Just a quick note on the reference to Team Human. Douglas Rushkoff has a podcast with the same name and he is frequently addressing the conflict of values, as you intelligently note above about Gidley’s main point.
From a short essay in which Rushkoff explains his reasoning for starting the Team Human podcast:
“…people who understand we have to stop optimizing human lives for economic growth, and start optimizing the economy for human prosperity. People who want to stop programming people for technology, and start programming technology for people. The people I’ve come to call Team Human.”
…“My books may have been good for addressing the symptoms of social and economic injustice, and doing forensic analysis of the root causes for our problems – sometimes dating back to things like the invention of central currency and chartered monopolies in the late Middle Ages. But social change requires more than knowledge of where we are and how we got here. It requires a shift in values, in perception, and in the way we understand what it means to be a human being. It’s more fundamental than policy, because it is what animates us in the first place.”
So maybe, to continue the loose (and slightly loathsome!) football/sports metaphors that have kicked-off around here, the “team human” Rushkoff and others play for are always going to be underdogs in the Human Games League. The “other teams” have bigger sponsors, more fans, flashier gear. They are in charge and winning the games for now, because the game is rigged, they hit harder and have more of a money pool to find the bigger “better” players. But soon enough, as more players and sports fans become aware of the global concussions and the dangers of the games, the rules will need to change to favor the humans…and as the rules of the game change, the entire sport changes as well. In the future, we might have special space football leagues, but the suits will still need to accomodate for the human inside. One would think that Musk and friends would be looking out for the underdogs when designing the new suits, and he may have our favorite team human in mind when designing. Yet the gracefulness of the anti-gravity sports will be demolished once someone suggests and others go along with the idea that rocket boosters attached to each players suit would make a better contact sport.
We do not need to champion the human, but we do need to keep the game civil if we are to continue playing. And, like everything else, once we find the most optimal way to exist in a multitudinous globe, through discourse, deep reading, slow thought, the concept of the game will disappear as we go on about our days.
So, though we do not wish to take sides or join a team, we are supporting the players who like to play against the bad ideas, the limited forms of consciousness, the supporters of misinformation.