Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

I feel like Hollywood would rather end the emerging, bottom-up creative culture than let it happen.

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

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.

We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.

It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us.

Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.

We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?"

Ecstacy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature.

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

We are moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

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

It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.

When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we've strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time.

Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.

The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

It feels as if ever since the iPhone was released, the Macintosh computer has become just another leverage point in this other operating system's marketing plan.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete.

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.

Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape.

To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied - through marketing as much as talent - by Steve Jobs.

Computers don't kill books; people do.

I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

I don't want to sound like some old person pining for how things used to be, because I'm not. But walking down the street, for example, used to be a public activity; you'd see the other people.

Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen.

A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn't do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment.

The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can't multitask, and we shouldn't keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.

Global warming, you don't win it. It's this weird steady-state issue that's going to be with us for a few thousand years.

Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s.

... we're moving into an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we refuse than the ones we accept.

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.

Nothing is sacred. And, more importantly...the 'nothing' you end up with is truly sacred.

We've been taught that the renaissance was one of the great golden ages of civilisation. The renaissance was not a golden age, it was the end of a golden age.

Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.

Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.

The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.

Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.

Beyond the hype, style, and speculation, the truth is that the iPad is really just another tablet device. A really big PDA, where a touchscreen does what a laptop's keyboard used to do.

By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google.

I'm not a communist, just a media theorist.