Program or Be Programmed

Think of almost any television commercial: A person gets in terrible trouble, the product gets her out. A girl gets a pimple before the prom. She tries all sorts of things to get rid of it, making matters worse. Just when it looks like all is lost, she finds the miracle cream. It works, boyfriend sh…

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Users Programming Media Against Us

The network is still controlled centrally by an authority, but it functions in a decentralized way.

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Totalitarian Silent Power Central Control Authority Digital Power Structures

Our devices and, by extension, our nervous systems are now attached to the entire online universe, all the time.

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Post-Biology Brains Digital Life Always On Connectionism

The content is not the message, the contact is. The ping itself. It's the synaptic transmission of an organism trying to wake itself up.

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Connectionism Medium = Message

In preliterate civilizations, people attempted to live their lives and appease their gods with no real sense of the rules. They just did what they could, sacrificing animals and even children along the way to appease the gods they didn't understand. The invention of text gave them a set of rules to…

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Democratization History Of Communication Opening of Culture

The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.

— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com

Evolution Media

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