Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. – Douglas Rushkoff
If you join the Boy Scouts without understanding the underlying agendas and biases of the organization, you might grow up to believe that being gay is a bad thing. – Douglas Rushkoff
I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it’s a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us. – Douglas Rushkoff
The ‘looking forward’ so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence. – Douglas Rushkoff
New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, ‘Jane is now friends with Tom.’ The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete. – Douglas Rushkoff
Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That’s why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the ‘demands’ of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. – Douglas Rushkoff
I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on ‘Bonfire Of The Vanities.’ I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma’s apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience. – Douglas Rushkoff
In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It’s just 3:23. It’s almost this absolute duration that doesn’t have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is. – Douglas Rushkoff
We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there’s an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we’d best pay attention to what’s going on around us in the real world. We text while driving. – Douglas Rushkoff
Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems. – Douglas Rushkoff
Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. – Douglas Rushkoff
Once a teen has been identified as part of the ‘target market,’ he knows he’s done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one’s own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product. – Douglas Rushkoff
The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers. – Douglas Rushkoff
Removed from ‘Gmail’ doesn’t necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors – the real product it is offering its advertisers. – Douglas Rushkoff
The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives. – Douglas Rushkoff
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative – as watching someone else’s story – and much more toward enacting one’s own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. – Douglas Rushkoff
If money can’t be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can’t do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the ‘New York Times’ and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content. – Douglas Rushkoff
Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption – similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the ’70s and ’80s. – Douglas Rushkoff
Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell. – Douglas Rushkoff
Social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It’s the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. – Douglas Rushkoff
Think ‘Game of Thrones.’ In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn’t really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it’s structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera. – Douglas Rushkoff
The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. – Douglas Rushkoff
The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves. – Douglas Rushkoff
With the DVR, I was mostly writing about it as a good thing in giving us the choice of when and how to watch things. But there’s what we lose in the bargain, which is the collective spectacle. ‘Did you see Jay Leno last night?’ – Douglas Rushkoff
‘Digiphrenia’ is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There’s your Twitter profile, there’s your Facebook profile, there’s your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel. – Douglas Rushkoff
Everything we do in the digital realm – from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call – creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it – or will be soon enough. – Douglas Rushkoff
Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by ‘Big Pharma.’ You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter. – Douglas Rushkoff
Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I’ve paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice. – Douglas Rushkoff
One argument against open systems is that they become open to everything, good and bad. Like a Richard Meier skyscraper, the anal retentive, Bauhaus elegance of the Mac does prevent the loose ends and confusion of a less sterile environment. But it also prevents fertility. Apple’s development must come from within. – Douglas Rushkoff