Douglas Rushkoff famous quotes

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

#Expansion #Levels #Requirements

I don't want to sound like some old person pining for how things used to be, because I'm not. But walking down the street, for example, used to be a public activity; you'd see the other people.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#People #Sound #Example

More than anything, rave was an intentionally designed experience. The music, lighting, and ambience were all fine-tuned to elicit and augment altered states of consciousness. The rhythm of the music was precisely 120 beats per minute, the frequency of the fetal heart rate, and the same beat believed to be used by South American shamans to bring their tribes into a trance state. Through dancing together, without prescribed movements, or even partners, rave dancers sought to reach group consciousness on a level they had never experienced before.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Heart #Dancing #Dancer

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?"
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Phones #People #Alternatives

We are moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Moving #Playing Games #Role Playing

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Want #Narrative #Ends

Global warming, you don't win it. It's this weird steady-state issue that's going to be with us for a few thousand years.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Winning #Years #Issues

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, a vast majority of the time, we surrender our true autonomy to this illusion of agency. I'm as guilty as anybody, and I write about it in a book. I'm not condemning anybody.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Book #Writing #Agency

I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Technology #People #Fields

Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Giants #Peers #Want

I feel like Hollywood would rather end the emerging, bottom-up creative culture than let it happen.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Creative #Hollywood #Culture

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

#Letting Go #Essence #Special

Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Iphone #Apples #Ipods

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 #Writing #Play

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

#Memories #Philosophy #Medicine

Imagine what it would be like if you didn't know that the evening news was funded primarily by 'Big Pharma.' You would actually believe the stuff that they're saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Believe #Thinking #Would Be

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 #Believe #Gay

In spite of my own reservations about Bing's ability to convert Google users, I have to admit that the search engine does offer a genuine alternative to Google-style browsing, a more coherently organized selection of links, and a more advertiser-friendly environment through which to sell space and links.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Space #Google #Style

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Order #Networking #Snapshots

The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God's universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Community #Pulse #Eras

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Want #Influence #Hours

Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#War #Mean #Escaping

For Google, the problem with being a free, abundant, and rather infinite set of services is that it's hard to create much of a stir about anything. There are so many major software service options under the 'more' menu on the Gmail page that they've had to go and add a final item called 'even more.'
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Google #Finals #Add

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.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Jobs #Apples #Google

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

#Art #Vanity #Directors

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 #People #Choices

I don't know of any other form of life that gathers up all the food it needs in the first two-thirds of its life in order to do nothing in its last third of life. In a utopian presentist society, instead of working extra hard to put money in the bank, you'd be working to provide value for the people around you.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Order #Two #People

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

#Book #Thinking #Poison

Google is in a position where it doesn't even have to strive to become a hip, conscious choice. Brands are temporary fads. Functionality is forever. Google just has to 'be,' and everyone will end up there sooner or later.
-- Douglas Rushkoff

#Choices #Forever #Google

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

#Kids #Self #Hype