1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff photo

Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Total quotes: 39
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
Tagged: Media, Reality TV
“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
Tagged: Users, Programming, Media Against Us
“Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying the chaos. On the other hand, once you zoom in to a fractal, you have no way of knowing which level you are on. The details at one level of magnification may be the same as on any other. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Facts, Fractals, Notes to self, Present Shock
“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
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock, Time
“Many of us aspire to this ability to be 'on' at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all the time, to everything—and to be capable of matching this intensity and availability ourselves. Isn't this what it would mean to be truly digital citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps?”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to, Notes to self, Present Shock
“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
Tagged: CNN, Media, News Networks
“I've always looked at media as something I call social currency, in other words: people don't buy records in order to have the record, just in order to have that music; people buy records in order to have an excuse for someone else to come over to their house and visit them. People watch a movie so that they can talk to their friends who have also seen that same movie. It's not the experience of the media itself as much as the way that that media can act as social currency for other interactions. Where it gets dangerous is when we're just consuming media and have no time to actually relate about it.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Media, Movies, Relations, Social Currency, Thought Catalog
“Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our free time answering email or tending to our social networks. Staring into screens, we are less attuned to the light of day and the physiological rhythms of our housemates and coworkers. We are more likely to accept the false digital premise that all time is equivalent and interchangeable. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Notes to self, Present Shock, The internet
“The human species is undergoing radical change. The Internet is almost a test run for this change. I don't think the Internet, in this sense, is such a major deal at all. The Internet is a way to practice what it is that we're going to have to do for real, which is deal with privacy when we can all read each other's thoughts, deal with a global community when we're all realizing that we're part of the same thing. The Internet is like a good, dry, safe way for scared white people to experience community again, after we've been so isolated through television.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Internet, Isolation, Radical Change, Technological Time, Television
“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
Tagged: Democratization, History Of Communication, Opening of Culture
“But real people don't engage with the world via big ideas. We engage through activities that are scaled to real life. Big ideas—at least the kind we recognize as big ideas—are for big entities: corporations, countries, continents. If we're going to begin operating on a human scale at least some of the time, then we must abandon the one-size-fits-all way of doing things. That's just another artifact of the Industrial Age and its bias toward highly mechanized, repeatable manufacturing.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc
Tagged: Change the World, Human Scale, Scale, Small is Big
“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
Tagged: Connectionism, Global Brain, Intimacy, One Body, Pain, Relationalism, My Philosophy, Thought Catalog History
“This technique is called marginalizing and is still frequently used, especially in organized reactions to media viruses. In order to generate public support for an illogical policy, leaders need to name and demonize an enemy, then whip up an emotional fury against the demon. Anyone remaining against the proposed policy needs to be minimalized, sidelined, or marginalized. This way people who oppose the public relations objectives are made to feel absolutely alone.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Marginalization
“If we get really, really good at fine-tuning our shamanic alchemy and we can play the brain exactly as we want; cool, but... there is something that the mushrooms tell you that a synthetic, perfectly modulated chemical won't. The mushrooms are going tell you some stuff you may not want to really hear when you're high. Like, hey you're fucking up the planet here. Hey you're cheating on your girlfriend there. Why haven't you talked to me in the last three years? ... The sacred plants have agendas. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Livestream.com
Tagged: Chemicals, Drugs
“But the initial choice to have email at all is to open a loop. The choice to open a particular email, though, constitutes entry into something more like static information. The problem is that the sender may have spring-loaded a whole lot of time and energy into that message, so that clicking on it is like opening a Pandora's box of data and responsibilities. A week of the sender's preparation can instantaneously unfold into our present. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Email, Notes to self, Present Shock, Work
“...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
Tagged: Health, Notes to self, Present Shock, Time
“The same is true for businesses that rework their operations around the time frames of quarterly reports, and mutual funds that 'dress up' for end-of-year evaluations by selling unpopular assets and purchasing popular ones. They miss or work against the more naturally occurring rhythms and lose the ability to ride the waves underlying essentially all human endeavors. The phones are smarter but we are dumber.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Hippie analysis, Present Shock, Rhythms, Time
“Patagonia follows through on the dirtbag ethos in both its product line and its corporate giving. One doesn't compensate for the other. Patagonia uses organic cotton and recycled fleece and shell materials, so that its manufacturing takes as little toll as possible on the environment. The products themselves are designed to be versatile rather than particular, so that consumers don't have to purchase an entire product line in order to be equipped, and so that hikers can get by with the fewest items”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: US Goverment
loading next page...