Top 120 Douglas Rushkoff Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Invest in people who will take care of you when you’re old.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

3. “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

4. “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

5. “We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

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

— Douglas Rushkoff

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. 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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

11. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

12. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

13. “Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then he’s talking about renaissance: the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

14. “If we don’t truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

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

— Douglas Rushkoff

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

25. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

26. “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

27. “Socialization depends on both autonomy and interdependency; emphasizing one at the expense of the other compromises the balance.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The phones are smarter but we are dumber.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

33. “We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there’s an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we’d best pay attention to what’s going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Computers don’t kill books; people do.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

39. “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

40. “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

41. “People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

42. “New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures – from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

47. “We are moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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