Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 27

Fast Company – Learning to Code Offers Diminishing Returns

Read this piece at Fast Company

Looking for job security in the knowledge economy? Just learn to code. At least, that’s what we’ve been telling young professionals and mid-career workers alike who want to hack it in the modern workforce—in fact, it’s advice I’ve given myself. And judging by the proliferation of coding schools and bootcamps we’ve seen over the past few years, not a few have eagerly heeded that instruction, thinking they’re shoring up their livelihoods in the process.

Unfortunately, many have already learned the hard way that even the best coding chops have their limits. More and more, “learn to code” is looking like bad advice.

CODING CAN’T SAVE YOU

Anyone competent in languages such as Python, Java, or even web coding like HTML and CSS, is currently in high demand by businesses that are still just gearing up for the digital marketplace. However, as coding becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India, we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops.

This trend is bound to increase. The better opportunity may be to use your coding skills to develop an app or platform yourself, but this means competing against thousands of others doing the same thing—and in an online marketplace ruled by just about the same power dynamics as the digital music business.

Besides, learning code is hard, particularly for adults who don’t remember their algebra and haven’t been raised thinking algorithmically. Learning code well enough to be a competent programmer is even harder.

Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing.

It’s actually worse. A single computer program written by perhaps a dozen developers can wipe out hundreds of jobs. As the author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen has pointed out, digital companies employ 10 times fewer people per dollar earned than traditional companies. Every time a company decides to relegate its computing to the cloud, it’s free to release a few more IT employees.

Most of the technologies we’re currently developing replace or obsolesce far more employment opportunities than they create. Those that don’t—technologies that require ongoing human maintenance or participation in order to work—are not supported by venture capital for precisely this reason. They are considered unscalable because they demand more paid human employees as the business grows.

TRAINING OUR ROBO-REPLACEMENTS

Finally, there are jobs for those willing to assist with our transition to a more computerized society. As employment counselors like to point out, self-checkout stations may have cost you your job as a supermarket cashier, but there’s a new opening for that person who assists customers having trouble scanning their items at the kiosk, swiping their debit cards, or finding the SKU code for Swiss chard. It’s a slightly more skilled job and may even pay better than working as a regular cashier.

But it’s a temporary position: Soon enough, consumers will be as proficient at self-checkout as they are at getting cash from the bank machine, and the self-checkout tutor will be unnecessary. By then, digital tagging technology may have advanced to the point where shoppers just leave stores with the items they want and get billed automatically.

For the moment, we’ll need more of those specialists than we’ll be able to find—mechanics to fit our current cars with robot drivers, engineers to replace medical staff with sensors, and to write software for postal drones. There will be an increase in specialized jobs before there’s a precipitous drop. Already in China, the implementation of 3-D printing and other automated solutions is threatening hundreds of thousands of high-tech manufacturing jobs, many of which have existed for less than a decade.

American factories would be winning back this business but for a shortage of workers with the training necessary to run an automated factory. Still, this wealth of opportunity will likely be only temporary. Once the robots are in place, their continued upkeep and a large part of their improvement will be automated as well. Humans may have to learn to live with it.

HIGH-TECH UNEMPLOYMENT

This conundrum was first articulated back in the 1940s by the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, whose work influenced members of the Eisenhower Administration to start worrying about what would come after industrialism. By 1966, the United States convened the first and only sessions of the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, which published six (mostly ignored) volumes sizing up what would later be termed the “post-industrial economy.”

Today, it’s MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee who appear to be leading the conversation about technology’s impact on the future of employment—what they call the “great decoupling.” Their extensive research shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that technological progress eliminates jobs and leaves average workers worse off than they were before.

“It’s the great paradox of our era,” Brynjolfsson explained to MIT Technology Reviewin 2013. “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.”

Yet it’s hard to see this great decoupling as a mere unintended consequence of digital technology. It is not a paradox but the realization of the industrial drive to remove humans from the value equation. That’s the big news: The growth of an economy does not mean more jobs or prosperity for the people living in it.

“I would like to be wrong,” a flummoxed McAfee confided in the same article, “but when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need all the people for?”

When technology increases productivity, a company has a new excuse to eliminate jobs and use the savings to reward its shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks. What would’ve been lost to wages is instead turned back into capital. So the middle class hollows out, and the only ones left making money are those depending on the passive returns from their investments.

It turns out that digital technology merely accelerates this process to the point where we can all see it occurring. It’s just that we haven’t all taken notice yet—we’ve been busy coding.

The post Fast Company – Learning to Code Offers Diminishing Returns appeared first on Rushkoff.

The Evening Standard – Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Read this post at the Evening Standard

The day after Twitter Inc floated on the New York Stock Exchange, its co-founder Evan Williams was pictured in the financial pages wearing a sheepish smile. He had just made $4.3 billion in a single day. How does that make you feel? Angry? Inspired? Envious? In his ambitious and invigorating polemic about why everything’s so messed up, Douglas Rushkoff asks us to sympathise with the young billionaire.

“When you’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, receiving applause from all those guys in suits, it’s not usually because you’ve done something revolutionary,” he contends. “It’s because you have helped confirm financial capital’s centrality to the whole scheme of human affairs.” Rushkoff believes that, like the founders of Google, Uber, and countless other digital ventures, Williams has sacrificed the “world-changing” potential of his technology to the “growth trap” — the expectation that businesses (and countries, and the world economy) must keep expanding in a way that no healthy organism ever can.

The problem isn’t so much naïve app developers, or Wall Street sharks or even the smug Googlers in their private buses — all these people are only doing their jobs. It’s the “faulty economic code” that underwrites the whole economy. Everything from the US constitution to religion can be understood as code, he reckons.

Rushkoff is one of these Nineties idealists who is disillusioned at what the online world has become. For all its potential to link humans in peer-to-peer networks — a sort of digitally enabled version of the mediaeval bazaars that he venerates — the web has in practice created vast monopolies.

Even the supposed “sharing economy” companies are now gamed this way. Rushkoff reads Uber as aiming for total “platform monopoly”, ie, destroying all other taxi firms until it’s in a position to justify the amount of money invested in it. Like Amazon with books, or Google with advertising, Uber intends to destroy competition rather than creating it — short of creating value, it sucks it out.

But this isn’t just a feature of digital companies — they just do it fast enough to make the process clear. Drawing on Thomas Piketty’s demonstration that capital will always grow faster than the rest of the economy (ie, you have to have money to make money) he shows how “extraction” is a feature of most corporations. He cites Walmart’s consumer colonialism. What little “value” the US supermarket giant creates is leeched from the real economy (welfare dependency increases wherever it operates) and delivered unto shareholders. He contrasts this with the more holistic approach of family-owned business, co-ops and non-profits. He lauds projects that enable value to flow around the economy, such as Bitcoin and local currencies, and cites alternative value systems such as the “time banks” that proliferate in Greece and Spain, which allow ordinary people to exchange services more equitably.

Rushkoff is brilliant on start-up economics, and he pops the “big data” bubble rather deftly. For what it’s worth, Twitter’s recent history bears out his point. The company reported record revenue of $710 million last quarter. This was seen by most commentators as a disaster, since investors generally expect a 100x return. You don’t need to be a Cassandra to see that’s not sustainable.

But what’s especially funny is that by examining California tech firms in this second machine age, Rushkoff comes to strikingly similar conclusions about capitalism as Marx and Engels did by observing Manchester factories in the first machine age. Indeed, his more far-reaching solutions — reducing the working week, universal basic income, steady-state economics — are identical to those currently being shaped by radical Lefties and environmentalist.

Rushkoff shies away from political solutions — the pitch here is more to the aspiring entrepreneurs and the business leaders he meets on the TED circuit. But he is part of a growing consensus that there is another way of doing things — and I suspect these ideas will only become more current as the century progresses.

The post The Evening Standard – Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus appeared first on Rushkoff.

The Evening Standard Reviews Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Read this post at the Evening Standard

The day after Twitter Inc floated on the New York Stock Exchange, its co-founder Evan Williams was pictured in the financial pages wearing a sheepish smile. He had just made $4.3 billion in a single day. How does that make you feel? Angry? Inspired? Envious? In his ambitious and invigorating polemic about why everything’s so messed up, Douglas Rushkoff asks us to sympathise with the young billionaire.

“When you’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, receiving applause from all those guys in suits, it’s not usually because you’ve done something revolutionary,” he contends. “It’s because you have helped confirm financial capital’s centrality to the whole scheme of human affairs.” Rushkoff believes that, like the founders of Google, Uber, and countless other digital ventures, Williams has sacrificed the “world-changing” potential of his technology to the “growth trap” — the expectation that businesses (and countries, and the world economy) must keep expanding in a way that no healthy organism ever can.

The problem isn’t so much naïve app developers, or Wall Street sharks or even the smug Googlers in their private buses — all these people are only doing their jobs. It’s the “faulty economic code” that underwrites the whole economy. Everything from the US constitution to religion can be understood as code, he reckons.

Rushkoff is one of these Nineties idealists who is disillusioned at what the online world has become. For all its potential to link humans in peer-to-peer networks — a sort of digitally enabled version of the mediaeval bazaars that he venerates — the web has in practice created vast monopolies.

Even the supposed “sharing economy” companies are now gamed this way. Rushkoff reads Uber as aiming for total “platform monopoly”, ie, destroying all other taxi firms until it’s in a position to justify the amount of money invested in it. Like Amazon with books, or Google with advertising, Uber intends to destroy competition rather than creating it — short of creating value, it sucks it out.

But this isn’t just a feature of digital companies — they just do it fast enough to make the process clear. Drawing on Thomas Piketty’s demonstration that capital will always grow faster than the rest of the economy (ie, you have to have money to make money) he shows how “extraction” is a feature of most corporations. He cites Walmart’s consumer colonialism. What little “value” the US supermarket giant creates is leeched from the real economy (welfare dependency increases wherever it operates) and delivered unto shareholders. He contrasts this with the more holistic approach of family-owned business, co-ops and non-profits. He lauds projects that enable value to flow around the economy, such as Bitcoin and local currencies, and cites alternative value systems such as the “time banks” that proliferate in Greece and Spain, which allow ordinary people to exchange services more equitably.

Rushkoff is brilliant on start-up economics, and he pops the “big data” bubble rather deftly. For what it’s worth, Twitter’s recent history bears out his point. The company reported record revenue of $710 million last quarter. This was seen by most commentators as a disaster, since investors generally expect a 100x return. You don’t need to be a Cassandra to see that’s not sustainable.

But what’s especially funny is that by examining California tech firms in this second machine age, Rushkoff comes to strikingly similar conclusions about capitalism as Marx and Engels did by observing Manchester factories in the first machine age. Indeed, his more far-reaching solutions — reducing the working week, universal basic income, steady-state economics — are identical to those currently being shaped by radical Lefties and environmentalist.

Rushkoff shies away from political solutions — the pitch here is more to the aspiring entrepreneurs and the business leaders he meets on the TED circuit. But he is part of a growing consensus that there is another way of doing things — and I suspect these ideas will only become more current as the century progresses.

The post The Evening Standard Reviews Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus appeared first on Rushkoff.

Legendary Life Podcast – How Corporate Growth Became The Enemy of Our Health And Prosperity

Listen to the audio podcast at Legendary Life

Douglas Rushkoff a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, CUNY. He is the bestselling author of Present Shock, as well ass a dozen other books on media, life, and culture. Named as one of the world’s most influential thinkers by MIT, he has also award-winning documentaries including Generation Like and Digital Nation. He new book Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.

The post Legendary Life Podcast – How Corporate Growth Became The Enemy of Our Health And Prosperity appeared first on Rushkoff.

Legendary Life Podcast: How Corporate Growth Became The Enemy of Our Health And Prosperity

Listen to the audio podcast at Legendary Life

Douglas Rushkoff a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, CUNY. He is the bestselling author of Present Shock, as well ass a dozen other books on media, life, and culture. Named as one of the world’s most influential thinkers by MIT, he has also award-winning documentaries including Generation Like and Digital Nation. He new book Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.

The post Legendary Life Podcast: How Corporate Growth Became The Enemy of Our Health And Prosperity appeared first on Rushkoff.

In Conversation With Marina Gorbis at the Commonwealth Club

Listen to the audio podcast at the Commonwealth Club.

Digital technology was supposed to usher in a new age of distributed prosperity, but many have complained that so far it has been used to put industrial capitalism on steroids. Rushkoff says It’s not technology’s fault; but instead he blames a growth-driven, economic operating system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. But he says there must be a better response to the lopsided returns of the digital economy than to throw rocks at the shuttle buses carrying Google employees to their jobs, as protesters did in December 2013. Acclaimed media scholar and technology author Douglas Rushkoff calls for people to embrace the more distributed possibilities of these technology platforms. He says we can optimize every aspect of the economy—from central currency and debt to corporations and labor—to create sustainable prosperity for business and people alike.

The post In Conversation With Marina Gorbis at the Commonwealth Club appeared first on Rushkoff.

Bloomberg – What’s Wrong With the Digital Economy

Watch the video at Bloomberg Business

Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” discusses the shortfalls of the digital economy and why new technology and digital media business don’t work in the traditional economic marketplace. He speaks on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

The post Bloomberg – What’s Wrong With the Digital Economy appeared first on Rushkoff.

What’s Wrong With the Digital Economy

Watch the video at Bloomberg Business

Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” discusses the shortfalls of the digital economy and why new technology and digital media business don’t work in the traditional economic marketplace. He speaks on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

The post What’s Wrong With the Digital Economy appeared first on Rushkoff.

Strategy+Business – Rocking the Bus

Read this article at Strategy+Business

The publisher of Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent new book,Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Portfolio, 2016), compares the author to Thomas Piketty and Erik Brynjolfsson — both of whom are noted economists. But Rushkoff, a media analyst who has become known for his insights on technology, is no economist. What’s more, he explicitly rejects both of these thinkers. He dismisses Piketty’s preferred solution to inequality, redistribution. And Rushkoff is equally sure that there will not be a “second machine age,” as Brynjolfsson projects.

The reason for his disagreement is expressed in the book’s subtitle, How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, which is a theme that builds on Rushkoff’s earlier work, includingLife Inc. (Random House, 2009) and Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010). Rather than focusing on the economic and technological factors driving the future of humanity, however, Rushkoff turns the lens around in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. The title, of course, is a reference to recent incidents in which some San Franciscans have demonstrated their anger at Google’s private transportation system, which ferries well-paid workers from gentrifying neighborhoods to the company’s suburban campus. In the book, Rushkoff unabashedly promotes human values, which, he steadfastly claims, are the same as digital values. As he puts it, “The word digital itself refers todigits — the 10 fingers we humans use to build, to count, and to program computers in the first place.” In this important and useful polemic, Rushkoff puts forth a bold thesis: We need to understand that digital technology allows us to install a new “social” operating system to replace the old industrial one that tried to eliminate the incalculable messiness of human life. It’s about time someone said this and made the argument stick.

Rushkoff starts with the premise that the pure economic analysis promulgated by the digerati has failed to help us understand how the future is unfolding. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the market logic of unfettered technology, or calling for a regime of regulation that will halt technological progress, he advocates a third way: “digital distributism.” Distributism is an approach to economics based on the principle of “subsidiarity,” which simply means that every entity, whether corporation or government agency, should be as big or small as it needs to be to accomplish its purpose — but not bigger or smaller. This approach is fully committed to private property and sees a strong role for governments in intervening to block entities from becoming “too big to fail.”

By tapping into what may be the only major alternative to the endlessly rotating capitalism-or-socialism hamster cage that has dominated the past century of political–economic punditry, Rushkoff cuts to the radical core of the issues involved. He argues that we should promote prosperity over growth, thus forcing a fundamental reexamination of what has been hidden from our view. No Luddite, Rushkoff calls on us to take advantage of what digital technology gives us: an opportunity to restore human balance to a society that is now racing toward a future in which machines dominate.

Because Rushkoff isn’t an economist, he can’t be expected to produce a detailed description of a new economic system. But he does provide a wealth of examples of entities that are managing to promote prosperity amid growth. He focuses on well-known topics such as “benefit corporations,” “employee-owned businesses,” and “cooperatives,” all of which endeavor to spread wealth more equitably. These well-intentioned efforts, however, are just scratching the surface. And in the majority of countries — most notably in China — approaching economic development without a recognition of the vital importance of growth is a nonstarter. As Rushkoff puts it, we seriously need a new “operating system.”

We need it, Rushkoff argues, because for the first time, automation is fundamentally reshaping our economic prospects. As economist Lawrence Summers recently noted in a conference presentation, in the 1960s the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Solow could dismiss the effects of automation on employment and industrial structure. Summers, then an impressionable graduate student, believed him. But Summers says he no longer buys the argument that automation is not fundamentally transformational. Furthermore, people may have changed in some fundamental way. More and more people realize that expecting nonstop consumption-driven growth makes little sense going forward. Indeed, those who most carefully monitor consumer behaviors have noticed fundamental changes in attitudes that began to show up in developed countries in the early 2000s, pointing to a persistent slowdown in consumption growth. Rushkoff also believes that technologies change us. Sociologists may disparage that argument as “technological determinism,” but their protests can’t stop us from being shaped by the tools we use.

The previous version of distributism, from which Rushkoff draws some schematic guidance, was an early-20th-century product of what is often called Catholic social teaching. This is the approach launched by Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which in English has the subtitle “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” It has taken many forms, including that of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, which Pope Francis specifically praised on his 2015 trip to the United States.

In his recent encyclical, Pope Francis noted that we are now living in a “technocratic paradigm” — a cultural matrix in which technology “rules” humanity. Pope Francis has been accused of being a socialist (or worse) for his criticism of the market as an inhuman machine. Rushkoff, for his part, is not Catholic. But he is a radical thinker who has tried to understand what technology might accomplish when and if humans actually reclaim control of their own lives.

Many economists have proposed rewriting the rules or have offered schemes for “saving capitalism.” Rushkoff brings a completely different set of observations and insights to this vital and expanding conversation. Because he isn’t constrained by models and isn’t limited by an education that blocks consideration of technological changes, Rushkoff is free to consider how human prosperity can displace a mechanistic growth drive. At the same time, he belongs in the category of techno-realists who squarely avoid both the utopian and dystopian outlooks.

Rushkoff is throwing rocks at more than the Google buses. He has been a hands-on participant as well as an astute observer during the past 20 years as the Internet has taken over our lives. He deserves to be read carefully, and his voice is likely to be an important one as we craft our new “human paradigm.”

The post Strategy+Business – Rocking the Bus appeared first on Rushkoff.

Rocking the Bus

Read this article at Strategy+Business

The publisher of Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent new book,Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Portfolio, 2016), compares the author to Thomas Piketty and Erik Brynjolfsson — both of whom are noted economists. But Rushkoff, a media analyst who has become known for his insights on technology, is no economist. What’s more, he explicitly rejects both of these thinkers. He dismisses Piketty’s preferred solution to inequality, redistribution. And Rushkoff is equally sure that there will not be a “second machine age,” as Brynjolfsson projects.

The reason for his disagreement is expressed in the book’s subtitle, How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, which is a theme that builds on Rushkoff’s earlier work, includingLife Inc. (Random House, 2009) and Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010). Rather than focusing on the economic and technological factors driving the future of humanity, however, Rushkoff turns the lens around in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. The title, of course, is a reference to recent incidents in which some San Franciscans have demonstrated their anger at Google’s private transportation system, which ferries well-paid workers from gentrifying neighborhoods to the company’s suburban campus. In the book, Rushkoff unabashedly promotes human values, which, he steadfastly claims, are the same as digital values. As he puts it, “The word digital itself refers todigits — the 10 fingers we humans use to build, to count, and to program computers in the first place.” In this important and useful polemic, Rushkoff puts forth a bold thesis: We need to understand that digital technology allows us to install a new “social” operating system to replace the old industrial one that tried to eliminate the incalculable messiness of human life. It’s about time someone said this and made the argument stick.

Rushkoff starts with the premise that the pure economic analysis promulgated by the digerati has failed to help us understand how the future is unfolding. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the market logic of unfettered technology, or calling for a regime of regulation that will halt technological progress, he advocates a third way: “digital distributism.” Distributism is an approach to economics based on the principle of “subsidiarity,” which simply means that every entity, whether corporation or government agency, should be as big or small as it needs to be to accomplish its purpose — but not bigger or smaller. This approach is fully committed to private property and sees a strong role for governments in intervening to block entities from becoming “too big to fail.”

By tapping into what may be the only major alternative to the endlessly rotating capitalism-or-socialism hamster cage that has dominated the past century of political–economic punditry, Rushkoff cuts to the radical core of the issues involved. He argues that we should promote prosperity over growth, thus forcing a fundamental reexamination of what has been hidden from our view. No Luddite, Rushkoff calls on us to take advantage of what digital technology gives us: an opportunity to restore human balance to a society that is now racing toward a future in which machines dominate.

Because Rushkoff isn’t an economist, he can’t be expected to produce a detailed description of a new economic system. But he does provide a wealth of examples of entities that are managing to promote prosperity amid growth. He focuses on well-known topics such as “benefit corporations,” “employee-owned businesses,” and “cooperatives,” all of which endeavor to spread wealth more equitably. These well-intentioned efforts, however, are just scratching the surface. And in the majority of countries — most notably in China — approaching economic development without a recognition of the vital importance of growth is a nonstarter. As Rushkoff puts it, we seriously need a new “operating system.”

We need it, Rushkoff argues, because for the first time, automation is fundamentally reshaping our economic prospects. As economist Lawrence Summers recently noted in a conference presentation, in the 1960s the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Solow could dismiss the effects of automation on employment and industrial structure. Summers, then an impressionable graduate student, believed him. But Summers says he no longer buys the argument that automation is not fundamentally transformational. Furthermore, people may have changed in some fundamental way. More and more people realize that expecting nonstop consumption-driven growth makes little sense going forward. Indeed, those who most carefully monitor consumer behaviors have noticed fundamental changes in attitudes that began to show up in developed countries in the early 2000s, pointing to a persistent slowdown in consumption growth. Rushkoff also believes that technologies change us. Sociologists may disparage that argument as “technological determinism,” but their protests can’t stop us from being shaped by the tools we use.

The previous version of distributism, from which Rushkoff draws some schematic guidance, was an early-20th-century product of what is often called Catholic social teaching. This is the approach launched by Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which in English has the subtitle “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” It has taken many forms, including that of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, which Pope Francis specifically praised on his 2015 trip to the United States.

In his recent encyclical, Pope Francis noted that we are now living in a “technocratic paradigm” — a cultural matrix in which technology “rules” humanity. Pope Francis has been accused of being a socialist (or worse) for his criticism of the market as an inhuman machine. Rushkoff, for his part, is not Catholic. But he is a radical thinker who has tried to understand what technology might accomplish when and if humans actually reclaim control of their own lives.

Many economists have proposed rewriting the rules or have offered schemes for “saving capitalism.” Rushkoff brings a completely different set of observations and insights to this vital and expanding conversation. Because he isn’t constrained by models and isn’t limited by an education that blocks consideration of technological changes, Rushkoff is free to consider how human prosperity can displace a mechanistic growth drive. At the same time, he belongs in the category of techno-realists who squarely avoid both the utopian and dystopian outlooks.

Rushkoff is throwing rocks at more than the Google buses. He has been a hands-on participant as well as an astute observer during the past 20 years as the Internet has taken over our lives. He deserves to be read carefully, and his voice is likely to be an important one as we craft our new “human paradigm.”

The post Rocking the Bus appeared first on Rushkoff.