Platform cooperatives – as a direct affront to the platform monopolies characterizing digital industrialism – offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good. Instead of extracting value and delivering it up to distant shareholders, we harvest, circulate, and recycle the value again and again. And those are precisely the habits we must retrieve as we move ahead from an extractive and growth-based economy to one as regenerative and sustainable as we're going to need to survive the great challenges of our time.   read more »

I know this has been a rough time for a lot of you, and I hope you are doing well. In brief: Yes, there has been a major electoral upheaval, and it seems there are many confused people out there working under some pretty strange assumptions. But no, this isn’t as much of a shift as it may seem. If anything, this is the legacy of the 20th Century coming back to haunt us...   read more »

In Aleister & Adolf the reader is taken behind the scenes of the capitalist spectacle and inside the boardrooms where corporate-occult marketing departments employ fascist sigil magick developed by the Nazis during WWII in today’s advertising logos. A place where the war for men’s minds is waged with symbols and catchy slogans. It’s a fun smart read and you’ll be much smarter after you’ve read it, trust me. And Oeming’s crisp B&W artwork is perfectly suited for getting across some often difficult and tricky philosophical concepts. He’s a unique talent indeed.   read more »

Douglas Rushkoff has been observing the Internet’s trajectory since the 1990s, writing 16 influential books about digital culture along the way including Media Virus and Present Shock. Rushkoff’s latest work, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, focuses on the business and investing practices of today’s leading tech companies like Uber and Snapchat, and how they are exaggerating the worst aspects of an economic system that pushes for growth at all costs.   read more »

Aleister & Adolf is a new graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics, the product of the creative pairing of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff—Professor of Media Studies at Queens College in New York—and and award-winning illustrator Michael Avon Oeming. In Aleister & Adolf the reader is taken behind the scenes of the capitalist spectacle and inside the boardrooms where corporate-occult […]   read more »

Author, media theorist, professor, activist: Douglas Rushkoff wears many hats. At the heart of his work is a recurring theme: how to redevelop society to better serve humans. In this episode, Douglas discusses his latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, which raises fundamental questions about what he calls the “old extractive, growth-based capitalism.” This is a hard-hitting critique of the digital revolution, finance in Silicon Valley, and its obsession with growth-and a call for new economic, technological, and social programs to create a fairer, more sustainable economy for humans.   read more »

When Americans go to the polls next week, they will be finalizing an electoral cycle characterized largely by resentment--and Doug Rushkoff, for one, mostly blames the changes spawned by the internet. Instead of the once-promised glorious new age, one that would free us from the tyranny of the corporate state, we got income inequality, the housing bubble, increased corporate power, and, now, a presidential election like none other in our history. And Rushkoff, a longtime media theorist and author, says the tech industry is partly responsible.   read more »

In Aleister & Adolf, media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff weaves a mind-bending tale of iconography and mysticism, set against the backdrop of a battle-torn Europe. This all-new original graphic novel, beautifully rendered by Michael Avon Oeming (The Victories, Powers), views real-world history through a psychedelic occult lens.   read more »

Watch the closing keynote at Sibos 2016.   read more »

Listen to this podcast at This Week in Startups   read more »