Quotes by Douglas Rushkoff

If we could stop thinking of meaning and purpose as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.

Computers dont kill books people do.

Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.

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 Beans statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

Most of us still havent grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than weve learned about them.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the neuroplasticity allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

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 theyre corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

Not only have computers changed the way we think, theyve also discovered what makes humans think - or think were thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.

The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they dont bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apples rules. If youre even allowed to.

When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.

Once a teen has been identified as part of the target market, he knows hes done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep ones own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You werent supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.

I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think its a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.