Present Shock: When everything happens now
The Douglas Rushkoff edition
“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
“Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“If we could stop thinking of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
“Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today’s elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
“It’s also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn’t preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“People are at best an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured. Everything is optimized for capital, until it runs out of world to consume.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human
“The phones are smarter but we are dumber.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“Our digital devices and the outlooks they inspired allowed us to break free of the often repressive timelines of our storytellers, turning us from creatures led about by future expectations into more fully present-oriented human beings. The actual experience of this now-ness, however, is a bit more distracted, peripheral, even schizophrenic than that of being fully present. For many, the collapse of narrative led initially to a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder—a disillusionment, and the vague unease of having no direction from above, no plan or story. But like a dose of adrenaline or a double shot of espresso, our digital technologies compensate for this goalless drifting with an onslaught of simultaneous demands. We may not know where we’re going anymore, but we’re going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“Wal-Mart’s relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador’s eyeglass. Like temporary forts built solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
“Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell,”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
“Meanwhile, the extraordinary measures we take to stay abreast of each minuscule change to the data stream end up magnifying the relative importance of these blips to the real scheme of things. Investors trade, politicians respond, and friends judge based on the micromovements of virtual needles. By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living. The tension between the faux present of digital bombardment and the true now of a coherently living human generated the second kind of present shock, what we’re calling digiphrenia—digi for “digital,” and phrenia for “disordered condition of mental activity.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
“But even if such a prediction were true, our inability to distinguish between a virtual reality simulation and the real world will have less to do with the increasing fidelity of simulation than the decreasing perceptual abilities of us humans.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
“Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires