Douglas Rushkoff

“Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell.”

“Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.”

“I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.”

“While Google has given away pretty much everything it has to offer - from search and maps to email and apps - this has always been part of its greater revenue model: the pennies per placement it gets for seeding the entire Google universe of search and services with ever more targeted advertising.”

“New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, 'Jane is now friends with Tom.' The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.”

“Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.”

“Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.”

“Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.”

“As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.”

“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”

“Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.”

“The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'”

“Microsoft's new OS, Windows 7, may finally be a worthy successor to XP, eliminating the clutter of Vista and letting users get to what they want to use without the fuss. All this, while remaining compatible with their IT departments' demands for scalability and custom implementations.”

“Part of an icon's power comes from its indivisibility. The swoosh cannot be further deconstructed into its component parts. Just as golden arches mean McDonald's, and the little red tab means Levi's, the swoosh is Nike. The product is its icon, inseparably and without exception. To buy a pair of Nike shoes is to buy the Nike swoosh.”

“Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.”

“In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.”

“Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.”

“No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.”

“Like civil-rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present.”

“The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.”