Most of us thought digital technology would connect the whole world in new ways. The Internet was supposed to break down those last boundaries between what are essentially synthetic nation states and herald a new, global community of peers. National governments were considered extinct. Internet evangelist (and Grateful Dead lyricist) John Barlow dismissed them in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace 20 years ago: "I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us." But the Internet age has actually heralded the opposite result. We are not advancing toward some new global society, but instead retreating back to nationalism. Instead of moving toward a colors of Benetton racial intermingling, we find many yearning for a fictional past when people like to think our races were distinct, and all was well.   read more »

We think of automobiles as American as baseball, apple pie, and hotdogs - or at least that's what the car advertisers have gotten us to believe. But as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's investigation into a fatal self-driving car accident should remind us, the automobile's centrality to the American way of life was an expensive and political battle with nearly uncountable human casualties.   read more »

The natural successor to philosopher of communication theory Marshall Mcluhan, Rushkoff was one of the first adopters of cyber culture but quickly saw how big business overturned the promise of the digital age in favour of making money. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Rushkoff for a pseudo Marxist rather than a media theorist. He uses words like “value extraction” and “scorched earth approach” and there is a lot of truth and heartfelt compassion in what Douglas has to say. His ability to cut through all the jargon of the tech age and say it as it is especially in his latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, is refreshing. A punk and pioneer, Rushkoff comes at this hyper-capitalist sector with venom. He has been left heartbroken having originally thought that this tech explosion would bring us the fruits and spoils of open collaborations and more transparency. Nonetheless his fight goes on, Rushkoff opens up to us passionately about the disfigurement of the digital age and how we can try to fix it.   read more »

It is easy to be mesmerised by the purported benefits of the digital age. The ability to easily and efficiently communicate, consume, connect and create though often comes at the expense of older more established modes and mediums, such as telephones and newspapers. A vision of supposed freedom and hope has been converted over time into the poster child of digital industrialisation and growth-based economics.   read more »

In this episode, we talk about how he sees the purpose of Judaism is to help one transcend Judaism, the psycho-social peril of living in the digital now, and how the new media empires has failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.    read more »

At the dawn of the internet Douglas Rushkoff wrote the book Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. A whirlwind tour through the lens of various web subcultures, Cyberia lay the philosophical foundation for the internet as an opportunity for a new kind of liberation. Rushkoff argued that the web could generate a new renaissance by birthing a technological civilization grounded in ancient spiritual truths. But a different story emerged. Almost overnight, the web was wholeheartedly adopted by mainstream culture and fundamentally changed the world in unexpected ways.   read more »

We may be moving into an era when everyone can make computer programs, even though they don’t know how to code — at least not in the way we think about coding today. I’ve started playing with an iPad app called Ready that lets kids build little games, simple apps, and creative digital projects. It uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to create objects, change their properties, and make them interact with each other or a user.   read more »

Video footage of this year's talk at at PSFK.   read more »

Watch this video at Commonwealth Club   read more »

Media theorist, professor, and graphic novelist Douglas Rushkoff has been in love with the internet since its cyberpunk beginnings. He has made several documentaries and written more than a dozen bestselling books about media, technology, and culture – his new book is Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.    read more »