By Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian. He teaches media studies at NYU and the New School University and serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast. He has been making waves recently with some new ideas about jobs—and the lack of them. AMA SHIFT asked Doug about the world of work, and what Occupy Wall Street tells us about what is wrong with the economy.

AMA SHIFT: What’s your thesis about what’s happening to the world of work?

DR: A more freelance, direct peer-to-peer means of exchange is going to replace what we thought of as employment. And that’s especially significant when we have an economy that’s run on an obsolete, highly centralized operating system. Most of the people who are trying to develop policies and solutions to the so-called unemployment problem are looking for ways to get banks to invest in corporations who will then hire people, rather than simply creating opportunities for people to exchange directly with one another.

AMA SHIFT: How did you get to this vantage point?

DR: It was listening to Obama and others talk about jobs, jobs, jobs. And I started to think, do people really want jobs? Is that what we really want? It’s not that we need to have people in these jobs in order for there to be enough stuff; there’s actually enough stuff. The reason we work hard is so that we know how much of the stuff that’s out there each person’s allowed to have, right? But the problem is, we don’t have enough need for these jobs any more. We have more stuff than we have excuses to employ people.

AMA SHIFT: What’s your take on Occupy Wall Street?

DR: What they’re trying to do is to reconcile, two extremes. There’s this big, crashing economy, and then there’s this vision of a more compassionate, peer-to-peer society where people share the stuff they have. And there’s still a great distance to be made between those two places. But I think what they’re looking at is that the operating system itself is faulty, that the system that was originally justified as enabling the distribution of goods and enabling commerce now no longer does that.

I was just listening to Bloomberg today, and they were trying to explain the stock market rise. And they said, “Well, there’s no real reason why it’s rising. It probably had something to do with computer algorithmic trading.” So the speculative Wall Street market economy is utterly detached from reality. And the needs of algorithms and debt structures now takes precedence over the actual needs of people.

How do we somehow bring that thing down to the level of real people who have real needs? Do we simply build a different kind of economy? Do we start looking at things like local currencies? Or do we look at things like bitcoin for long-distance net exchange? Do we start looking at different kinds of barter networks and sharing? Is there a new kind of a collectivism that can emerge? Because really, what they’re looking at is the disconnect between a market whose logic is based in scarcity, and a world that has managed to achieve abundance through production.

AMA SHIFT: If someone is embarking on their first career, what should they be thinking about? How should they be preparing themselves?

DR: Well, there’s two main ways. If they want to get a job, then simply learn how to do something others can’t. Most businesses have no programming capability, no real graphic design capabilities, no interface capability. They don’t know how to Tweet and Facebook and social network and build websites with WordPress. So if you can spend a week of your time and get up to speed in one of those areas, you can get a job.

But my longer-term advice would be, don’t worry about getting a job at all. Try to do something, make something, create something. I would think about moving somewhere other than a big city, move to a real town in a real place where they have real needs that you can actually meet, where there’s a local economy into which you can integrate yourself, rather than the generic economy where you’re going to try to get a job, but you’ll be completely at the mercy of forces way beyond your control.

AMA SHIFT: What was your first job?

DR: I never really had a job. When I was 14 I was a tennis attendant at the public tennis courts in my town. And then when I got out of school I tutored kids through their SATs, college entrance exams—until I wrote my first book. Then, in the late 80s I thought that the internet was going to be a very cool thing, and I wrote about it and championed it. I was a prejudiced, biased, cheerleading journalist and writer for what I thought would be an important change in the way media and technology happened. The more I cheered and supported the emergence of an internet, the more I created a demand for the articles I was writing.

AMA SHIFT: What lessons did you draw from that?

DR: I tell people, find something you care about, and then be the person who knows the most about it. Find the very edge of something, the new part, the unfolding part. Find the part of a culture, or a business, or an industry, or a world that you care about, and then help that part happen. Align yourself with it. And the more you make it happen, the more people are going to need what you do.

So that could be anything right now. It could be community-supported agriculture, which is an exciting place. It could be peer-to-peer currency. It could be some of these direct democracy movements. I mean, there’s so many places out there where people are having deep thoughts, where people are passionate. If you position yourself in one of those places where people are genuinely passionate, then you’re in a growth industry, by default.