Douglas Rushkoff has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 26 ratings. The most-rated is Team Human.
Team Human
Summary
"A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork." (Walter Isaacson) Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the NPR-One podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity. In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: Money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It's time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth.
©2019 Douglas Rushkoff (P)2018 Recorded Books
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
Summary
Digital technology was supposed to usher in a new age of distributed prosperity, but so far it has been used to put industrial capitalism on steroids. It's not technology's fault but that of an extractive, growth-driven economic operating system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. Robots threaten our jobs while algorithms drain our portfolios. But 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. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and technology author Douglas Rushkoff calls on us to abandon the monopolist, winner-takes-all values we are unwittingly embedding into the digital economy and to embrace the more distributed possibilities of these platforms. He shows how 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.
©2016 Douglas Rushkoff (P)2016 Penguin Audio
Program or Be Programmed
Summary
The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: It's here; it's everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? "Choose the former," writes Rushkoff, "and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make." In 10 chapters, composed of 10 "commands", Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe. In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping listeners to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age - and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little audiobook with a big and actionable message.
©2012 BetterListen! LLC, all rights reserved. (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Present Shock
Summary
"If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism." This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives. People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, compile knowledge, and connect with anyone, at any time. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future’s arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this “now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock. Rushkoff weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture. He explains how the rise of zombie apocalypse fiction signals our intense desire for an ending; how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault. He examines how the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, and delves into why conspiracy theories actually comfort us. As both individuals and communities, we have a choice. We can struggle through the onslaught of information and play an eternal game of catch-up. Or we can choose to live in the present: favor eye contact over texting; quality over speed; and human quirks over digital perfection. Rushkoff offers hope for anyone seeking to transcend the false now. Absorbing and thought-provoking, Present Shock is a wide-ranging, deep thought meditation on what it means to be human in real time.
©2013 Douglas Rushkoff (P)2013 Audible Inc.
Life Inc.
Summary
A captivating book that reveals how corporations have come to dominate all aspects of life - including our inner lives - and what to do about it.Something has gone terribly wrong. Unquestionably, but seemingly inexplicably, we now live in a world where the market has infiltrated every area of our lives.In Life Inc., brilliant and charismatic cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that we no longer know who we are, or what we want. Everything, especially authenticity, is branded. Real community and real intimacy have broken down, replaced by market-tested cures for everything from weight, to conception, to poverty, to food, to finding a mate. The market, and its operating system, Corporatism, is no longer something people build and control. Rather, it builds and controls us.Rushkoff, in tracing the roots of corporatism from the Renaissance to today, reveals the way it supplanted social interaction and local commerce and came to be regarded as a preexisting condition of our world, from the history of public relations to the relentless gentrification of America's urban neighborhoods. And he shows us how to fight back: how to de-corporatize ourselves, disengage from branded expectations, think locally, and return to the real world of human activity. As Rushkoff puts it, "Micro-decisions are what matter."
©2009 Douglas Rushkoff (P)2009 Random House Audio