We Have Allowed Tech to Define Us
“Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.” (Rushkoff, 2022). His work explores human relationships to technology and how that affects our relation to money, power, and narrative.
We’ve spent the decade letting our tech define us. It’s out of control.
Review of Rushkoff’s article by Erica LaBar
It’s pretty common to see older generations pester younger generations about being on their phone too much, but are they wrong? Even Meredith Broussard, author of “Artificial Unintelligence” would agree something is up with tech. The issue with technology is that it is created to be addicting to use. Technochauvinism is a term coined by Broussard which assumes that tech is always the answer. Overall, the manipulative ways of the tech industry finds ways to tend to consumer’s desires (analyzing their data) — leading to their dependency on the product.
We can’t even blame capitalism, anymore. 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. (Rushkoff, Douglas. 2019).
The worst part about the advancements of technology is the people creating it. We are not in their own best interest and they are also finding ways to put “us against them.” The Center for Humane Technology has called attention to the way that the manipulative techniques of behavioral finance have been embedded in our apps — bringing us all up to speed on the science of captology and addiction, circa 1999 (Rushkoff, Douglas. The Guardian, 2019). Companies wanted us to become addicted to their products and it is drastically changing the way we behave around each other.
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.
We are guilty of following along with their tactics. The media, news, and government greatly influence our belief systems on a public scale. Like I said earlier — it creates an “us verses them”. Although if we found a better way to communicate with each other, it wouldn’t have to be that way. “In the digital environment, we have the opportunity to remember who we really are and how to take responsibility for our world. Here, we are not just passive consumers; we are active citizens and more. That’s the real power of a distributed network: it is not centrally controlled, but locally generated” (Rushkoff, Douglas. The Guardian, 2019). The influence of Rushkoff and Broussard in the tech world is inspiring to me. They are conscious users of tech and they are staying true to their own beliefs. They are using their knowledge of digital studies to further educate others about discussions they feel people should be mindful of. I find that useful myself and I enjoy using this platform to voice structures thoughts about digital studies.