Douglas Rushkoff

Apple enjoys 'Harry Potter'-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off. ”

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it. ”

By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google. ”

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life. ”

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. ”

As popular culture becomes more presentist, 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 videogames. ”

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken. ”

I don't know of any other form of life that gathers up all the food it needs in the first two-thirds of its life in order to do nothing in its last third of life. In a utopian presentist society, instead of working extra hard to put money in the bank, you'd be working to provide value for the people around you. ”

Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel. ”

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness. ”