Douglas Rushkoff's must-read on technology out of control
“We’ve spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)
“The quest for exponential returns may have fueled the development of extractive and addictive technologies, but the cultural phenomena they gave birth to now have a life of their own”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)
“We can no longer come to agreement on what we’re seeing, because we’re looking at different pictures of the world. It’s not just that we have different perspectives on the same events and stories; we’re being shown fundamentally different realities, by algorithms looking to trigger our engagement by any means necessary…We are living in increasingly different and irreconcilable worlds. We have no chance of making sense together. The only thing we have in common is our mutual disorientation and alienation”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)
“The digital media environment is a space that is configuring itself in real time based on how the algorithms think we will react. They are sorting us into caricatured, machine-language oversimplifications of ourselves. This is why we saw so much extremism emerge over the past decade. We are increasingly encouraged to identify ourselves by our algorithmically determined ideological profiles alone, and to accept a platform’s arbitrary, profit-driven segmentation as a reflection of our deepest, tribal affiliations”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)
“We are promoting a spectator democracy on digital platforms, and, in the process, we are giving life to paranoid nightmares of doom and gloom, invasion and catastrophe, replacement and extinction. And artificial intelligence hasn’t even arrived yet”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)
“We have surrendered to digital platforms that look at human individuality and variance as “noise” to be corrected, rather than signal to be cherished. Our leading technologists increasingly see human beings as a problem, and technology as the solution – and they use our behavior on their platforms as evidence of our essentially flawed nature”
Read more at the Guardian (Douglas Rushkoff)