Latest Quotes

“For [Stewart] Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the 'long now' that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“...the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family,…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Great ideas don't really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems. They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, 'fade into view over long periods of time.'”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Steven Johnson, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Once 'the shadow of the future' lengthens, we have the basis for more durable relationships.”

— Robert Axelrod, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map.”

— Joichi Ito, Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants

“Management's job is not to fill current employees with the collected, compressed wisdom of the ages, but rather to support them in the jobs only they are actually charged with doing. Management becomes a bit like customer service department for the employees, who are the ones responsible for the bus…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“In a world where everything is declining, you have instances of digital outlets growing. But relatively speaking, they in no way begin to replace what was there before. Even the Huffington Post. I think maybe they have revenue of $60 million. That's as opposed to what's gone away: the Washington Pos…”

— Michael Wolff, Digiday.com

“You have things that are sprouts that are beginning to yield and employ people and beginning to do interesting things and become influential. But compared to what the business once was, it's nothing. We've now built a business on the basis of being almost completely staffed by young people who are p…”

— Michael Wolff, Digiday.com

“His agency was structured in the loosest possible way. He detested hierarchies. There were no department heads, and no job descriptions. The agency operated as a partnership, like a big law firm. When he offered me a job, he gave me no inkling what work he had in mind for me. Office boy? Copywriter?…”

— David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

“When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.”

— Pat Brown, Ogilvy on Advertising

“Left-wing economists, ever eager to snatch the scourge from the hand of God, hold that advertising tempts people to squander money on things they don't need. Who are these élitists to decide what you need? Do you need a dishwasher? Do you need a deodorant? Do you need a trip to Rome? I feel no qualm…”

— David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

“Advertising is not the noblest creation of man's mind, as so many of its advocates would like the public to think. It does not, single-handedly, sustain the whole structure of capitalism and democracy and the Free World. It is just as nonsensical to suggest that we are superhuman as to accept the in…”

— Leo Burnett, Ogilvy on Advertising

“There is comfort in consensus; those in the majority gain confidence from their very number.”

— Seth A. Klarman, Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor

“When a bank wants to move a big quantity of shares, for example, it doesn't want everyone to know what it is doing. If news of a big buy leaked out before the big buy could be completed, the price may go up. To hide their motions, they employ the same technique as stealth planes: they use algorithms…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Our iPads and Androids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now