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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

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Douglas Rushkoff
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 18
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Aren
Distancing
Side
Arousing
Technology
Handles
Sides
Photos
Look
Twitter
Looks
Users
People
Digital
Handle

More quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

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Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Douglas Rushkoff
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I don't know of any other form of life that gathers up all the food it needs in the first two-thirds of its life in order to do nothing in its last third of life. In a utopian presentist society, instead of working extra hard to put money in the bank, you'd be working to provide value for the people around you.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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The plague did not lead to Europe’s economic collapse. Rather, Europe’s currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.
Douglas Rushkoff
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We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Whether it's watching a $4,000 laptop fall off the conveyor belt at airport security, contending with a software conflict that corrupted your file management system, or begging your family to stop opening those virus-carrying 'greeting cards' attached to emails, all computer owners are highly leveraged and highly vulnerable technology investors.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Computers don't kill books people do.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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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
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In spite of my own reservations about Bing's ability to convert Google users, I have to admit that the search engine does offer a genuine alternative to Google-style browsing, a more coherently organized selection of links, and a more advertiser-friendly environment through which to sell space and links.
Douglas Rushkoff
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The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
Douglas Rushkoff
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In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, a vast majority of the time, we surrender our true autonomy to this illusion of agency. I'm as guilty as anybody, and I write about it in a book. I'm not condemning anybody.
Douglas Rushkoff
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I feel like Hollywood would rather end the emerging, bottom-up creative culture than let it happen.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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