[D66] Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution

[René Oudeweg]

wired.com
Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
Malcolm Harris
24–30 minutes

The media studies building at Queens College is small and dark, with low 
ceilings and narrow corridors. It was built more than a century ago as a 
residential school for incorrigible boys, and a certain atmosphere of 
neglect remains. When I visit on a January weekday to see Douglas 
Rushkoff, who teaches here, he guides me around a stack of fallen 
ceiling tiles to his office in a back corner of the first floor. The 
Wi-Fi in the room is spotty, so he uses an Ethernet adapter to plug his 
laptop into the wall. The only evidence that we haven’t traveled back to 
the ’90s is that when it’s time for class, no students show up. Instead, 
Rushkoff opens his laptop and brings up a grid of faceless black boxes.

This is the first course meeting of “Digital Economics: Crypto, NFTs and 
the Blockchain.” Rushkoff is a good sport about teaching on Zoom, though 
it’s a shame his class of mostly undergraduates can’t fully appreciate 
the 62-year-old media-studies-professor look that he’s absolutely 
nailed: black V-neck, cropped gray hair. He launches into an impassioned 
half-hour lecture in which he urges his students, only three of whom 
have their cameras on, to see through the social construction of 
money—he pulls out a dollar bill and waves it in front of the laptop 
screen, saying, “This is not money. This is a piece of paper that we use 
to represent money”—and to probe what he calls the “big question” of his 
life’s work: how power travels across media landscapes.

Outside of this Queens College classroom, Rushkoff is a widely cited 
theorist of the internet, known for his prolific and influential 
writings on culture and economics. He gets the occasional student who 
recognizes his work—“He’s a famous author,” one writes on Rate My 
Professor, “just do a Google search”—but most of them are busy people 
logging in to class from their phones, more interested in fulfilling 
their degree requirements than in the dense collage of Rushkoff’s book 
covers taped to the wall behind his desk.

That his class may not be his students’ first priority doesn’t bother 
Rushkoff much. He’s made a point of landing at City University of New 
York in Queens after a teaching stint at the far more expensive, 
prestige-mongering, private New York University. In a portion of his 
lecture, he hints at the trajectory his intellectual life has taken:

“I was pretty freaking excited in the ’90s about the possibilities for a 
new kind of peer-to-peer economy. What we would build that would be like 
a TOR network of economics, the great Napsterization of economics in a 
digital environment,” he tells his students. But more recently, he 
continues, he’s turned his attention to something else that this new 
digital economy has created: “It made a bunch of billionaires and a 
whole lot of really poor, unhappy people.”

This kind of rhetoric is part of a recent, decisive shift in direction 
for Rushkoff. For the past 30 years, across more than a dozen nonfiction 
books, innumerable articles, and various media projects about the state 
of society in the internet age, Rushkoff had always walked a tightrope 
between optimism and skepticism. He was one of the original enthusiasts 
of technology’s prosocial potential, charting a path through the digital 
landscape for those who shared his renegade, anti-government spirit. As 
Silicon Valley shed its cyberpunk soul and devolved into an incubator of 
corporate greed, he continued to advocate for his values from within. 
Until now. Last fall, with the publication of his latest book, Survival 
of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff all 
but officially renounced his membership in the guild of spokespeople for 
the digital revolution. So what happened?

It is, generally speaking, a difficult time to maintain a straight face 
as a diehard advocate of decentralization. A couple of months before I 
come to see Rushkoff, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, run by a cabal of 
tasteless pyramid schemers blathering platitudes about art and 
community, collapsed, torching billions of dollars in the process. These 
internet capitalists proved to be worse guardians of the public interest 
than even the corporate robber barons of yore. (Some weeks after my 
visit, Silicon Valley Bank failed and nearly dragged the global 
financial system down along with it—a direct result of the Trump 
administration’s deregulation agenda.)

Confronted with such irrefutable evidence, Rushkoff isn’t just lying low 
or changing the subject the way perennial techno-optimists often do. His 
conversion is deeper. “I find, a lot of times, digital technologies are 
really good at exacerbating the problem while also camouflaging the 
problem,” he tells the black boxes that represent his students. “They 
make things worse while making it look like something’s actually 
changed.” Still, as he talks, I can occasionally catch a glimpse of 
Rushkoff reverting into his former persona: the inveterate Gen X 
techno-optimist, the man who can’t resist the untested promise of ever 
newer tools. Near the end of class, he starts instructing his students 
to not use ChatGPT to write their assignments, then halts abruptly, as 
if unable to go on. “Well, actually,” he says, reconsidering, “we’ll 
figure it out.”

Rushkoff’s CUNY job is a sort of homecoming. He was born in Queens, and 
he associates his early years with ’60s communitarian-style neighborhood 
barbecues. Later, his family moved an hour north to Scarsdale, where he 
recalls groomed suburban yards and neoliberal values. After graduating 
from Princeton in 1983 with a degree in English and theater, he took 
inspiration from Bertolt Brecht and went to CalArts for an MFA in 
directing. He’d planned for a life on Broadway, but the theatrical world 
struck him as uptight, traditional, and hostile to his experimental 
instincts. All the cool people were moving to the Bay Area to mess with 
computers. There he went too.

Rushkoff got his first star turn as the nation’s guide to Generation X. 
In 1994, when he was 33, he published his debut book, Cyberia: Life in 
the Trenches of Hyperspace. Through detailed and colorful portraits of 
cyberpunks, ravers, and virtual reality pioneers, the work introduced 
mainstream readers to the people creating what was then an underground 
culture. Rushkoff made the media rounds as an outspoken representative 
of this new youth scene; in the introduction to The GenX Reader, he 
menaced “Boomers” in the name of “Busters”: Whether you like it or not, 
we are the thing that will replace you. Writing at the cutting edge of 
technology and society gave him endless opportunities to come up with 
buzzwords, for which he evinced a special talent. His second book, Media 
Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, helped popularize the concept 
of “memes” going “viral.”

In Cyberia, Rushkoff tried to conjure an epochal synthesis out of his 
dispatches from the nascent digital subculture: “Things like virtual 
reality, Smart Bars, hypertext, the WELL, role-playing games, DMT, 
Ecstasy, house, fractals, sampling, anti-Muzak, technoshamanism, 
ecoterrorism, morphogenesis, video cyborgs, Toon Town, and Mondo 2000,” 
he excitedly prophesied in the book, “are what slowly pull our 
society—even our world—past the event horizon of the great attractor at 
the end of time.” This was high-quality, uncut cyber-futurism, and 
people ate it up. Others in his cohort, such as experimental theorist 
artists Genesis P-Orridge and R. U. Sirius, dragged out remnants of the 
counterculture into the ’90s, but Rushkoff gained wider prominence by 
keeping one foot in the straight world, where he forecast the cultural 
and social implications of emerging technology for everyday people. 
Soon, the cyber thesis that people would live much of their 21st-century 
lives “online” turned into cyber fact.

Few thinkers are as consistently productive as Rushkoff—since the 
mid-nineties he’s put out a book roughly every other year—and for 
readers who can keep up, that output serves as a real-time tracking of 
his ideological trajectory, like a radar screen revealing in regular 
pulses the arc of a missile. Ping: There he is. Ping: There he is. Ping: 
There he is. Hanging out with Rushkoff for a day, I found that he is as 
prolific in conversation as in writing, and that the stream of the 
discussion moved steadily forward, even when I tried to steer him toward 
the past.

In the early aughts, Rushkoff was no longer young, but he kept his 
attention on youth culture. His fidelity to both sides of generational 
tension made him a uniquely credible narrator. Merchants of Cool, his 
2001 Frontline documentary, is a brilliantly executed crash course in 
critical media analysis. (I watched the movie in my high school’s 
required “living skills” class, and its smart dissection of the 
advertising industrial complex had us rapt.) The doc was such a hit that 
PBS brought Rushkoff back for two more shows: The Persuaders (2004) and 
Generation Like (2014). Neither condescending nor dull, these movies 
insist on treating kids like real people.

Rushkoff’s work also contained resolutely feminist ideas at a time of 
reactionary backlash and open sexual abuse. Harvey Weinstein ran 
Hollywood; Jeffrey Epstein ran science philanthropy. Rushkoff’s 
Frontline specials, meanwhile, are virtuosic in the way they expose 
shifts in capitalist demand for sexualized young teens. In Merchants of 
Cool, he shows talent agents cooing over a made-up and skimpily clad 
13-year-old, asking the girl about her screen age range. “I’ve been told 
I look 17,” she tells them with mixed pride, and they note it down 
approvingly. In Generation Like, a mom explains that she posts full-body 
pictures of her would-be-influencer young daughter because those get 
more likes. Rushkoff doesn’t place blame on teens or girls; instead, he 
explains how impersonal corporate forces act on people. This thoughtful 
orientation is one reason his early work holds up so well.

“Back when I got started in digital,” Rushkoff tells me after his class, 
using the word in a charmingly antiquated way, “it was like saying you 
were going to play Dungeons and Dragons for your career.” But as 
Rushkoff’s area of expertise—the nexus between youth, advertising, and 
technology—transformed into one of America’s leading industries, he 
found himself an odd duck in a pond filled with increasingly rich and 
powerful techno-optimists. Many of Rushkoff’s professional peers, 
including Clay Shirky, who wrote Here Comes Everybody, and Chris 
Anderson, former editor of this magazine and author of The Long Tail, 
have refreshed their commitment to Silicon Valley with each innovation 
cycle: Shirky is now an administrator at New York University 
specializing in educational tech, and Anderson founded companies for 
drones and robotics. Rushkoff has likewise stayed open to new 
technologies, but unlike his peers, he never stopped asking how each new 
discovery might be misused. He credits a devotion to spiritual humanism 
and his related practice of Judaism, as he explains in his 2004 book 
Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, with keeping him one step 
removed from the would-be-god transhumanists.

With his credentials, Rushkoff could probably have nabbed an industry 
gig; the dreadlocked computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who has also been 
outspoken on the antihuman effects of tech platforms, took research 
roles with Silicon Graphics and then Microsoft. But Rushkoff maintained 
critical distance, and his writing began to shift focus to the economy 
and the stultifying power of the corporate form, as with Life, Inc.: How 
the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (2009) and 
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (2010). 
Rushkoff describes this period as his “first break” with his Silicon 
Valley contemporaries. “Technology was this great human thing,” he tells 
me, referencing the creative and open-minded culture of psychedelics and 
raves. Then, “Wired magazine and capitalism and extraction and 
behaviorism and finance all killed it.” (Rushkoff clearly has a sore 
spot about this publication, which he never wrote for.)

“Money was a great feedback loop and positive reinforcer,” he continues, 
“because the more dehumanizing you make the tech, the more money you 
make.” To his horror, Rushkoff saw that the once renegade web was 
pushing people toward predictability and conformism. His utopian Cyberia 
had been betrayed by monopolists seeking to recentralize control.

In response to this capitalist takeover of the internet, Rushkoff 
proposed solutions firmly in line with his longstanding commitment to 
decentralization. He held at the time that the government should take a 
step back and allow change to appear at the grassroots level. In a 
keynote address at the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum, Rushkoff called 
for presidential candidate Barack Obama to promote solar power not by 
state fiat but by deregulation. The government needed to move “out of 
the way of all those people who are ready to implement solar power 
themselves,” he said. Two months and five days later, Lehman Brothers 
collapsed, signaling the peak of the 2008 financial crisis and 
dramatizing the need for a new social code.

In October 2011, when the rapidly spreading Occupy Wall Street protests 
were under scrutiny from establishment media, Rushkoff published some of 
the first words of support for the movement in the mainstream press. 
“Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not 
being truthful,” he wrote in a column for CNN. “Whether we agree with 
them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that 
there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while 
things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher.”

As a decentralized movement, Occupy appealed to Rushkoff, and pulled 
him, like many other thinkers of the time, into the realm of political 
struggle. In the years that followed, he would delve further into class 
analysis. His work became less interested in the progression of society 
toward the new, and more interested in the conflict between groups of 
people defined in economic terms.

He hadn’t yet relinquished his belief that the common person could wield 
tech for their own ends. Program or Be Programmed suggests that readers 
learn to code; in Life Inc. and Present Shock (2013), he endorses 
alternative currencies. In Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth 
Became the Enemy of Prosperity (2016), he writes approvingly of 
BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and Wikipedia as platforms that don’t depend on 
venture capital. Always critical of advertising, he never fell for the 
flashy promises of Google and Facebook’s Web 2.0, but his soft spot for 
decentralization never seemed to calcify. Even as he cataloged 
yesterday’s failures with clear eyes, he couldn’t help holding out hope 
that tomorrow’s tech would be different, that the web could live up to 
its potential to create a better and more interesting world.

I first encountered Rushkoff’s writing around this time, in 2010, while 
I was working for a site called Shareable.net. The site’s premise was 
that connecting everything and everyone to the web would allow people to 
freely lend the stuff they already owned, creating further abundance for 
all. Room-sharing platforms would reduce housing costs, and ride-sharing 
platforms would reduce the number of cars on the road. Rushkoff was a 
proponent of reorganizing the internet according to peer-to-peer 
principles, and he became one of the site’s most popular contributors. 
As platforms like Airbnb and Uber took over, leading the world into a 
new age of inequality and increased resource consumption, his dream of 
participatory decentralization died hard. But even amid mounting 
cognitive dissonance, certain parts of Rushkoff’s faith held out.

On reflection, he says, “I blamed capitalism and held the technology 
itself innocent.”

Rushkoff’s latest book, Survival of the Richest, which was published 
last fall, marks a subtle but major evolution in his thought. In the 
opening pages, he refers to himself offhandedly as a “Marxist media 
theorist.” After a career in service to the idea that a reconciliation 
between the worlds of Cyberia and Gaia was possible, Rushkoff has 
finally chosen a side.

The book starts with a personal anecdote. In 2017, Rushkoff accepted an 
invitation to give a keynote speech at a fancy resort, an easy 
supplement to his public-sector income. But his audience turned out not 
to be the typical crowd of white-collar managers; instead, he was 
confronted with five ultra-wealthy hedge fund guys sitting around a 
table. And they didn’t want Rushkoff’s standard media theorist spiel; 
they wanted him to provide solutions for a hypothetical postapocalyptic 
scenario they called The Event. “Where should we locate our bunker 
complexes?” they asked, and “How do we secure the loyalty of our private 
guards once money becomes valueless?” Yikes.

Despite occasionally identifying as a futurist, Rushkoff had not gamed 
out any Event-style scenarios. He riffed. How to make sure your head of 
security doesn’t slit your throat tomorrow? “Pay for his daughter’s bat 
mitzvah today,” he said. His suggestions didn’t go over particularly 
well, and the conversation turned out to be more consequential for him 
than for the survivalists. That moment, he tells me, prompted a “second 
break” with techno-optimism, one that would sever his alliance even to 
tech itself, and finally bring him home to Queens.

The bulk of Survival of the Richest isn’t about apocalypse escape routes 
for the super-wealthy. It’s preoccupied with something Rushkoff calls 
The Mindset, which roughly translates to “the way Silicon Valley 
technocrats think.” The Mindset is about a strategy of acceleration 
without a destination. It’s about blowing up humanity’s corpus of 
existing knowledge in favor of something—anything—new. In this 
relentless drive, Rushkoff perceives a self-destructive impulse. 
“Instead of just lording over us forever,” he writes, “the billionaires 
at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. Like the 
plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the structure of The Mindset requires an 
endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, 
the saved or the damned.” This isn’t just Facebook’s old “Move fast and 
break things” motto; it’s Zuckerberg’s personal mantra: “Domination!” 
Why are the world’s richest people obsessed with preparing for the 
apocalypse? Because they’re edging us all toward it. It’s as if, 
Rushkoff writes, they’re trying to build a car that goes fast enough to 
escape from its own exhaust.

Who is afflicted with The Mindset? The archetypal subject, Rushkoff 
writes, was Jeffrey Epstein: with a private island, an elite coterie of 
enablers and protectors, and detailed plans to impregnate 20 women at a 
time. Rushkoff never met Epstein, but he once wandered into his distant 
orbit via the celebrity literary agent John Brockman. The book recounts 
a dinner party Rushkoff attended at Brockman’s home that included the 
evolutionary biology crank Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proceeded to mock 
Rushkoff for believing in a “potentially moral universe,” to the 
chuckles of the assembled dignitaries. (When Epstein’s full crimes came 
to light, Rushkoff flashed back to this conversation—a rejection of 
morality, indeed!) Epstein is certainly an extreme example. But when 
Elon Musk talks about his own nine (?) kids as a solution to 
underpopulation, one suspects Rushkoff is on to something.

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff burns the last bridges linking him 
to the techno-solutionist crowd. Whole Earth impresario and fellow tech 
media guru Stewart Brand comes in for particularly harsh criticism. 
Though a decade earlier Rushkoff had counted Brand among his close 
intellectual collaborators, now he endorsed Timothy Leary’s excoriation 
of Brand as a petty leader of “a few smart but psychosexually immature 
white men who wanted all the benefits of being sealed up in their 
perfectly controlled and responsive environments—without ever having to 
face the messy, harsh reality of the real world.” During a time of 
intensifying wealth polarization, Brand nabbed 42 million dollars from 
Jeff Bezos to fund a giant clock. Meanwhile, Rushkoff transformed into a 
middle-aged Marxist. While much of his cohort worked with Netflix to put 
out the insipid documentary The Social Dilemma, Rushkoff’s perceptive 
films stream for free on PBS. These days, the direction of his work fits 
with his thought in a way that the solutionist juggling of his earlier 
career never could.

A harsh critic might accuse Rushkoff of having played both sides, given 
that his ideas have found some overlap with the latest—and perhaps 
worst—generation of techno-capitalists. But this would be unfair. 
Rushkoff has always played for what he calls “Team Human.” What’s 
changed is not his loyalties, but his understanding of what can be 
included in humanism. “Team Human doesn’t reject technology,” he wrote 
in his 2019 book of the same title. “Artificial intelligence, cloning, 
genetic engineering, virtual reality, robots, nanotechnology, 
bio-hacking, space colonization, and autonomous machines are all likely 
coming, one way or another. But we must take a stand and insist that 
human values are folded into the development of each and every one of 
them.” Only a few years later, here he is rejecting not just these 
technologies, but technology writ large as a solution to our problems. 
(That is to say, he no longer talks about humanizing space colonies.)

Over noodle soup at a cheap Chinese place off the Queens College campus, 
I ask Rushkoff how he feels about the industry now. “It’s not just Look 
what they did to my song,” he says. “It’s that the song itself is 
corrupt.” He struggles to find a break in his monologuing to slurp 
before his bowl goes cold. “I’ve come to see these technologies as 
intrinsically antihuman. How far back do we have to go to find 
technology that’s not about controlling nature? You have to go back to 
fucking Indigenous people and permaculture. That’s the future.”

I push Rushkoff to say more about the personal aspects of this second 
break, what drove him to reject Tech with a capital T. What brought him 
here, to a public college in Queens, while many of his old peers stayed 
close to Silicon Valley and its money? He takes an uncharacteristic pause.

“There is that psychosocial component,” he sighs. “There’s a domination 
mentality, and a fear of women and nature and earthworms.” He pauses 
again. “I might have had that. I was a little nerd boy and scared of 
girls and teased and pushed down stairs and all that, and virtual worlds 
feel safe. As I grew up, I realized, oh, that’s just death.” The 
dramatic comment is classic Rushkoff, but I understand that his feeling 
of pioneering excitement in the days of the early web, one strong enough 
to fuel him for decades, has finally curdled into shame and disgust.

For as long as I’d followed Rushkoff’s work, I had seen circling within 
it the twin wolves of criticism and hope, kept apart and alive in a way 
no other writers in the tech world have managed. Now the lupine duel has 
finally resolved, and the cyberwolf of techno-optimism registers its 
final processes as it lies twitching in a pool of its own coolant.

At this moment of near insurmountable crisis, there’s a steady demand in 
the ideas market for techno-solutionist commentators. Rushkoff has 
officially reduced the supply by one. You won’t find him advising anyone 
on how to outsource work to “AI” or dim the sun. “Like the 
consumer-driven, growth-based capitalism on which The Mindset is 
premised, these solutions usually involve finding new resources, 
exploiting them, selling them, and then disposing of them so more can be 
mined, manufactured, and sold,” he writes in Survival of the Richest. 
Arguing against both Elon Musk and the Green New Deal, Rushkoff 
concludes, “Degrowth is the only surefire way to reduce humanity’s 
carbon footprint.” It’s not a popular position or one you can slap a 
neologism on and sell. He’s given up waiting for promising technologies 
to resolve our society’s core contradictions.

So what answers does Rushkoff offer? His programmatic conclusions in 
Survival are surprisingly conventional: “Buy local, engage in mutual 
aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up 
anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and 
organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy 
so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher 
rates than those actively working for their income.” This is a lot like 
what you’d hear from certain left-wing corners of the Democratic Party. 
A bit staid for Rushkoff, maybe, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

For Rushkoff these days, Queens College is the physical representation 
of an alternative mindset. Back at the media studies building, he guides 
me down to a room in the basement. Here, in a far corner, he has created 
a respectable group conference setup by moving a few tables into a U 
configuration facing a screen. A bank of computers and a salvaged 
recording booth sit among a chaotic pile of old electronics pieces. It 
feels like Rushkoff is preparing for some of his students, maybe one of 
the three who turned their cameras on in class, to show up and DIY a 
podcast or a video blog. This is his legacy: an inveterate cyberpunk, 
offering Gen Z under-supervised access to a room full of communications 
tools. It’s the very opposite of a billionaire’s end-of-the-world 
bunker. “It’s something, right?” Rushkoff says, looking around at the 
possibilities. “I think maybe this is where I’m supposed to be.”

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