Douglas Rushkoff > Quotes

“Computers don't kill books; people do.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“Our digital experiences are out of body. This biases us toward depersonalised behaviour in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present - and are much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“It's also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn't preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. 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.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“The primary purpose of the internet had changed from supporting a knowledge economy to growing an attention economy.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the ‘slow hunch.’ We’ve heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds. They have a feeling that there’s an interesting problem, but they don’t quite have the tools yet to discover them.” Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time—available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and
mortgages became derivative investments.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“The phones are smarter but we are dumber.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we “stand on the shoulders”5 of the previous generation. The danger of such a position is that we can forget to put our own feet on the ground.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them.

There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP.

It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Socialization depends on both autonomy and interdependency; emphasizing one at the expense of the other compromises the balance.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“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.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“Our digital devices and the outlooks they inspired allowed us to break free of the often repressive timelines of our storytellers, turning us from creatures led about by future expectations into more fully present-oriented human beings. The actual experience of this now-ness, however, is a bit more distracted, peripheral, even schizophrenic than that of being fully present. For many, the collapse of narrative led initially to a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder—a disillusionment, and the vague unease of having no direction from above, no plan or story. But like a dose of adrenaline or a double shot of espresso, our digital technologies compensate for this goalless drifting with an onslaught of simultaneous demands. We may not know where we're going anymore, but we're going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we're simply too busy to notice.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Wal-Mart’s relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador’s eyeglass. Like temporary forts built solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“We can be fully human without being in complete control of our world.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity?

In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever.

This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell,”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Meanwhile, the extraordinary measures we take to stay abreast of each minuscule change to the data stream end up magnifying the relative importance of these blips to the real scheme of things. Investors trade, politicians respond, and friends judge based on the micromovements of virtual needles. By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living. The tension between the faux present of digital bombardment and the true now of a coherently living human generated the second kind of present shock, what we're calling digiphrenia—digi for "digital," and phrenia for "disordered condition of mental activity.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“In country after country where local moneys were abolished in favor of interest-bearing central currency, people fell into poverty, health declined, and society deteriorated12 by all measures. Even the plague can be traced to the collapse of the marketplace of the late Middle Ages and the shift toward extractive currencies and urban wage labor. The new scheme instead favored bigger players, such as chartered monopolies, which had better access to capital than regular little businesses and more means of paying back the interest. When monarchs and their favored merchants founded the first corporations, the idea that they would be obligated to grow didn’t look like such a problem. They had their nations’ governments and armies on their side—usually as direct investors in their projects. For the Dutch East India Company to grow was as simple as sending a few warships to a new region of the world, taking the land, and enslaving its people. If this sounds a bit like the borrowing advantages enjoyed today by companies like Walmart and Amazon, that’s because it’s essentially the same money system in operation, favoring the same sorts of players. Yet however powerful the favored corporations may appear, they are really just the engines through which the larger money system extracts value from everyone’s economic activity. Even megacorporations are like competing apps on a universally accepted, barely acknowledged smartphone operating system. Their own survival is utterly dependent on their ability to grow capital for their debtors and investors.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity