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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

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Douglas Rushkoff
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 18
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Night
Choice
Giving
Watches
Leno
Writing
Watch
Bargain
Thing
Lose
Spectacle
Good
Loses
Bargains
Things
Choices
Collectives
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Collective
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More quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

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I don't think tablets are where we should be focused. But I do think they could end up being an efficient way of delivering textbooks. They're just not really that, yet. There's all sorts of poisons and mined minerals and carnage that goes on to make a tablet. Way more than to print a book. Or a bunch of books.
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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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
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The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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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
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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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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
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While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.
Douglas Rushkoff
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In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Apple enjoys 'Harry Potter'-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off.
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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It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.
Douglas Rushkoff
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The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to.
Douglas Rushkoff
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When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.
Douglas Rushkoff
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I understand Windows as well as most technical-support personnel. I can edit a config.sys file and delete bad lines in an autoexec.bat with the best of them. I can partition a hard drive in FAT32 But why would I want to?
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