Quote

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

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
Live
Step
Really
Internet
Design
Steps
Technology
Ability
Empowerment
Fear
Occasion
Reality
Occasions

More quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

Image
Google is in a position where it doesn't even have to strive to become a hip, conscious choice. Brands are temporary fads. Functionality is forever. Google just has to 'be,' and everyone will end up there sooner or later.
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
Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
Global warming, you don't win it. It's this weird steady-state issue that's going to be with us for a few thousand years.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
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
The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
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
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
I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
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
I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game. The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four- dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how serious we take it, or how serious its consequences are.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.
Douglas Rushkoff
Image
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
Image
Online advertising may not be much more successful than an old double-barrel, but - like a good spray of buckshot - it makes up for its lack of accuracy with sheer volume. There are 10 unique ads listed with every Gmail message in your queue, each tied to the message content. And a paying sponsor.
Douglas Rushkoff