Douglas Rushkoff

The award-winning author of Life, Inc. examines the pros and cons of today's digitally driven, real-time world, explaining how to safeguard against the vulnerabilities of instant-experience media while maximizing its benefits.

When Everything Happens Now

Present Shock

Why doesn't the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone? What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else? When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn't between the unem�ployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Rather, a tornado of technological improvements has spun our economic program out of control, and humanity as a whole--the protesters and the Google employees as well as the shareholders and the executives--are all trapped by the consequences. It's time to optimize our economy for the human beings it's supposed to be serving. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and author Douglas Rushkoff tells us how to combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology. Tying together disparate threads--big data, the rise of robots and AI, the increasing participation of algorithms in stock market trading, the gig economy, the collapse of the eurozone--Rushkoff provides a critical vocabulary for our economic moment and a nuanced portrait of humans and commerce at a critical crossroads.

How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

"A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork."--Walter Isaacson

Team Human

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: It's here; it's everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? "Choose the former," writes Rushkoff, "and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make." In ten chapters, composed of ten "commands" accompanied by original illustrations from comic artist Leland Purvis, Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe. In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age--and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.

Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Program Or be Programmed

Analyzes the ways in which the author believes that corporate interests dominate life, citing the impact of branding and marketing on everything from health care to relationships, in a report that makes recommendations for achieving authenticity and disengaging from commercial expectations.

How the World Became a Corporation and how to Take it Back

Life Inc

The Tech Elite's Ultimate Exit Strategy

Survival of the Richest

ten commands for a digital age

Program or Be Programmed

Examines media and popular culture issues, including childrens' television, MTV, the O.J. Simpson trial, and alternative media

Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture

Media Virus!

The digital age will always be marked by the spirit of its first emergence, and the tension from the very first between corporate high-tech and the appropriation of information technologies by the counter-culture. Cyberia is an ideas-led, exuberant documentary written in 1994 about the converging strands of this new era, the empowerments of cyber-technology and the emergent hacker and cyber milieu.

Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Cyberia

Argues that bosses, so-called experts, and authorities real and imaginary have taken over much of the decision-making power in our lives, and explains how the new technologies and media innovations are being co-opted to shape our world and to damage individual initiative. Reprint.

Why We Listen to what "they" Say

Coercion

Richard D. Bartlett

Anthony Cabraal

Joshua Vial

Doris Zurr

Lucas Tauil de Freitas

Phoebe Tickell

Hannah Smith

Damian Sligo-Green

Susan Basterfield

Gina Rembe-Stevens

Chelsea Robinson

Francesca Pick

Sandra Otto

Nick Laurence

Alanna Irving

John Gieryn

Charley Davenport

Sandra Chemin

Lucy Carter

Kate Beecroft

"The future of working together has arrived. A radically different workplace is possible. We can build organisations that change lives, and grow resilient, committed, self-managing teams. If you are curious about how the power of community can transform the way business works, and has the potential to change the world, this book is for you."--back cover.

How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business

Better Work Together

Media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff weaves a mind-bending tale of iconography and mysticism against the backdrop of a battle-torn Europe. In a story spanning generations, and featuring some of the most notable and notorious idealists of the 20th century, legendary occultist Aleister Crowley develops a powerful and dangerous new weapon to defend the world against Adolf Hitler's own war machine spawning an unconventional new form of warfare that is fought not with steel, but with symbols and ideas. Unfortunately, these intangible arsenals are much more insidious and perhaps much more dangerous than their creators could have ever conceived. "Rushkoff is a cultural treasure and an eccentric author of big, strange ideas, never less than fascinating and always entertaining." -Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine, Red, Trees, and Transmetropolitan "Douglas has been one of my personal heroes, and I've been a most attentive reader of anything he cares to put between covers, knowing that his combination of a cold eye and a warm heart is guaranteed to astonish and embolden my own thinking about what's possible in the world--about what's possible to enact in the space between one human being and another. He occupies the ground of our most immediate perplexities, and his reports of what he finds are breaking news." -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Best American Comics and The Fortress of Solitude

Aleister & Adolf

A Novel

Ecstacy Club

Gathering in a dilapidated old warehouse to explore the ultimate frontier of cyberspace and the ultimate barrier of time, a group of disenfranchised young hackers and esoteric spiritualists tries to create a plugged-in utopia, until they find themselves threatened by a motley array of mysterious enemies. Reprint.

Ecstasy Club

On a landscape that seems to be transforming itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment strategy, businesses rush to embrace change by trading in their competencies or shifting their focus altogether. All in the name of innovation. But this endless worrying, wriggling, and trend watching only alienates companies from whatever it is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush to think "outside the box," the full engagement responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants, new packaging, new marketing schemes, or even new CEOs are no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise as individuals and as businesses. Indeed, for all their talk about innovation, most companies today are still scared to death of it. To Douglas Rushkoff, this disconnect is not only predictable but welcome. It marks the happy end of a business cycle that began as long ago as the Renaissance, and ended with the renaissance in creativity and collaboration we're going through today. The age of mass production, mass media, and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation it engendered between producers and consumers, managers and employees, executives and shareholders, and, worst of all, businesses and their own core values and competencies. American enterprise, in particular, is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process -- and fun -- of discovery. "American companies are obsessed with window dressing," Rushkoff writes, "because they're reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink, rebrand, or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived." Rushkoff backs up his arguments with a myriad of intriguing historical examples as well as familiar gut checks -- from the dumbwaiter and open source to Volkswagen and The Gap -- in this accessible, thought-provoking, and immediately applicable set of insights. Here's all the help innovators of this era need to reconnect with their own core competencies as well as the passion fueling them.

Innovation from the Inside Out

Get Back in the Box

Why doesn’t the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone? What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else? When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn’t between the unem­ployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Rather, a tornado of technological improvements has spun our economic program out of control, and humanity as a whole—the protesters and the Google employees as well as the shareholders and the executives—are all trapped by the consequences. It’s time to optimize our economy for the human beings it’s supposed to be serving. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and author Douglas Rushkoff tells us how to combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology. Tying together disparate threads—big data, the rise of robots and AI, the increasing participation of algorithms in stock market trading, the gig economy, the collapse of the eurozone—Rushkoff provides a critical vocabulary for our economic moment and a nuanced portrait of humans and commerce at a critical crossroads.

Testament.

The tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind. Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive The Event: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making -- as long as they have enough money and the right technology. In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset created -- a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies -- and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. Instead of changing the people, he argues, we can change the program.

When Zeke, an unpopular young college student, discovers a new club, he learns that reality at the club is a psychic field created by Zero-G children and that he has become a pawn in a conspiracy of the militaries of the present and future to destroy the Zero-G kids. Original. 10,000 first printing.

Douglas Rushkoff

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