Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Total quotes (61)
Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff

Birthname

Birthday February 18, 1961

Educated At California Institute Of The Arts, Utrecht University, Princeton University

Nationality United States Of America

Occupations Journalist, Writer

Religion Atheism

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Total quotes (61)

CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowered expectations for high-budget production values; and, finally, its freedom from traditional narrative made it less suspect in the post-Watergate era. Like Ted Turner himself, CNN would be renegade, free of corporate or government control, and utterly uncensored. This is why the network came under such widespread attack in its earlier days from traditional news media, academics, and politicians. Contrary to journalistic standards of the day, CNN let Saddam Hussein speak directly to the American people.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

MediaSaddam HusseinCNNMedia Companies

...the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family, whose multiple generations last much longer than any single individual's life span. Over centuries, it's the tribe or nation. Over millennia, it is an entire culture. Over tens of millennia, it is the species itself, slowly evolving or surrendering to an evolved competitor. And over eons, the unit of survival is 'the whole web of life of our planet.' Human beings have endured as a result of our ability to adapt on all six scales of being and to balance the conflicting demands of each.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

FactsNotes to selfPresent ShockTime

When a bank wants to move a big quantity of shares, for example, it doesn't want everyone to know what it is doing. If news of a big buy leaked out before the big buy could be completed, the price may go up. To hide their motions, they employ the same technique as stealth planes: they use algorithms to break their giant trade into thousands of little ones, and do so in such a way that they look random. Their sizes and timing are scattered.

In order to identify this stealthy algorithmic movement, competing banks hire other mathematicians to write other algorithms that monitor trading and look for clues of these bigger trades and trends. The algorithms actually shoot out little trades, much like radar, in order to measure the response of the market and then infer if there are any big movements going on. The algorithms are, in turn, on the lookout for these little probes and attempt to run additional countermoves and fakes. The algorithmic dance—what is known as black box trading—accounts for over 70 percent of Wall Street trading activity today.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

FactsNotes to selfPresent Shock
CorporationsMedia ConglomeratesMoney

Think of almost any television commercial: A person gets in terrible trouble, the product gets her out. A girl gets a pimple before the prom. She tries all sorts of things to get rid of it, making matters worse. Just when it looks like all is lost, she finds the miracle cream. It works, boyfriend shows up, happy prom girl. The continuous narrative arc is used to draw the audience into a state of tension. Only the storyteller—the advertiser—has the way out. To be released from tension, we must accept the storyteller’s answer—meaning the advertiser’s product. We may have understood that the people making us anxious were not our friends—that the stuff on television is called 'programming' for a reason. But we were relatively powerless to do anything about it other than not watch at all.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed

UsersProgrammingMedia Against Us

It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and not truly complicit in the death camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up the now infamous experiment in which each subject was told by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks to what they believed were lethal voltages. On a structural level— and maybe also an emotional one— reality TV mirrors much of this same dynamic. No, we’re not literally shocking people, but we are enjoying the humiliation and degradation of the participants, from the safe distance of an electronic medium. The question is not how much deadly voltage can we apply, but how shamefully low can we go? Besides, the producers bear the real brunt of responsibility— just as the men in lab coats did in the research experiments.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

MediaReality TV

For [Stewart] Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the 'long now' that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the desert (itself the product of a multigenerational effort), we will be able to experience or at least perceive the bigger cycles that evade us in our daily schedules. In addition, instead of writing our years with four digits, Brand encourages us to use five, as in 02020 instead of 2020, keeping us aware of the much larger timescales on which important activity is still occurring. We could still operate on the timescale of seasonally changing fashions or TV schedules while remaining cognizant of the greater cycles binding humanity to the cosmos.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

Notes to selfPresent ShockTime

If we have no destination toward which we are progressing, then the only thing that motivates our movement is to get away from something threatening. We move from problem to problem, avoiding calamity as best we can, our worldview increasingly characterized by a sense of panic. Our news networks and Internet feeds compound the sense of crisis by amplifying only the most sensational and negative events, which garner the highest ratings and click-throughs, generating still more of the same. Yes, the news has always been dominated by darkness and disaster; newspapers with a dead body on the cover page sell better than those announcing a successful flower show. But now the feedback on viewer ratings is instantaneous, and its relationship to ad revenues is paramount, as once-independent news channels like CNN become mere subsidiaries of NYSE conglomerates such as Time Warner.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

CNNMediaNews Networks

The main thing I've been trying to communicate, whether it's in terms of spirituality, in terms of media, in terms of marketing and communications, or even in terms of politics and economics, is that there's one thing going on here: people are desperately afraid to accept the fact that we are moving towards a very organismic relationship with one another: that the human being is one big thing. The problem about accepting that is if the human being is one thing, if we're all part of the same big organism, then those people starving in Africa or India are not them, they're us. So all of a sudden it's not their pain, it's our pain and we're all responsible for what's happening here. And I think the real obstacle to that kind of a sensibility is not that people want to control what's happening or that people want to be bosses, but that people are really afraid of that level of intimacy.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored

ConnectionismGlobal BrainIntimacyOne BodyPainRelationalismMy Philosophy

In preliterate civilizations, people attempted to live their lives and appease their gods with no real sense of the rules. They just did what they could, sacrificing animals and even children along the way to appease the gods they didn't understand. The invention of text gave them a set of rules to follow—or not. Now, everyone was a cheater to some extent, at least in that they had the choice of whether to go by the law, or to evade it. With the printing press came writing. The Bible was no longer set in stone, but something to be changed––or at least reinterpreted. Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses, the first great 'mod' of Catholicism, and later, nations rewrote their histories by launching their revolutions. Finally, the invention of digital technology gives us the ability to program: to create self-sustaining information systems, or virtual life. These are technologies that carry on long after we've created them, making future decisions without us.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed

DemocratizationHistory Of CommunicationOpening of Culture

...we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of relationships between all these clocks. Body temperature rises during the daylight hours, but some people's rise faster than others, making them morning people, while those whose temperature rises more slowly over the course of the day reach their most effective state of consciousness in the early evening. Meanwhile, when our body temperature rises, we perceive of time as passing more slowly. This is because our internal clocks are counting faster, while time is actually passing at the same rate as always.

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

HealthNotes to selfPresent ShockTime

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