Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Douglas Rushkoff
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 18
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Persons
Complexes
Person
Complex
Everything
Technology
Come
Simple
Going
Less
Pervasive
Much
Learn
Iphone
Understand
Technologies
Become
Systems

More quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

Image
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
With the DVR, I was mostly writing about it as a good thing in giving us the choice of when and how to watch things. But there's what we lose in the bargain, which is the collective spectacle. 'Did you see Jay Leno last night?'
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
The 'looking forward' so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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