Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

Douglas Rushkoff — 2016

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.

Reviews

John Manoogian III@jm3

Apr 4, 2024

This is less of a review and more of a note to self and future readers. If you want a summary of the plot, read the other reviews or the book description. I loved this book. I do think it would benefit from a new title. It's tiresome when talking about it with friends to constantly re-explain that it's not really about Google, and it's not an Anti Google screed. But that's a pretty minor point. This is a very high-entropy book, from an information perspective. Nearly every single sentence contains new / unique thoughts, to the point that any form of speed-reading, which I normally do, is difficult. You have to pretty much absorb each sentence as its own semantic unit. Which is, you know, reading, I guess :) I felt that this had a lot of parallels to or resonance with Umair Haque's Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. I'm curious if Rushkoff read either of them. In my opinion, Rushkoff's book is more readable, more deeply researched, and a bit less preachy than Umair's. OTOH, I think Umair can be pretty inspirational too. Your mileage may vary.