Top 66 Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

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.

The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

Microsoft’s new OS, Windows 7, may finally be a worthy successor to XP, eliminating the clutter of Vista and letting users get to what they want to use without the fuss. All this, while remaining compatible with their IT departments’ demands for scalability and custom implementations.

Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.

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.

Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It’s just 3:23. It’s almost this absolute duration that doesn’t have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

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

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

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.’

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

To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we’ve committed ourselves. And that system is embodied – through marketing as much as talent – by Steve Jobs.

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.

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.

Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents’ credit card information.

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.

While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.

Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.

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.

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.

The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.

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.

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.

The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it ‘out there.’

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.

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

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.

It’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.

Apple enjoys ‘Harry Potter’-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off.

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.

Our eyeball hours are scarce, indeed. That’s why Google wants us to do as much as possible online, in range of their ads, and is willing to spend billions creating more reasons and ways for us to do so.

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.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a ‘people’s’ Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

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.

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.

Like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.

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.

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.

Beyond the hype, style, and speculation, the truth is that the iPad is really just another tablet device. A really big PDA, where a touchscreen does what a laptop’s keyboard used to do.

While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other.

Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.

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.