Online Journalism Blog

This happened last November but is timeless stuff: Douglas Rushkoff speaking. Full video is below but here are some choice quotes:

“I think what we actually have to do is go all the way back to the Renaissance to understand what’s happening now, to understand what’s unraveling now, because it was during the Renaissance that the capital structures that we’re depending on were invented, and where the technologies sympathetic to those capital structures were also invented. And what we’re looking at today, is the invention of technologies that now undermine those capital structures, but we’re not willing to change the  capital structures to adjust to these new technologies.

“… we created mass production because of the needs of capital. We needed to accelerate growth in order to pay back banking, in order to work currency. This was the underlying rule of currency. And so we created technologies, both to stoke production, and to stoke consumption. Right? Mass production, in some sense disconnected the worker from the process of production and made the timing, it really made human beings now, having to work at the pace of machines rather than the other way around. So all these goods were happening.

” … Now interactive technology, this is the stuff that just happened since the late 80’s till now, doesn’t conform to this model. Why? Because interactive technology turns the consumer into a producer. So now the person who was the consumer is creating value. Now this is a problem in a model where value is extracted. Right? The corporate model is to extract value from the periphery, to extract value from real activity, to extract value from communities, from localities, from the land, from the water, from anywhere. As people become producers, they’re creating value.

” … The problem is that people are creating value, and that’s the threat. People creating value is considered a leak in traditional corporate capitalism. They’re spending more, but the monopoly is broken and that puts future earnings in question, it puts business models in question.

“… ’digital economy’ is itself an oxymoron. Digital economy is not, things digital are best understood as an ecology not as an economy. Economies are based, at least economies that we understand, are based in rational actors, maximising their value, through the the, acquisition or distribution of scarce resources. Whereas on the internet, what we have are irrational people having  fun, engaging and sharing what feel at least to them like limitless resources. And it may be, that treating it as an economy, uhm, is doomed from the outset. And that we have to learn where economic rules really do function and where they don’t.”

Hat tip to Donnacha DeLong for this one.