Douglas Rushkoff

“Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.”

“Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s.”

“Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.”

“Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.”

“The 'looking forward' so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence.”

“Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes.”

“The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.”

“We know that people are less open in conversations if the other conversant puts a cell phone on the table. Even if it's turned off. The sign is enough to close the mind and make a prospective client or lover less likely to do what you ask. As people realize this, they'll start putting away phones or turning them off.”

“Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.”

“Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.”

“When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.”

“What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.”

“Imagine what it would be like if you didn't know that the evening news was funded primarily by 'Big Pharma.' You would actually believe the stuff that they're saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.”

“As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.”

“By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google.”

“Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape.”

“The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It's more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system.”

“I don't think tablets are where we should be focused. But I do think they could end up being an efficient way of delivering textbooks. They're just not really that, yet. There's all sorts of poisons and mined minerals and carnage that goes on to make a tablet. Way more than to print a book. Or a bunch of books.”

“To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied - through marketing as much as talent - by Steve Jobs.”

“Our eyeball hours are scarce, indeed. That's why Google wants us to do as much as possible online, in range of their ads, and is willing to spend billions creating more reasons and ways for us to do so.”