“Computers don't kill books; people do.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“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
“Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and mortgages became derivative investments.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“The phones are smarter but we are dumber.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Socialization depends on both autonomy and interdependency; emphasizing one at the expense of the other compromises the balance.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“The primary purpose of the internet had changed from supporting a knowledge economy to growing an attention economy.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“The most successful of biology’s creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
"Time has always been used against us on a certain level. The invention of the clock made us accountable to the employer, gave us a standard measure and stopwatch management, and it also led to the requirement of interest-bearing currency to grow over time, the requirement of the expansion of our economy."
― Douglas Rushkoff
"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
"We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working ... Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff-it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff."
― Douglas Rushkoff
"'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel."
― Douglas Rushkoff
"Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information."
― Douglas Rushkoff
"Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old."
― Douglas Rushkoff
"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