether to deepen extraction or to build cooperative, human-centered alternatives.