Team Human Quotes

“The primary purpose of the internet had changed from supporting a knowledge economy to growing an attention economy.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“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

“We can be fully human without being in complete control of our world.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Socialization depends on both autonomy and interdependency; emphasizing one at the expense of the other compromises the balance.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“The most successful of biology’s creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Simply remembering that corporations were invented should alone empower us to reinvent them to our liking.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Chinese laborers "finish" smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints with a highly toxic solvent proven to shorten the workers lives. That's how valuable it is for consumers to believe their devices have been assembled by magic rather than by the fingers of underpaid and poisoned children.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“being human is a team sport.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“The net turned media back into a collective, participatory, and social landscape. But, as seemingly happens to each and every new medium, the net went from being a social platform to an isolating one. Instead of forging new relationships between people, our digital technologies came to replace them with something else.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Projecting human qualities onto machines—like seeing a car grille as a face or talking to a smartphone AI like a person—is called anthropomorphism. But this is the opposite: we are projecting machine qualities onto humans. Seeing a human being as a machine or computer is called mechanomorphism. It’s not just treating machines as living humans; it’s treating humans as machines.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“If nothing else, living in a digital media environment should help us become more aware of the programming all around us.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“The industrialist’s dream was to replace them entirely—with machines.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Human beings connect so easily, it's as if we share the same brains.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Limbic consonance is the little-known process through which the mood of a room changes when a happy or nervous person walks in.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Such exponential growth does not occur in the natural world, except maybe for cancer—and that growth ceases once the host has been consumed.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“The myth of individuality made capitalism possible and has sustained it to this day.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“By viewing evolution though a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“The screen is encroaching on the eye, from TVs to computer monitors to phone screens to smart watches to VR goggles to tiny LEDs that project images onto the retina to neural implants that communicate directly with the optic nerve.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“To have autonomy without interdependency leads to isolation or narcissism. To have interdependency with no autonomy stunts our psychological growth. Healthy people live in social groups that have learned to balance or, better, marry these two imperatives.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Without socially positive opportunities to exercise our autonomy, we tend toward self-promotion over self-sacrifice and fixate on personal gain over collective prosperity.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“A baby starved of social contact has difficulty developing a regulated nervous system. Young men with few social acquaintances develop high adrenaline levels. Lonely students have low levels of immune cells. Prison inmates prefer violence to solitary confinement. In the US, social isolation is a greater public health problem than obesity.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human