Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.

— Douglas Rushkoff

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predicatively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

— Douglas Rushkoff

If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology.

— Douglas Rushkoff

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

— Douglas Rushkoff

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

— Douglas Rushkoff

I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presents 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.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

— Douglas Rushkoff

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.

— Douglas Rushkoff

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

— Douglas Rushkoff