Quotes from Douglas Rushkoff

Human beings connect so easily, it's as if we share the same brains.

If nothing else, living in a digital media environment should help us become more aware of the programming all around us.

Such exponential growth does not occur in the natural world, except maybe for cancer—and that growth ceases once the host has been consumed.

Simply remembering that corporations were invented should alone empower us to reinvent them to our liking.

Shareholders are demanding that Twitter find better ways of monetizing its users Tweets.

But there may never be enough to satisfy shareholders who expect to win back one hundred times their initial twenty billion dollar bet.

To have autonomy without interdependency leads to isolation or narcissism. To have interdependency with no autonomy stunts our psychological growth. Healthy people live in social groups that have learned to balance or, better, marry these two imperatives.

It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

The net turned media back into a collective, participatory, and social landscape. But, as seemingly happens to each and every new medium, the net went from being a social platform to an isolating one. Instead of forging new relationships between people, our digital technologies came to replace them with something else.

The company's stellar growth revived more than a few economic sectors, as well as a few neighborhoods.

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

Growth is good, at least for those doing the growing.

We're all operating on borrowed time and borrowed money. We need to make a choice.

The industrialist's dream was to replace them entirely—with machines.

Until one corporation is left standing, and the impoverished revolt.

The screen is encroaching on the eye, from TVs to computer monitors to phone screens to smart watches to VR goggles to tiny LEDs that project images onto the retina to neural implants that communicate directly with the optic nerve.

Resistance to digital industrialism may look like communism, but it's better understood as a simple reinstatement of the commons. Most

We can screw up our biological clocks a lot easier than that, too. Shift work, where employees alternate between days and nights on the job, leads to a significantly higher rate of violence, mood disorders, depression, and suicide. If a shift worker is scheduled even just one night on duty, urinary electrolytes take five days to adjust and eight days for the heart rate to return to normal. The World Health Organization has suggested that shift work is a "possible" carcinogen.

But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves.

many of us use what spare time and money we have earned undoing the impact of our jobs or companies. And that gets harder every day.

On an innovation landscape now characterized by flow, capital competes for vehicles in which to invest. Accordingly, interest rates plummet and banks threaten insolvency.

being human is a team sport.

A few employees are fine while a company is getting going, but eventually all of those skills need to be automated in order for the company to "scale" infinitely. This is why Facebook wants AIs or—at worst—its users to monitor and tag offensive posts instead of paid human employees.

And thinking is not like a book you can pick up when you want to, in your own time.