Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

When protesters threw rocks at Google employee shuttles in San Francisco, they were expressing a frustration felt by millions: the sense that the digital economy enriches a tiny few while impoverishing everyone else. But Rushkoff argues that the protesters — and most of their critics — were missing the real problem.

The issue isn't the technology or even the companies. It's the operating system underlying them all: a growth-at-all-costs model of capitalism that was designed in the Renaissance for a very different world. Our digital businesses are running a medieval corporate charter on twenty-first-century hardware, and the results are predictably disastrous.

Rushkoff traces the history of how corporations became programmed to extract value rather than create it — and how the internet, once a potential counterforce, was colonized by the same extractive logic. But he also shows how a growing number of businesses, communities, and platforms are finding ways to generate sustainable prosperity instead.

The result is a book that reframes the debate around inequality and technology — and offers a practical path toward an economy that works for everyone, not just the shareholders.