Quotes from Douglas Rushkoff

The most successful of biology's creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems.

Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.

an economic operating system designed by thirteenth-century Moorish accountants looking for a way to preserve the aristocracy of Europe has worked as promised. It turned the marketplace into one giant debtors' prison. It is not only unfit for the needs of a twenty-first-century digital society; central currency is the core mechanism of the growth trap.

Our current economic crises stem, at least in part, from our inability to recognize the storage bias of the money we use. Since it is the only kind of money we know of, we use it for everything.

Engaged in a new form of serfdom---only bound now to banks and mortgage lenders instead of to lords---her more highly leveraged neighbors pore over the business section of the newspaper each day looking for some sign that the government will soon step in to "freeze" their mortgage rates where they are before a scheduled adjustment hits.

But further research has suggested that after people have gained power, they tend to behave like patients with damage to the brain's orbitofrontal lobes. That is, the experience of wealth and power is akin to removing the part of the brain "critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior.

A nongrowing company can be tremendously prosperous and deliver the vast majority of that prosperity to its shareholders. It just might not come in the form of a rising share price, which is the only metric most shareholders understand. That's why shareholders need to be trained to value other metrics or be replaced by people who do.

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

A baby starved of social contact has difficulty developing a regulated nervous system. Young men with few social acquaintances develop high adrenaline levels. Lonely students have low levels of immune cells. Prison inmates prefer violence to solitary confinement. In the US, social isolation is a greater public health problem than obesity.

The only real answer, the really simple one that neither philanthrocapitalists nor green technologists want to hear, is that we have to reduce our energy consumption altogether.

Without socially positive opportunities to exercise our autonomy, we tend toward self-promotion over self-sacrifice and fixate on personal gain over collective prosperity.

Publicly traded corporations direct financial surpluses back to investors, CEOs, and boards of directors. They have little incentive to churn it back into the business and, as we have seen, a great deal of incentive to maximize surpluses at the expense of employees, the environment, and even the corporation itself.82

Once a line could truly be drawn in something other than sand, the notion of history as a progression became possible.

In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commons, studies what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest.

the industrial ideal: anyone can request work, do so anonymously, never meet the employee, and reject the results without ever paying. The

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She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads.

The smartest hackers understand that their skill at hacking technology may be less important than their skill at hacking the digital marketplace.

Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It's an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. Such systems go out of control because the feedback of their own activity has become louder than the original signal.

The bank transforms itself from an agent of debt to a catalyst for distribution and circulation. Like money in a digital age, it becomes less a thing of value in itself than a way of fostering the value creation and exchange of others. Less a noun than a verb.

Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island." VR is the new solution to climate change—or maybe the ultimate surrender to its inevitability. As resources vanish and economic conditions worsen, technological simulations can fill in where real wealth has disappeared. "The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted.

The myth of individuality made capitalism possible and has sustained it to this day.

Limbic consonance is the little-known process through which the mood of a room changes when a happy or nervous person walks in.

Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food." He paused, and sighed, "I don't want to be in that moral dilemma.