Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff
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Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Narrator: Douglas Rushkoff

Unabridged: 9 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 03/01/2016

Synopsis

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 protesters 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.

About The Author

Douglas Rushkoff is the bestselling author of Present Shock, as well as a dozen other books on media, technology, and culture, including Program or Be Programmed and Life Inc. Named one of the world’s ten most influential thinkers by MIT, he has made documentaries for PBS Frontline, including Generation Like and The Merchants of Cool, and he is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, CUNY. He lives in New York and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Molly on April 14, 2016

Rushkoff is a smart person with a lot of interesting ideas - you know a review isn't going to be good when it starts that way. I have a problem with his presentation - he makes unsourced claims that, even if true, seem designed to elicit an emotional reaction to draw the reader into accepting that t......more

Goodreads review by Jared on March 16, 2016

While Rushkoff often drives me a little crazy with his pessimistic, borderline conspiracy-theory driven world view, this book is filled with great ideas and observations. It's well worth the read for anyone interested in looking critically at our global economy, business ideas and the ways in which......more

Goodreads review by Craig on May 05, 2016

Douglass Rushkoff is urging us to reprogram our economic operating system. His basic argument goes something like the following. A long time ago, because currencies that served as stable stores of value were too scarce for common use, people availed themselves of whatever they had that came closest......more

Goodreads review by Brian on November 07, 2018

There is so much to unpack within Douglas Rushkoff’s book that a single page review won’t even come close to doing it justice. But in order to give a streamlined review, I will focus on the following three big themes in this book that I took away: 1. Technology has been used to extract as much value......more

Goodreads review by Atila on June 03, 2016

Virada inesperada com esse livro. Achei o começo meio redundante, porque a parte sobre novas empresas acumulando riqueza e externalizando problemas é mais bem retratada pelo Jaron Lanier em Who Owns the Future?. Mas a segunda porção, sobre modelos de negócio, acúmulo de capital, o que o dinheiro rep......more

Quotes

“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 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 Linchpin
 
“Thoughtful, provocative, and essential reading for our economic moment.”
—JOI ITO, director, MIT Media Lab
 
“We’ve optimized for growth. But have we lost our way? As an economy? As a community? As a society with a value proposition that doesn’t make sense on a human or economic level? Rushkoff asks questions that matter. A challenging and necessary read.”
—SHERRY TURKLE, author of Reclaiming Conversation
 
“Every great advance begins when someone sees that what everyone else takes for granted may not actually be true. Douglas Rushkoff questions the deepest assumptions of the modern economy and blazes a path toward a more human-centered world.”
—TIM O’REILLY, founder, O’Reilly Media
 
“Douglas Rushkoff is a true digital visionary. Read this rousing call to reboot our society from the bottom up before it’s too late.”
—ASTRA TAYLOR, filmmaker and author of The People’s Platform
 
“In what could be seen as a crisis, Rushkoff shares his smart, optimistic, and pragmatic perspective about how both businesses and consumers can reimagine today’s current economic operating system in the digital age—and prosper.”
—BONIN BOUGH, chief media and e-commerce officer, Mondelēz

“Powerful truth telling… The crux of the argument that Rushkoff makes is that the digital economy is a house of cards built on fictional growth metrics that drive companies to raise money, undercut human workers, sell on the public markets and then—almost inevitably—collapse under the weight of public market demands.”
—Forbes
 
“A brilliant, bomb-hurling critique of the flaws in our digital economy, identifying what has gone wrong and what can be done about it.”
—Financial Times
 
“A powerful exposé of an underdiscussed downside to the digital revolution.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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