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Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Total quotes: 61
“It is easy to criticize a sensationalist talk show for, say, giving a neo-Nazi a platform to voice hateful rhetoric. But by exposing these sorts of people rather than censoring them, these shows reveal the underlying inconsistencies in their doctrines. Instead of appearing frightening, these people’s platitudes appear as inane as they really are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Censorship, Exposure, Media
“Chaos is the way that nature reasserts herself into our attempts at organization and control, especially when those efforts are intentionally oppressive.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Against Bureaucracy
“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock, Twitter
“The content is not the message, the contact is. The ping itself. It's the synaptic transmission of an organism trying to wake itself up.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Connectionism, Medium = Message
“New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock
“...the bloggers, designers, lovers, and programmers all sacrifice their connection to natural and emergent rhythms and patterns in order to match those dictated by their technologies and the artificial situations they create. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Present Shock, Rhythms, Time
“Our devices and, by extension, our nervous systems are now attached to the entire online universe, all the time.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Post-Biology, Brains, Digital Life, Always On, Connectionism
“The network is still controlled centrally by an authority, but it functions in a decentralized way.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Totalitarian, Silent Power, Central Control, Authority, Digital Power Structures, Web Power, The Ironclad Web
“Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock
“Instead of trying to get everyone to conform to a simple set of commands, a great manager, organizer, or leader strives instead to create an environment or provide the tools through which people naturally cooperate.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Management
“'Humanism,' a term first coined in 1808 to identify this Renaissance trend, refers not to some sort of humanitarian impulse, but to the solipsism and self-absorption characterizing the era’s religion, art, and science.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
Tagged: Capitalism, Humanism
“That's why now when I look at Obama talking about jobs, let's create jobs for everyone. It's like who wants a fucking job?”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Livestream.com
Tagged: Capitalism, Job, Money
“Our iPads and Androids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Your business must be structured so that the more they know, the better you look, and the better you really are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Business, Transparency
“Everyone's perspective is different; everyone's perspective matters.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Perspectivism, Thought Catalog, Let Everyone Be Heard, All People Have Value
“We do not watch videos as much as we are engulfed by them.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: The Media
“Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Facts, Notes to, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Great ideas don't really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems. They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, 'fade into view over long periods of time.'”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Steven Johnson, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock
“testing more quote options”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Game of Thrones close read
Tagged: test
“Flowing information, like twenty-four-hour news or MTV videos, is more like the nonnarrative experience of electronic music or extreme sports. We get a textural experience, we learn the weather, or we catch the drift. We do not get to the end; we shut it off and it continues without us.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Digital media, Notes to self, Present Shock
“How many generations before our own asked people to earn and save enough money while young in order to accumulate a nest egg big enough to live off for the last third of one’s life? It’s a bit like asking an animal to get fat enough not to have to eat again for the rest of its natural life. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“The corporate book industry can’t grow at the rate required by publicly held companies, anyway. This is why it is failing. Publishing is a sustainable business, not a growth industry. So it needs to be run by people looking for sustainable projects and careers—not runaway profits.”
— Douglas Rushkoff,
Tagged: Book Publishing
“Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person's biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens it. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Fac, Facts, Notes to self, Time
“Camcorders and VCRs gave people the ability to make their own media, and demystified the process through which the media they watched was created. Stars lost some of their allure, commercials lost their impact, and newscasters lost their authority.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc
Tagged: Demystification, History Of Communication
“What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Facts, Fractals, Notes to self, Present Shock
“By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Email, Notes to self, Present Shock, The internet, Twitter
“The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Evolution, Media
“Our current tax policy rewards capital gains (extraction) with a very low tax rate, while punishing dividends (along with revenue, earnings, and payroll) at a very high tax rate. If we want to promote transactions and circulation, we should reverse that.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Douglas Rushkoff on How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity – and How To Fix It — NewCo Shift
Tagged: Tax Policy, Taxes, Capital Gains
“Management's job is not to fill current employees with the collected, compressed wisdom of the ages, but rather to support them in the jobs only they are actually charged with doing. Management becomes a bit like customer service department for the employees, who are the ones responsible for the business. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Management, Notes to self, Present Shock
“Bernie Sanders’s impact is limited because he attacks business and billionaires. That’s not the way to communicate with them and create change. The better approach is to show how the current game plan isn’t simply contributive to wealth inequality and incompatible with the survival of the human species. It’s also bad business!”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Douglas Rushkoff on How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity – and How To Fix It — NewCo Shift
Tagged: Bernie Sanders, Business
“Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—variation on energy in Einstein's equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock at the center of the universe, we are not unhinged from one another.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock, Time
“The emergence of alternative distribution systems could have motivated innovation as easily as it induced paralysis; the industry could have used it as an opportunity to develop better, higher resolution recordings that can't easily be shared, or to build more accessible downloading interfaces, as Apple did with its groundbreaking iTunes/iPod online music store combination.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Change, Disruption
“Like generals in the safety of a situation room using toy tanks on a miniature battlefield to re-create a noisy and violent war, government and corporate leaders strategized in isolation from the cacophony of feedback. They sought to engage with their challenges from far above and to make moves as if the action were occurring on a game board. Complexity was reduced to simple, strategic play.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Complexity, Detachment
“Media is saying something in the way it finds its stories, churns them out, swallows them again, redigests them, and spits them out once again. This is more than a simple cultural bulimia. This is a complex but, on some level, effective form of mass catharsis and self-observation that our society employs to monitor and then modify itself.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Culture, Media
“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to the shared consciousness. Everything is everything. Acceptance of this premise feels communist or utopian; resistance feels like paranoia.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Consciousness, Copyright
“The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more productive in the early morning, while in the next week we are more effective in the early afternoon.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Health, Notes to self, Present Shock, Time
“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
Tagged: Media, Saddam Hussein, CNN, Media Companies
“Why is this so hard for so many of us? It's not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there's a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to keep opening emails in the hope of a little shot of serotonin — a pleasant ping from the world of chronos. We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Emai, Email, Time Managment
“...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
Tagged: Facts, Notes to self, Present Shock, Time
“...children's playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as well as greater awareness of those individuals falling out of sync due to illness or some other stress deserving of collective attention.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Facts, Present Shock, Rhythms, Time, Weird
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