As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

— Douglas Rushkoff

As popular culture becomes more presents, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward video games.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroblastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Computers don't kill books people do.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the saber metrics 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.

— Douglas Rushkoff