Top 100 Douglas Rushkoff Quotes
#1. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God's universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse.
Douglas Rushkoff
#2. I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell products.
Douglas Rushkoff
#3. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#4. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#5. If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.
Douglas Rushkoff
#6. The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don't own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks.
Douglas Rushkoff
#7. The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.
Douglas Rushkoff
#8. Apple enjoys 'Harry Potter'-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off.
Douglas Rushkoff
#9. The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'
Douglas Rushkoff
#10. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#11. I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game. The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four- dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how serious we take it, or how serious its consequences are.
Douglas Rushkoff
#12. Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.
Douglas Rushkoff
#13. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#14. When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.
Douglas Rushkoff
#15. The smartest hackers understand that their skill at hacking technology may be less important than their skill at hacking the digital marketplace.
Douglas Rushkoff
#16. What makes a great standalone piece of hardware is not the same thing as what makes a great networking device. One can work as an essentially closed system. The other is absolutely dependent on its openness.
Douglas Rushkoff
#17. Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.
Douglas Rushkoff
#18. Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.
Douglas Rushkoff
#19. New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, 'Jane is now friends with Tom.' The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.
Douglas Rushkoff
#20. 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
#21. If you join the Boy Scouts without understanding the underlying agendas and biases of the organization, you might grow up to believe that being gay is a bad thing.
Douglas Rushkoff
#22. No matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.
Douglas Rushkoff
#23. Our eyeball hours are scarce, indeed. That's why Google wants us to do as much as possible online, in range of their ads, and is willing to spend billions creating more reasons and ways for us to do so.
Douglas Rushkoff
#24. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#25. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#26. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#27. Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.
Douglas Rushkoff
#28. It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us,
Douglas Rushkoff
#29. If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.
Douglas Rushkoff
#30. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#31. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#32. Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then he's talking about renaissance: the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework.
Douglas Rushkoff
#33. Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.
Douglas Rushkoff
#35. Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.
Douglas Rushkoff
#36. Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.
Douglas Rushkoff
#37. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#38. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#39. Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.
Douglas Rushkoff
#40. I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.
Douglas Rushkoff
#41. I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.
Douglas Rushkoff
#42. Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.
Douglas Rushkoff
#43. On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.
Douglas Rushkoff
#44. 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
#45. Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and
mortgages became derivative investments.
Douglas Rushkoff
#46. Once a line could truly be drawn in something other than sand, the notion of history as a progression became possible.
Douglas Rushkoff
#47. We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.
Douglas Rushkoff
#48. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#49. Online advertising may not be much more successful than an old double-barrel, but - like a good spray of buckshot - it makes up for its lack of accuracy with sheer volume. There are 10 unique ads listed with every Gmail message in your queue, each tied to the message content. And a paying sponsor.
Douglas Rushkoff
#50. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#51. As Apple continues to release new styles of netbooks, laptops, and even desktops with untold movie-watching and game-playing capabilities, I wouldn't be surprised to see the iPhone operating system running on them - and the Macintosh eventually becoming a thing of the past.
Douglas Rushkoff
#52. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#53. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#55. As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
Douglas Rushkoff
#56. Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell.
Douglas Rushkoff
#57. A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn't do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment.
Douglas Rushkoff
#58. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#59. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#60. Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
Douglas Rushkoff
#61. The plague did not lead to Europe's economic collapse. Rather, Europe's currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.
Douglas Rushkoff
#62. If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
Douglas Rushkoff
#63. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#64. I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.
Douglas Rushkoff
#66. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#67. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#68. 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
#69. Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads.
Douglas Rushkoff
#70. 'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel.
Douglas Rushkoff
#71. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#72. We're moving into an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we refuse than the ones we accept.
Douglas Rushkoff
#73. Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.
Douglas Rushkoff
#74. New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete.
Douglas Rushkoff
#75. Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles.
Douglas Rushkoff
#76. Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers.
Douglas Rushkoff
#77. Like civil-rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present.
Douglas Rushkoff
#78. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#79. Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right? ... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Douglas Rushkoff
#80. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#82. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#83. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#84. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#85. We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.
Douglas Rushkoff
#86. For Google, the problem with being a free, abundant, and rather infinite set of services is that it's hard to create much of a stir about anything. There are so many major software service options under the 'more' menu on the Gmail page that they've had to go and add a final item called 'even more.'
Douglas Rushkoff
#87. Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.
Douglas Rushkoff
#88. Digiphrenia - the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.
Douglas Rushkoff
#89. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#90. The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to.
Douglas Rushkoff
#91. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#92. Rejecting the rules of late-stage tech-bubble venture-capital madness is a better, more resilient, and durable approach to business in a digital landscape. Who better to affirm this than one of the digital industry's most trusted news and analysis sources, PandoDaily.
Douglas Rushkoff
#93. Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.
Douglas Rushkoff
#94. Everything we do in the digital realm - from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call - creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it - or will be soon enough.
Douglas Rushkoff
#95. She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads.
Douglas Rushkoff
#96. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#97. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#98. 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.
Douglas Rushkoff
#99. 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?"
Douglas Rushkoff
#100. Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.
Douglas Rushkoff
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