Douglas Rushkoff Quotes
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The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
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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.
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I'm not a communist, just a media theorist.
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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.
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Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.
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I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.
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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.
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I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
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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.
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Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied - through marketing as much as talent - by Steve Jobs.
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As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
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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.
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Apple enjoys 'Harry Potter'-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off.
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Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.
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While Google has given away pretty much everything it has to offer - from search and maps to email and apps - this has always been part of its greater revenue model: the pennies per placement it gets for seeding the entire Google universe of search and services with ever more targeted advertising.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.