Quotes from Douglas Rushkoff

The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It's more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system.

Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.

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.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.

Like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.

While Google has given away pretty much everything it has to offer - from search and maps to email and apps - this has always been part of its greater revenue model: the pennies per placement it gets for seeding the entire Google universe of search and services with ever more targeted advertising.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

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.

Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.

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.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.

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.

Google is in a position where it doesn't even have to strive to become a hip, conscious choice. Brands are temporary fads. Functionality is forever. Google just has to 'be,' and everyone will end up there sooner or later.

The plague did not lead to Europe's economic collapse. Rather, Europe's currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.

We were taking out mortgages we couldn't afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.

And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these "mortgage-backed securities.

digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation.

If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.

Chinese laborers "finish" smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints with a highly toxic solvent proven to shorten the workers lives. That's how valuable it is for consumers to believe their devices have been assembled by magic rather than by the fingers of underpaid and poisoned children.

Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.

Anchoring bias" refers to our tendency to rely on the first information we hear.

It's not that Twitter isn't successful, it just isn't successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.

This "out of sight, out of mind" externalization of poverty and poison doesn't go away just because we've covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality.