Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143131298
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/06/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,114,464
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: What's Wrong with This Picture? 1

Chapter 1 Removing Humans from the Equation 13

Digital Industrialism 13

Mass Mass Mass 16

The Digital Marketplace: Winner Takes All 24

The Economy of Likes 30

The Big Data Play 39

Sharing Economics: Getting Humans Back "on the Books" 44

The Unemployment Solution 54

Chapter 2 The Growth Trap 68

Corporations Are Programs 68

The Platform Monopoly 82

Recoding the Corporation 93

The Steady-State Enterprise 97

Chapter 3 The Speed of Money 124

Coin of the Realm 124

Reprogramming Money-Bank Vaults to Blockchains 138

Money Is a Verb 151

Chapter 4 Investing Without Exiting 168

Finance Is Nothing Personal 168

Do Algorithms Dream of Digital Derivatives? 178

Investment Gamified: The Startup 184

Ventureless Capital: The Patience of Crowds 196

Fully Invested-Factors Beyond Capital 206

Chapter 5 Distributed 224

Digital Distributism 224

Renaissance Now? 232

Acknowledgments 241

Appendix 245

Notes 247

Selected Bibliography 263

Index 267

Community Action Guide 279

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

01/25/2016
This interesting, thoughtful dissection of the modern digital economy and its shortcomings starts off with a clarion call. Rushkoff, a digital futurist turned critic, believes the speed and scale of digital commerce and corporate expansion since the 1990s is a “growth trap” that could “derail not only the innovative capacity of our industries, but also the sustainability of our entire society.” He may be right, and he is cogent and clear about Silicon Valley’s accepted trajectory for startups: seek massive amounts of capital and win a monopoly position to dominate the competition. But Rushkoff’s critique—that the scale of digital economics is propelling modern capitalism into an unsustainable state—dwarfs his prescriptive remedies. The book’s calls for more peer-oriented companies, “inclusive capitalism,” and alternative models such as the mission-driven “benefit corporation,” seem inadequate to the challenge of replacing the system described here. Calling for a rejection of the winner-takes-all, zero-sum-game approach is a reasonable response to current economic developments, yet Rushkoff has done this in a way that is interesting without being truly compelling. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2015-12-20
Rushkoff (Theory and Digital Economics/CUNY, Queens; Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, 2013, etc.) looks behind marketing hype to examine the nexus of digital technology and the economy. Taking issue with those who extol the virtues of the intermediary role of platforms like taxi-service replacement Uber or hotel alternative Airbnb, the author relentlessly peels back layers of confusion and obfuscation and reveals how these successful businesses have been brought into existence on the back of the government's original investment in the Internet. In Rushkoff's view, online businesses—whether the older, established ones like Amazon, Netflix, and Paypal or newer startups—are best seen as extensions of the advertising and marketing industries. He contends that it is the users of these companies that constitute their major "product," and their "likes," reposts, and "favorites" became vastly important (books and movie rentals are just means to the end). User preferences and data become grist for the mill of big data companies, who execute complex analytical work-ups for their customers. These digital platforms have consistently wreaked havoc across broad sectors of the market—one of the earliest and most obvious examples is what Amazon did to the book business. "Monopolistic commerce platforms are not true peer-to-peer systems," writes the author, "and they are anything but freeing." The results are often job loss, declining living standards, and depreciated assets. As Rushkoff shrewdly notes, "the job of the company is to extract value from local communities and pay it to investors. Its customer base, as well as its employee population, ultimately grows poorer." The author then extrapolates further: "you can only extract value from a region or market segment for so long before it has nothing left to pay with." Rushkoff hopes that the software creating the problems can also help organize a shift toward more equitable solutions. A powerful exposé of an underdiscussed downside to the digital revolution.

Kirkus Reviews