Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. Douglas Rushkoff More Quotes by Douglas Rushkoff More Quotes From Douglas Rushkoff New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Douglas Rushkoff google technology self 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 data technology people No matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being. Douglas Rushkoff media creative kids Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the "demands" of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. Douglas Rushkoff news agency movement Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken. Douglas Rushkoff wall broken doe Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product. Douglas Rushkoff target-market shopping games 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 nike mcdonalds mean People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them. Douglas Rushkoff reality people world 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 portraits style photography 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 multitasking brain way Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads. Douglas Rushkoff journalism infinite pay If you join the Boy Scouts without understanding the underlying agendas and biases of the organization, you might grow up to believe that being gay is a bad thing. Douglas Rushkoff growing-up gay believe If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped. Douglas Rushkoff medicine philosophy memories If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content. Douglas Rushkoff new-york play writing I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience. Douglas Rushkoff vanity directors art 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 essence special letting-go 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 poison book thinking 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 tv-shows stuff children I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines. Douglas Rushkoff technology choices people 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 television-commercials self kids
