265 Quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

I’m not a communist, just a media theorist.

Facebook’s successor will no doubt provide an easy ‘migration utility’ through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.

A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn’t do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment.

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.

We have the alternative. “Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?”

Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We’re back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.

Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what’s happening on the free Internet is more akin to the ‘crowdsourcing’ of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them – only the search engines that parse their articles.

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.

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.