Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 28

The Jake Sasseville Show – Why We’re So Addicted to Growth

Listen to the audio podcast on Soundcloud

Douglas Rushkoff’s work is a compass for a new world. A recovering theater director whose first book “Cyberia” got side-lined in 1992 by the publisher because “the Internet wasn’t going to be a ‘thing’ by 1993,” is the author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity” which articulates this new digital economy, shows us how we can both grow (and stop growing) and still be prosperous.

He’s part philosopher of economics, and part media historian.

“We think we need money to have an economy,” is one of my favorite lines of the interview.

It spoke to me deeply, and I think will touch all of you entrepreneurs, financial folks, even artists and creators. It shows a new way of thought by understanding business and debt by going back to its roots in the 12th and 13th century. And, Douglas is a helluva entertaining guy to boot.

Powerful for our times. Right now. It will ignite something deep within you.

The post The Jake Sasseville Show – Why We’re So Addicted to Growth appeared first on Rushkoff.

The Jake Sasseville Show: Why We’re So Addicted to Growth

Listen to the audio podcast on Soundcloud

Douglas Rushkoff’s work is a compass for a new world. A recovering theater director whose first book “Cyberia” got side-lined in 1992 by the publisher because “the Internet wasn’t going to be a ‘thing’ by 1993,” is the author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity” which articulates this new digital economy, shows us how we can both grow (and stop growing) and still be prosperous.

He’s part philosopher of economics, and part media historian.

“We think we need money to have an economy,” is one of my favorite lines of the interview.

It spoke to me deeply, and I think will touch all of you entrepreneurs, financial folks, even artists and creators. It shows a new way of thought by understanding business and debt by going back to its roots in the 12th and 13th century. And, Douglas is a helluva entertaining guy to boot.

Powerful for our times. Right now. It will ignite something deep within you.

The post The Jake Sasseville Show: Why We’re So Addicted to Growth appeared first on Rushkoff.

American Genius – Why Your Company Should Stop Focusing on Growing

Read this article at The American Genius

Doug Rushkoff has been referred to as a kind of Media Theorist. He spends much of his time studying the human condition as it applies to our digital lives and dreams of how we can use cyberspace to maintain and create a spirit of empowerment.

Podcast host Jodi Avrigan recently spoke to Doug Rushkoff and they riffed on a number of topics including why companies should concentrate on doing what they do best and stop succumbing to boardroom and investor pressure to keep growing.

Stop growing and start living

An early advocate of the internet, Doug Rushkoff could confidently say he’s seen it all or close to it. What he sees as the current [and destructive trend] of companies that are told to expand rather than do what it is they do best.

Says Rushkoff, “We need to optimize the digital economy. Not for its extraction value or its conversion into capital but for the circulation of money [in the right directions].” In other words, in a perfect world Rushkoff envisions companies making their millions or billions and putting that money back into the company or at the very least putting those profits back into the hands of the people that are doing the work. At least some of it.

Growth, growth, growth

In terms of growth Rushkoff cites Walmart as an excellent example of abuse: they rushed to open so many stores that ultimately there are no longer enough people to sell to. And now Walmart is closing stores.

The website Edhltd.com postulates this even further when author Edward D. Hess (Distinguished Executive in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Management at Emory University) states, “Most companies can tolerate incremental growth or growth to replace unprofitable customers fairly easily over time. But successive years of high growth challenge the competencies and risk tolerances of most companies.”

So the issue of growth is really two issues: The first is to ask at what pace or rate should you grow and secondly what is your capacity and risk tolerance for growth?

Another way of thinking is that if you make a good living painting and selling 5 paintings a year why stretch and paint eight a year and risk the quality suffer at the expense of making a profit?”

Sustainability

Platforms that extract more from their platform than they facilitate was another topic-in-real-time and Rushkoff cited Uber as a good example. Rushkoff feels the Uber driver/operator is just a resource with no plan in place to protect them or incentive for long-term career growth.

Rushkoff refers to it as looking for ways to optimize one’s business (especially if it’s smaller). Part of it has to do with what he calls “boundary-investment.” Which is simply investing in way that the money comes back to you.

Real vs. virtual communities

New technology will create a lot of growth. Internet economy in particular has the ability to make money in many different ways. What has happened though is that Wall Street noticed how much was to be made with the internet and suddenly THAT is the priority.

Twitter is an example say Rushkoff. Twitter can no longer just be a platform that is able to send 140 characters from one phone to another. After making billions of dollars Twitter must concentrate on making [even more] money. All at the expense of a great app. Why? Because extraction is now the focal point.

Says Rushkoff in the interview, “The original internet was not created to make a whole lot of money just so the founders have nothing to do. It was created with the intention to make money doing what you love and turning it back into the community.”

Another twist on this concept again comes from Edward Hess, who points out, “By growing at high rates for several years – yes, you will capture market share but also you rise on the business food chain and come into the sights of very big, well-capitalized, highly-efficient and well-managed competitors.”

The takeaway

The key point: As you grow, your competition changes. As you grow, you become both a threat and a target.

All in all a great interview. Check it out. Ol’ Gar’ gives it 5 stars. And the read the book by Doug Rushkoff as well (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus).

The post American Genius – Why Your Company Should Stop Focusing on Growing appeared first on Rushkoff.

Why your company should stop focusing on growing

Read this article at The American Genius

Doug Rushkoff has been referred to as a kind of Media Theorist. He spends much of his time studying the human condition as it applies to our digital lives and dreams of how we can use cyberspace to maintain and create a spirit of empowerment.

Podcast host Jodi Avrigan recently spoke to Doug Rushkoff and they riffed on a number of topics including why companies should concentrate on doing what they do best and stop succumbing to boardroom and investor pressure to keep growing.

Stop growing and start living

An early advocate of the internet, Doug Rushkoff could confidently say he’s seen it all or close to it. What he sees as the current [and destructive trend] of companies that are told to expand rather than do what it is they do best.

Says Rushkoff, “We need to optimize the digital economy. Not for its extraction value or its conversion into capital but for the circulation of money [in the right directions].” In other words, in a perfect world Rushkoff envisions companies making their millions or billions and putting that money back into the company or at the very least putting those profits back into the hands of the people that are doing the work. At least some of it.

Growth, growth, growth

In terms of growth Rushkoff cites Walmart as an excellent example of abuse: they rushed to open so many stores that ultimately there are no longer enough people to sell to. And now Walmart is closing stores.

The website Edhltd.com postulates this even further when author Edward D. Hess (Distinguished Executive in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Management at Emory University) states, “Most companies can tolerate incremental growth or growth to replace unprofitable customers fairly easily over time. But successive years of high growth challenge the competencies and risk tolerances of most companies.”

So the issue of growth is really two issues: The first is to ask at what pace or rate should you grow and secondly what is your capacity and risk tolerance for growth?

Another way of thinking is that if you make a good living painting and selling 5 paintings a year why stretch and paint eight a year and risk the quality suffer at the expense of making a profit?”

Sustainability

Platforms that extract more from their platform than they facilitate was another topic-in-real-time and Rushkoff cited Uber as a good example. Rushkoff feels the Uber driver/operator is just a resource with no plan in place to protect them or incentive for long-term career growth.

Rushkoff refers to it as looking for ways to optimize one’s business (especially if it’s smaller). Part of it has to do with what he calls “boundary-investment.” Which is simply investing in way that the money comes back to you.

Real vs. virtual communities

New technology will create a lot of growth. Internet economy in particular has the ability to make money in many different ways. What has happened though is that Wall Street noticed how much was to be made with the internet and suddenly THAT is the priority.

Twitter is an example say Rushkoff. Twitter can no longer just be a platform that is able to send 140 characters from one phone to another. After making billions of dollars Twitter must concentrate on making [even more] money. All at the expense of a great app. Why? Because extraction is now the focal point.

Says Rushkoff in the interview, “The original internet was not created to make a whole lot of money just so the founders have nothing to do. It was created with the intention to make money doing what you love and turning it back into the community.”

Another twist on this concept again comes from Edward Hess, who points out, “By growing at high rates for several years – yes, you will capture market share but also you rise on the business food chain and come into the sights of very big, well-capitalized, highly-efficient and well-managed competitors.”

The takeaway

The key point: As you grow, your competition changes. As you grow, you become both a threat and a target.

All in all a great interview. Check it out. Ol’ Gar’ gives it 5 stars. And the read the book by Doug Rushkoff as well (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus).

The post Why your company should stop focusing on growing appeared first on Rushkoff.

KQED – Douglas Rushkoff Dissects the Tech Economy

Listen to the audio podcast at KQED

Just over two years ago protesters in Oakland made national headlines when they surrounded Google and Apple commuter buses and threw rocks at them. For Douglas Rushkoff, these protests symbolized everything that is wrong with the tech economy. In his new book, “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity,” Rushkoff takes a deeper look at why the success of Silicon Valley companies has contributed to deeper economic and social tensions in the Bay Area. He joins us to talk about rebooting our economy to create a more sustainable and equitable future.

The post KQED – Douglas Rushkoff Dissects the Tech Economy appeared first on Rushkoff.

Douglas Rushkoff Dissects the Tech Economy

Listen to the audio podcast at KQED

Just over two years ago protesters in Oakland made national headlines when they surrounded Google and Apple commuter buses and threw rocks at them. For Douglas Rushkoff, these protests symbolized everything that is wrong with the tech economy. In his new book, “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity,” Rushkoff takes a deeper look at why the success of Silicon Valley companies has contributed to deeper economic and social tensions in the Bay Area. He joins us to talk about rebooting our economy to create a more sustainable and equitable future.

The post Douglas Rushkoff Dissects the Tech Economy appeared first on Rushkoff.

Has rampant capitalism hijacked the promise of the digital age?

Read this piece at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

In retirement Bill Gates has become a smiling, genial philanthropist: a multi-billionaire busy giving away his vast fortune. Media coverage of him these days is almost exclusively related to his work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But it wasn’t so long ago that Bill Gates was a corporate colossus—one of the richest businessmen in the world with a reputation built on a strange mix of boyish charm and ruthless determination.

Those who admired Gates in the years up to his retirement saw him as a geek come good: a nerdy computer hacker who went on to help build the digital world.

Others saw a man bent on squashing innovation in the name of global software dominance. For years Microsoft battled both US and European regulators against charges of uncompetitive practice. When Gates finally stepped down in 2008, the headline in Wired read: ‘So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly.‘

The Gates mix of soaring altruistic rhetoric and hard-headed commerce is now widespread throughout the digital world: Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple all adopt a take-no-prisoners approach to business, cloaked in the PR language of change, opportunity and personal empowerment.

University of Maryland legal academic Frank Pasquale, who focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of information technology, calls them the ‘Silicon Valley oligarchs’.

‘I think the fundamental problem is that people don’t like to face up to the reality of monopolisation,’ says Pasquale, speaking about the global rise of Uber, Airbnb and other so-called sharing economy companies. ‘It’s much more convenient to believe the comforting myth that these markets are always contestable.

‘A firm like Uber is an appeal to venture capitalists—speculative capital—that wants to see massive returns via monopolisation. Let’s not mistake the business model here. The model here is for one of these firms to come in and to take over various aspects of commerce, to take over the rides that are in an area, to take over availability of non-hotel rooms to sleep in, et cetera. I think that this is really a perversion of the original aspirations of the sharing economy.’

The perils of corporate capitalism ‘running on digital steroids’

For Pasquale, the rise of the oligarchs signals lost potential—the opportunity to enhance genuine sharing and competition through the use of new technologies. But leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff goes one step further. In his newly released book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he warns that the promise of the digital age is being hijacked by a rampant form of old-style capitalism, a modus operandi akin to that of the robber-barons of the 19th century.

‘These platforms don’t exist to help people exchange with one another,’ he says. ‘They really are scorched-earth efforts at achieving monopolies in particular industries, not in order to serve those industries or even sustain them or grow them, but in order to hop over into another industry altogether.

‘What Uber is doing to driving, or Airbnb might be doing to hotels, is similar to what, say, Amazon did to books. Amazon doesn’t care about the authors and the publishers, it just used books to create a monopoly so it could hop over into other retail sectors.

‘What I’m trying to do is really communicate to developers, especially young developers who have great ideas for new applications, [is] that when they take huge amounts of venture capital and get these sky-high evaluations, in effect they have sold their businesses to those venture capitalists who will now expect 100 times or 1,000 times return on the investment they’ve made.’

Read more: The threat Uber poses to competition and productive capitalism

According to Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, the end result is an abandonment of both true entrepreneurial vision and the desire to build a long-term sustainable businesses. Rapid growth, he says, has become the raison d’etre of the start-up world.

‘What we are seeing are the same ills that we saw with traditional corporate capitalism—good old-fashioned extractive growth-based corporatism—but it’s running on digital steroids,’ he says.

‘Now it’s spinning out of control, the extraction happens much more rapidly. We also have what’s called power law dynamics … the superstars end up really getting all of the hits, all of the listens, all of the likes, and everybody else gets nothing. The internet tends to really exacerbate the divide between the very few winners in a winner-takes-all platform and [the] many, many losers.

‘These are the same problems that we see in traditional capitalism with the old monopolies of the oil companies or the railway companies, but they happen so quickly and they happen so completely that they are much more devastating to people.’

Communities left bankrupt by short-term tactics

These digital giants are devastating for economies as well, warns Rushkoff, because if you come to value capital more than people, you risk diminishing and impoverishing entire communities and exacerbating the wealth divide rather than fighting it.

‘We have digital technologies that are being optimised to convert the value that people create into share price, so that it’s captured by capital but it is not available to circulate throughout the system,’ he says. ‘That’s why we see so many communities getting poor, as the money is quite literally extracted from circulation.

‘Growth is not necessarily a problem, it could be a good by-product of a successful business. But when you have to grow in order to stay alive, it means that’s because you are in debt. It means that’s because you can’t satisfy your debt structure with simple revenue. It throws everything out of whack in such a bizarre way that these companies end up adopting these scorched-earth short-term tactics.

‘Here in America, many Walmart branches are going out of business because they’ve bankrupted the communities on which they depended. They put everybody else out of business, they don’t pay a living wage, so they’ve gotten to the point where they don’t have customers, they just have poor people living around them. That’s not a good long-term business strategy.

‘But when you are looking at quarter-over-quarter growth, when you are a CEO who just wants to get another two or three quarters of bonuses out of this and then leave, then that’s what you’re going to do. It’s bankrupting not just the people, it’s bankrupting corporate America as well.’

Our embrace of the corporate ethos and practice of Silicon Valley, Rushkoff argues, can in part be traced to the counter-cultural instincts of early online developers.

‘On the internet in the early days, in the late ’80s and the early ’90s, the people we wanted to keep off [were the] government. We really saw government as the ones that were going to censor us … and we did everything we could to get regulation and government away.

‘What we didn’t realise was that if we cleared out government completely, that corporations would come in and rule the thing. We thought there’s government and there’s people, and government is the oppressor and people want to be free. But what happened was all these corporations came in completely unregulated and really took over.’

A game where venture capital sets the rules

Another reason, Rushkoff says, was the ambition—and sometimes the greed—of early internet developers, many of whom took a lot of money in the late ’90s from Wall Street.

‘We kind of fooled them with business plans that weren’t really real, all these dot-coms and all that stuff. A lot of hackers and technologists, a lot of people, got rich off stuff that didn’t quite pan out,’ he says.

‘I think when venture capital came back again in the 2000s, they said, all right, we’re going to put money in this but we are going to do it our way this time. It turns out this is their way.’

David Glance, the director of the Centre for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia, also worries about wasted potential. He sees discontent beginning to swell around the increasingly commercial nature of social media in particular. Social media, he says, is looking old, tired, grumpy and more than a little compromised. It’s becoming much more obviously concerned, he says, about the needs of investors over customers.

‘When social media came onto the scene .. We had things like revolutions being supported and inspired by it—the Arab Spring, in particular, five years ago. Everything from commerce to love was going to be carried out on social media.

‘The truth has been a little bit different from that. Five years on from the Arab Spring, we realised that it wasn’t actually the central aspect to the revolution, that people were doing things in different ways and would have done things in different ways. It certainly played a part, and social media does play a part, but it’s not quite all that it’s cracked up to be.’

Social media in decline as commercial pressures bite

Glance says monopolistically minded companies like Facebook are responding to growing disillusionment of their customers by diversifying their offerings and by acquiring rival operations: Instagram in Facebook’s case. But he says all platforms are facing the same pressures to make money by becoming increasingly commercial, and there is growing evidence to suggest that many users no longer see social media as their main form of interactive communication.

‘People will still consume content, so I might go to Facebook and watch a few videos, as will a lot of other people,’ he says. ‘But in terms of its original promise of interacting with a network of users and basically using that as a basis of continuing conversations and interactions, it will be used far less. Messaging applications that allow people to communicate with each other one-on-one, for example, are going to continue in popularity, including even email.’

And there’s still a role for old-fashioned face-to-face communication, according to Glance.

‘It’s still far better to go out and talk to people face-to-face and interact in that way than it is to try and do that on social media.

‘You won’t see politicians necessarily giving up on going down streets and knocking on doors. Likewise with products and shops, they will not go away. Amazon, for example, are actually building bricks and mortar stores so that people can go in and look at products and are not just doing it online. I think that’s really where we’ve got to.’

Like Glance, Rushkoff also believes there are signs that ordinary individuals are pushing back against commercialism and exploitative corporate practices online. But he also concedes any change will be incremental.

‘No one is going to flip a switch or do an upgrade that makes the world great,’ he says.

‘What we have to realise is that in a digital age we have many distributed solutions. The solutions in Brisbane will be different than the ones in Sydney, which will be different than the ones in New York. We have to seize that and celebrate that—diversity of solutions is really the way things work in a distributed era.’

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City Lights Booksellers & Publishers: 5 Questions With Douglas Rushkoff

Read this interview at The City Lights Booksellers and Publishers Blog

Author, professor, and filmmaker Douglas Rushkoff is at City Lights on Wednesday, March 23 discussing his new book,Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity published by Portfolio Books. Douglas answered our 5 questions, more about him and his answers below.

About Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: The digital economy has gone wrong. Everybody knows it, but no one knows quite how to fix it, or even how to explain the problem. Workers lose to automation, investors lose to algorithms, musicians lose to power law dynamics, drivers lose to Uber, neighborhoods lose to Airbnb, and even tech developers lose their visions to the demands of the startup economy.

Douglas Rushkoff argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. This isn’t the fault of digital technology at all, but the way we are deploying it: instead of building the distributed digital economy these new networks could foster, we are doubling down on the industrial age mandate for growth above all. As Rushkoff shows, this is more the legacy of early corporatism and central currency than a feature of digital technology. In his words, “we are running a 21st century digital economy on a 13th century printing-press era operating system.”

Rushkoff calls on us to reboot this obsolete economic operating system and use the unique distributive power of the internet to break free of the winner-take-all game defining business today. A fundamentally optimistic book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus culminates with a series of practical steps to remake the economic operating system from the inside out—and prosper along the way.

About the Author: Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, Life Inc and the novel Ecstasy Club. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He wrote the graphic novels Testament and A.D.D., and made the television documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He lives in New York, and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Douglas Rushkoff: I came to City Lights back in 2013 to do a talk about Present Shock. It was one of the most magical, affirming evenings of my career. The crowd was large, but super focused. People were standing outside the front doors in the street, but everyone was quiet so that everyone could hear. It was such a diverse crowd–author Jerry Mander showed up, sitting two seats away from sex activist Conner Habib who was next to the founder of WordPress and the board of Burning Man. It was as if we were conjuring the very heart of the counterculture simply by gathering in its name.

CL: If your book had a soundtrack, what would it sound like?

DR: This one? Gosh. The first half would have to be something like Throbbing Gristle. The second half is a bit closer to Neil Young.

CL: What’s the first book you actually finished reading?

DR: Ever? Gosh. I think it was Scuffy the Tugboat. It was one of those Golden Books.

CL: If you weren’t a writer, what might you do?

DR: I don’t even have my current job. But if I weren’t a writer, I’d be a theater director.

CL: Name a few things you’d require if stranded on a desert island for an undefined period of time (and, yes, no wifi). 

DR: Other people would be nice. Incidentally, that’s all one needs for an economy, too. Not to make this about my book or anything . . .

Interview with the Walking Home podcast

Listen to the audio podcast at Studio Donovan

One of the worlds most important minds appears on today’s show to talk a little about how human reality has been pre-programmed for 400+ years. We touch on his new book (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus), the illuminati, economics, family, social media, community and more.

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FiveThirtyEight: Douglas Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing

Listen to the audio podcast at FiveThirtyEight

When Twitter went public, its initial stocked soared and Wall Street valued it at close to $25 billion. Its founders got rich, as did its venture capital investors. But Douglas Rushkoff sees these moments when tech companies cash in as dangerous. He thinks the growth imperative that corporations face, particularly data-driven corporations, means that they will never be able to fulfill the promise of building genuine communities online — whether they be political, social or economic.

For almost 20 years, Rushkoff has explored how the early promise of the Internet has been co-opted by corporate and advertising interests. His new book, “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” goes right at the economic structures at play in the tech industry. On this week’s episode of our podcast What’s The Point, Rushkoff discusses alternative economic structures that could make our data-driven lives more fulfilling.

Stream or download the full episode above, or subscribe using your favorite podcast app. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

You are your algorithm

Jody Avirgan: We’ve talked about this on the show before. Your past actions become basically who you are. And in order for an algorithm to really understand you, it’s better if you just act according to type.

Douglas Rushkoff: And they’re going to push you to act more according to your type. But as you act more according to your type, and as the marketplace becomes more and more predetermined and predictable, you actually don’t get growth, you don’t get innovation.

Jody Avirgan: Why?

Douglas Rushkoff: Because now you have designers, who instead of being encouraged to come up with their own, new, crazy ideas, are being encouraged to do the things that have been proven by the data to deliver results. A lot of times, in thriving marketplaces, a lot of ideas come from the bottom up. You see new consumer behaviors, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, look at what these kids are doing.” But as you end up with more predictable, controlled consumers, you end up with a less innovative society.

Why metadata is creepier than individual data

Avirgan: We obsess about the creepiness of a corporation or a government kind of knowing about us as individuals, but you say that the part that creeps you out the most is the metadata notion — to think of yourself as grouped, not as an individual.

Rushkoff: When people think of privacy, they think of the content rather than the context. So the privacy is like, “Oooo, does Coca-Cola know that I masturbated?”

Avirgan: I don’t know why Coca-Cola would want to know that, but I bet someone in Coca Cola is trying to figure it out.

Rushkoff: And they do. And they do. Believe me, statistically they know.

Avirgan: I will never be able to forget that notion.You’ve just implanted that in my head.

Rushkoff: [Laughs] That’s the social programming of the activist in media trying to plant memetic constructs that slowly deteriorate our brand imagery. It’s not the specific thing that they’re going to find out, it’s thegroups that you’re in, it’s the metadata. So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.

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