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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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Douglas Rushkoff
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 18
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Plague
Currency
Collapse
Driven
Lead
Europe
Economic
Rather

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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.
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Most simply, 'present shock' is the human response to living in a world that's always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it's the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it's just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there.
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.
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Social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them.
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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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.
Douglas Rushkoff
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I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell products.
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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The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self -consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs. ... You're safe because you have an ironic distance from the coercive techniques I'm employing. All of them that is, except this one. Are you on your guard yet? Does it feel good? Of course not.
Douglas Rushkoff
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Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.
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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Digital time does not flow it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.
Douglas Rushkoff
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As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.
Douglas Rushkoff
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On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.
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