Douglas Rushkoff

Why doesn't the explosive growth of companies such as Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone? How could things be different? In San Francisco in 2013 activists protesting against the gentrification of their city smashed the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work. But these protests weren't just a question of the activists versus the Googlers, or even the 99 per cent versus the 1 per cent. Rather they were symptomatic of the true conflict of our age, between humanity as a whole and a digital economy in which boundless growth is valued above all else. In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Rushkoff - named one of the world's ten most influential thinkers by MIT - lays out a ground plan for a different economic and social future. Ranging from big data to the rise of robots, from the gig economy to the collapse of the eurozone, Rushkoff shows how we can combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology to achieve a state of sustainable, distributed wealth. It's time the economy finally worked for the human beings it's supposed to serve. "Douglas Rushkoff is one of today's most incisive media theorists and a provocative critic of our digital economy. He's also fun to read". (Walter Isaacson, president and CEO, The Aspen Institute, and author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators). "If you don't know Rushkoff, you're not serious about figuring out what's going to happen next". (Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Tribes).

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 pro-testers 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.