Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus — Douglas Rushkoff

David Alayón
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

A few months ago, a friend, Txema Arnedo, recommended a book to me and when I read it I had the same feeling as with Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” or Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus”: it was a total revelation, a turning point. The book is “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” by Douglas Rushkoff, and it deals with various topics ranging from capitalism, society, corporates, economy and the future of humanity.

The book’s central thesis revolves around the philosophy of infinite growth and how exponential companies and large corporations have as their mission only to continue to grow, and the devastating effects that this entails at all levels for the human race. The result is the “non-generation” of value and the extraction of wealth from an ecosystem in order to distribute it among a few or directly freeze it in order to continue generating money.

Around this idea, Douglas Rushkoff argues that it doesn’t have to be so, using a wide range of models, studies and examples. This is obviously not technology’s fault, but of the way we are deploying it: instead of building the distributed digital economy that these new networks could foster, we are pushing the growth mandate of the industrial age to its limits.

To show the key ideas of the book, who better than Rushkoff himself in nothing more and nothing less than a Google Talk. Here you have it:

A very powerful speech that is clearly seen in an infinite number of cases: Twitter and its IPO, Uber and the VCs, Google and the gentrification of San Francisco… The truth is that the book is full of powerful ideas and reflections but above all it’s full of powerful questions, something key to changing consciousness. I particularly liked Marshall Mcluhan’s model of the four questions to evaluate a medium or a technology:

  • What does the technology enhance or amplify?
  • What does the technology make obsolete?
  • What does the technology retrieve that had been obsolete earlier?
  • What does the technology “flip into” when pushed to the extreme?

Try to answer these questions when you think of a technology, project, start-up or ecosystem, there is a lot of strength in these answers. Also, the chart that is revealed throughout the book to illustrate the different socio-economic “eras” is priceless.

I don’t know if Rushkoff’s vision is too utopian, but of course we have to change the current model in order to reach the abundance of which many transhumanists never stop talking about. And above all not to create a socio-economic collapse or dystopia with what is to come: automation, robotization, Artificial Intelligence, algorithms, exponentiality… And this can only be achieved with a model of sharing, of joint growth, circular economy, and not the model of the immortals: “There can be only one”.

#365daysof #futurism #transhumanism #society #book #day188

Future Today

High quality curated content and topics related to innovation and futurism along with a little reflection

David Alayón

Written by

Creative Technology Officer & Co-founder @Innuba_es @Mindset_tech · Partner @GuudTV @darwinsnoise · Professor @IEBSchool @DICeducacion · Mentor @ConectorSpain

Future Today

High quality curated content and topics related to innovation and futurism along with a little reflection

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