265 Quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

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.

And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it – whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.

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.

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.

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user’s psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

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.

It’s not that Twitter isn’t successful, it just isn’t successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.

Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there’s some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.