110+ Douglas Rushkoff Quotes On Education, Socialism And Future

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, and documentarian. He is best known for his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems and his exploration of the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He is the author of many books, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Douglas Rushkoff on leadership, education, socialism.

Top 10 Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

1. 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.
2. The plague did not lead to Europe’s economic collapse. Rather, Europe’s currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.
3. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.
4. When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.
5. 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.
6. Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.
7. 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.
8. A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.
9. I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.
10. Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.

Douglas Rushkoff Short Quotes

• Nothing is sacred. And, more importantly...the 'nothing' you end up with is truly sacred.
• I feel like Hollywood would rather end the emerging, bottom-up creative culture than let it happen.
• It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us.
• Computers don't kill books; people do.
• Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.
• I'm not a communist, just a media theorist.
• The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

Douglas Rushkoff Famous Quotes And Sayings

Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game. The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four- dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how serious we take it, or how serious its consequences are. — Douglas Rushkoff

Part of an icon's power comes from its indivisibility. The swoosh cannot be further deconstructed into its component parts. Just as golden arches mean McDonald's, and the little red tab means Levi's, the swoosh is Nike. The product is its icon, inseparably and without exception. To buy a pair of Nike shoes is to buy the Nike swoosh. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall. — Douglas Rushkoff

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. — Douglas Rushkoff

One argument against open systems is that they become open to everything, good and bad. Like a Richard Meier skyscraper, the anal retentive, Bauhaus elegance of the Mac does prevent the loose ends and confusion of a less sterile environment. But it also prevents fertility. Apple's development must come from within. — Douglas Rushkoff

Whether it's watching a $4,000 laptop fall off the conveyor belt at airport security, contending with a software conflict that corrupted your file management system, or begging your family to stop opening those virus-carrying 'greeting cards' attached to emails, all computer owners are highly leveraged and highly vulnerable technology investors. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell. — Douglas Rushkoff

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. — Douglas Rushkoff

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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.' — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

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

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

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the "demands" of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. — Douglas Rushkoff

New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, 'Jane is now friends with Tom.' The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete. — Douglas Rushkoff

'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel. — Douglas Rushkoff

Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit. — Douglas Rushkoff

As a writer and sometime activist who needs to promote my books and articles and occasionally rally people to one cause or another, I found Facebook fast and convenient. Though I never really used it to socialize, I figured it was OK to let other people do that, and I benefited from their behavior. — Douglas Rushkoff

The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't 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 Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers. — Douglas Rushkoff

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time. — Douglas Rushkoff

We know that people are less open in conversations if the other conversant puts a cell phone on the table. Even if it's turned off. The sign is enough to close the mind and make a prospective client or lover less likely to do what you ask. As people realize this, they'll start putting away phones or turning them off. — Douglas Rushkoff

What makes a great standalone piece of hardware is not the same thing as what makes a great networking device. One can work as an essentially closed system. The other is absolutely dependent on its openness. — Douglas Rushkoff

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Most simply, 'present shock' is the human response to living in a world that's always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it's the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it's just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles. — Douglas Rushkoff

I understand Windows as well as most technical-support personnel. I can edit a config.sys file and delete bad lines in an autoexec.bat with the best of them. I can partition a hard drive in FAT32 But why would I want to? — Douglas Rushkoff

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make. — Douglas Rushkoff

By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google. — Douglas Rushkoff

Most of us still haven't 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. — Douglas Rushkoff

Social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It's more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system. — Douglas Rushkoff

It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked. — Douglas Rushkoff

The 'looking forward' so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape. — Douglas Rushkoff

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 Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

... we're moving into an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we refuse than the ones we accept. — Douglas Rushkoff

When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we've strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time. — Douglas Rushkoff

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

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

With the DVR, I was mostly writing about it as a good thing in giving us the choice of when and how to watch things. But there's what we lose in the bargain, which is the collective spectacle. 'Did you see Jay Leno last night?' — Douglas Rushkoff

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

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

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

We've been taught that the renaissance was one of the great golden ages of civilisation. The renaissance was not a golden age, it was the end of a golden age. — Douglas Rushkoff

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it. — Douglas Rushkoff

The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can't multitask, and we shouldn't keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next. — Douglas Rushkoff

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others. — Douglas Rushkoff

Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers. — Douglas Rushkoff

Life Lessons by Douglas Rushkoff

1. Douglas Rushkoff teaches us to be mindful of how technology can shape our lives and the world around us, and to use it in a way that is beneficial to us and our society.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of being aware of the power of media and how it can be used to manipulate us.
3. Finally, he encourages us to think critically and actively engage with the world around us, rather than passively accepting what is presented to us.