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We've been taught that the renaissance was one of the great golden ages of civilisation. The renaissance was not a golden age, it was the end of a golden age.

Douglas Rushkoff

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Douglas Rushkoff
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: February 18
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Civilisation
Renaissance
Ages
Golden
Taught
Age
Ends
Great

More quotes by 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 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
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We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model.
Douglas Rushkoff
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I don't want to sound like some old person pining for how things used to be, because I'm not. But walking down the street, for example, used to be a public activity you'd see the other people.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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Part of an icon's power comes from its indivisibility. The swoosh cannot be further deconstructed into its component parts. Just as golden arches mean McDonald's, and the little red tab means Levi's, the swoosh is Nike. The product is its icon, inseparably and without exception. To buy a pair of Nike shoes is to buy the Nike swoosh.
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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Computers don't kill books people do.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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
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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
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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
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Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers.
Douglas Rushkoff
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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