Quote

The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

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
Home
Allow
Networks
Ideas
Computer
Computers
Work
Early
Peers
Would
Technology
Apply
Transact
Create
Tremendous
Decentralized
Quality
Directly
Networked
Idea
Qualities
Cyberpunk
Lives
Digital
Slack

More quotes by 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
Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google.
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
While Google has given away pretty much everything it has to offer - from search and maps to email and apps - this has always been part of its greater revenue model: the pennies per placement it gets for seeding the entire Google universe of search and services with ever more targeted advertising.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy migration utility through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.
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
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
Image
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
Image
Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying, 'Whatever.'
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads.
Douglas Rushkoff