Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity; Twitter @rushkoff Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, The Institute for the Future (IFTF); Futurist, Social Scientist—Moderator 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.

Comments

1. amazing!
2. A couple of rich people shopping for a million dollar home are mad even richer people paid 1,2 mill for it.
3. 30:05
4. Something else of concern here in your talk Douglas is the notion that we need to have more grey areas in the accounting of value. That's the wish of a person who doesn't want to provide actual value for others around him. If creating value for your fellow man were your primary concern, you would welcome a good accounting of that value. This is extremely important so that we know whether we've done anything. We simply have to measure it.
5. College is not the place to learn anything like you've described Douglas. At least not in my experience. I felt that it was an extension of the pressure to conform that I experienced in my public school education. In fact, it was a consolidation of pressure to conform to "new" cultural norms, or those of ideologues. What I learned about college is that both: a. College is not about intellectual expansion and b. College will not prepare you for survival in the real world. It's a scam in the same way that the housing bubble was created. This mythical scenario in which everyone becomes enlightened in some intellectual haven. Instead the opposite happened. I'm pretty sure I'm stupider for having experienced college.
6. What's interesting about this guy is that he's coming off to me as very sympathetic to the left and leftist causes, but most of what I hear from him as solutions could just as easily come from the mouth of a free market anarchist or libertarian. I'm so fucking sick of this left-right dichotomy. The notion that you have to ascribe your aspirations to some ideology in order to have rational thoughts about how we should organize society and what it means to be a free person is so ludicrous.
   In listening to a guy like Rushkoff, and others like Chomsky, it's evident to me that the extreme left (anarcho syndicalism) and the extreme right (anarcho capitalism) have more in common than not as compared to what he calls corporatism and AnCaps and Libertarians call Crony Capitalism or Crapitalism. Neither likes the notion of central banking and centralized control of the economy. Neither likes the notion of wielding government power to prop up inefficient corporate aristocracy. Neither likes the notion of warmongerers meddling in other countries' business and killing millions of innocent people in the process.
   How about we start our change with those issues. Eliminate central banks and make local currencies legal again. Eliminate the limited liability nature of corporations, which by the way would bankrupt Wall Street almost overnight. Eliminate debt-fueled funding of foreign wars. Once we get to that place, then we can let individuals decide whether they think it's acceptable to sell their labor vs. owning their own means of production, because those choices will once again become available to people.
7. I agree with him on Uber scenario that was why fingure out the self sufficient model to experienced my big ideas. But also realized something else challenge news on the path as call Unknown surprises.
8. Bit-coin isn't a fad or hype. It is just a straight up scam.
9. learned something new.
10. Individuality wasn't invented in the Renaissance. The Ego is a fundamental behavioral program which allows motivates living creatures to protect and care for themselves. Even plants have it. As human culture became involved in with this process they developed Self or Individuality. That's as old as human society is. The commercialized form isn't even new. There are ancient accounts of it. Buddhism is the oldest philosophy that I know of that recognizes the self and seeks to transcend it.
11. well said! lets get this in motion asap!
12. I always wonder who speakers like this are referring to when they say "we". There's lots of good ideas, but how to "we" as regular people change the tax system or create new business models in an environment with shitty regulations or predatory corporations who don't want to change?
13. surely we have class based system with the ruling class doing all they can to keep the rest of us beneath them, is this not the actual problem?
14. The financial operating system has improved efficiency greatly, the old inefficiencies and costs at the bottom that used to leak out and benefit the employee have been removed and the money collected.
    
    There are those that believe in the Ayn Rand utopia of perfect rational beings but in reality such individuals are just like the smug winner of a game of monopoly, they have all the property on the board and everyone else just sits and looks. Monopoly (the game) was devised to illustrate this very point.
15. "the venture capitalist don't understand"..i can;t believe a guy this smart can be that naive..believe me they DO understand it clearly
16. This is /fantastic/. The 'obese company' example/analogy was great.