Top 120 Douglas Rushkoff Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain’s capacity than before. Apparently not.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

55. “Like civil-rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what’s happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I’m here. You’re here, too. We are present.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

56. “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

57. “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

58. “I’m not a communist, just a media theorist.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Douglas Rushkoff

64. “The primary purpose of the internet had changed from supporting a knowledge economy to growing an attention economy.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

65. “The most successful of biology’s creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

66. “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

67. “The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

68. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

69. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

70. “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

71. “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

72. “But even if such a prediction were true, our inability to distinguish between a virtual reality simulation and the real world will have less to do with the increasing fidelity of simulation than the decreasing perceptual abilities of us humans.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

73. “Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

74. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

75. “Ecstacy stripped away the user’s inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

76. “And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

77. “Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption – similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the ’70s and ’80s.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

78. “The plague did not lead to Europe’s economic collapse. Rather, Europe’s currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Douglas Rushkoff

84. “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

85. “The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don’t own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

86. “The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there’s programming going on. It’s as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

87. “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

88. “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

89. “We can be fully human without being in complete control of our world.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

90. “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

91. “A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn’t do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

92. “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

93. “Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”

— Douglas Rushkoff

94. “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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

95. “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

96. “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

97. “We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

98. “I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

99. “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

100. “As Apple continues to release new styles of netbooks, laptops, and even desktops with untold movie-watching and game-playing capabilities, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPhone operating system running on them – and the Macintosh eventually becoming a thing of the past.”

— Douglas Rushkoff