Douglas Rushkoff Quotes & Sayings (Page 8)

“Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.”

“Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers.”

“To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied - through marketing as much as talent - by Steve Jobs.”

“While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.”

“While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other.”

“Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.”

“Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.”

“I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.”

“I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience.”

“If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.”