Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoffis an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth18 February 1961
CountryUnited States of America
world matter complexity
Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.
children order effectiveness
The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.
narrative want ends
A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.
heart dancing dancer
More than anything, rave was an intentionally designed experience. The music, lighting, and ambience were all fine-tuned to elicit and augment altered states of consciousness. The rhythm of the music was precisely 120 beats per minute, the frequency of the fetal heart rate, and the same beat believed to be used by South American shamans to bring their tribes into a trance state. Through dancing together, without prescribed movements, or even partners, rave dancers sought to reach group consciousness on a level they had never experienced before.
technology agency government
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
expansion levels requirements
Time has always been used against us on a certain level. The invention of the clock made us accountable to the employer, gave us a standard measure and stopwatch management, and it also led to the requirement of interest-bearing currency to grow over time, the requirement of the expansion of our economy.
choice consumer music napster paid share
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.
billions hours possible range reasons wants ways willing
Our eyeball hours are scarce, indeed. That's why Google wants us to do as much as possible online, in range of their ads, and is willing to spend billions creating more reasons and ways for us to do so.
changed computers discovered humans influence
Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.
artificial creating human intellect intelligence machine positive rather society sort
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.
If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.