Background

Douglas Mark Rushkoff was born on February 18, 1961, in New York City, New York, the United States to Marvin (a hospital administrator) and Sheila (a psychiatric social worker) Rushkoff.

Education

Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later he took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He was a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies, which was approved in June 2012.

Career

Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at The City University of New York/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. He is a columnist for Medium, technology and media commentator for CNN, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, and a lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world.

Douglas Rushkoff's first book. Free Rides: How to Get High without Drugs, was published in 1991, but his career as a journalist took off in 1994 with the publication of Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace and Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. The first volume established Rushkoff as a marketable media symbol of a technology-in-spired culture, while the second prompted at least one critic to compare him to Marshall McLuhan. Rushkoff was suddenly in demand as a media consultant to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and, for fees of five thousand dollars an hour and up, to various corporations. In 1995 Rushkoff published Children of Chaos: Surviving the End of the World As We Know It in London; it was released in the United States the following year as Playing the Future: How Kid's Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos. Rushkoff s first novel. Ecstasy Club was published in 1997, and movie rights to it were optioned by a Hollywood producer.

Rushkoff wrote the prospectus for Cyberia on a flight to New York for a magazine editing job; he had noticed that many of his college classmates who had been involved with psychedelic drugs were working in the computer industry in Northern California, and he wanted to explore possible links between the new information revolution and mind-altering drugs. Cyberia, set in the San Francisco Bay Area, examines people whom Rushkoff sees as determined to re-define reality through “raves” (night-long techno-music and drug parties), paganism, hallucinogens, experimental art, and role-playing games. Computers figure prominently in these adventures, and modems establish communities of like-minded persons.

In Media Virus!, Rushkoff argues that “the datasphere” - contemporary media-saturated culture - is susceptible to media viruses in the form of controversies, ideas, and events that spread quickly throughout the system. Some of the examples he provides are the televised police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on the television character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and television programs such as The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy. These media viruses are often subversive of established points of view and they can, in the words of Randall Lyman in the online magazine Guardian Lit., “infect our minds just as biological viruses infect cells." Unlike many, Rushkoff is not worried that the media are controlled by governments and corporations because what he calls “media viruses" allow viewers and listeners to challenge the status quo - they allow countercultural politics to infiltrate mainstream media. In addition, the media are too complex and chaotic to be controlled by any one force.

In Rushkoff s 1995 work, the “children of chaos” are people who have grown up with computers controlled by computer “mice” and televisions operated with remote controls; with Barney, the purple dinosaur and Power Rangers; with skateboards and snowboard - “screenagers” as Rushkoff calls them. According to Rushkoff, they are the shapers of new, evolutionary environments in which change is constant and chaos is acceptable. They can process information faster than their elders, react more quickly, and understand the world on a much larger scale. In Playing the Future Rushkoff asserts that “screenagers” can lead everyone else “past linear thinking, duality, mechanism, hierarchy, metaphor, and God himself toward a dynamic, holistic, animistic, weightless, and recapitulated culture.”

In his 1997 novel, Ecstasy Club, Rushkoff spins a tale about a small cult having round-the-clock “rave” parties in an abandoned piano factory in Oakland, California. Fueled by quantities of drugs and armed with computers, they discover a method of time travel only to discover that they have been beaten to the punch by a conspiracy of governments, corporate saboteurs, and religious zealots.

Rushkoff's new book, a manifesto called Team Human, calls for the retrieval of human autonomy in a digital age. Prior to that, his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity argued that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all. His many best-selling books on media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, a follow-up to his Frontline documentary, Digital Nation, and Life Inc, an analysis of the corporate spectacle, which was also made into a short, award-winning film.

Rushkoff has written and hosted three award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance, and Digital Nation, about life on the virtual frontier. Most recently, he made Generation Like, an exploration of teens, marketers, and social media.

Rushkoff's commentaries have aired on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered, and have appeared in publications from The New York Times to Time magazine. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times and Guardian of London, as well as regular columns for Arthur, Discover Magazine and The Feature. He also hosted his own radio program on WFMU, The Media-Squat.

Rushkoff has taught regularly for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, The New School University, the MaybeLogic Academy and the Esalen Institute. He also lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world.

Rushkoff has served on the National Advisory Board of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, The Harrington School of Communications and Media at University of Rhode Island, the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, the United Nations Commission on World Culture, and as a founding member of Technorealism. He is on the Advisory Boards of MeetUp.com, Epic Privacy Browser, Loomio.org, Liquid Information, Artizens, and World Wide Workshop. He has been awarded a Fullbright Scholarship, and Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation, the Center for Global Communications, and the International University of Japan. He served as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture and regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Larry King to the Colbert Report and Bill Maher. He developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.

Rushkoff is on the board of several new media non-profits and companies and regularly speaks about media, society, and ethics to museums, governments, synagogues, churches, universities, and companies.

Rushkoff has also worked as a certified stage fight choreographer, an SAT tutor, and as keyboardist for the industrial band PsychicTV.

Achievements

• Douglas Rushkoff was named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his twenty books, there are bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. 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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Life Inc

    (Life Inc explains why we see our homes as investments rat...)

    2009
  • Nothing Sacred

    (Acclaimed writer and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, author of ...)

    1973
  • Coercion

    (Noted media pundit and author of Playing the Future Dougl...)

    1998
  • Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

    (In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and ...)

    2016
  • Club Zero-G

    (Douglas Rushkoff, author of eight books on media and cult...)

    2004
  • Present Shock

    (This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award...)

    2004
  • Team Human

    (Team Human is a manifesto - a fiery distillation of preem...)

    2019
  • Aleister & Adolf

    (Media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff weaves ...)

    2016
  • Get Back in the Box

    (Douglas Rushkoff was one of the first social commentators...)

    2005
  • Program or Be Programmed

    (The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fil...)

    2010
  • GenX Reader

    (Cursed by older generations, Generations X means a lot of...)

    1994
  • Media Virus!

    (The most virulent viruses today are composed of informati...)

    1994
  • Ecstasy Club 1997
  • Cyberia 1994

Religion

In his book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, Rushkoff explores the medium of religion and intellectually deconstructs the Bible and the ways that religion fails to provide true connectivity and transformative experiences.

Views

Quotations: "Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind  -  but this was okay since, in keeping with the Gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption."

"Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think."

"The phones are smarter but we are dumber."

"We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook."

"We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive."

Membership

• National Writer’s Union

• Author’s Guild

• Harmony Lodge

Connections

Douglas Rushkoff is married to Barbara Kligman. They have one child Mamie Hannah Rushkoff who was born on December 22, 2004.

Father:

Marvin Rushkoff

Mother:

Sheila Rushkoff

Spouse:

Barbara Rushkoff

Daughter:

Mamie Hannah Rushkoff

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 164
  1998
• Douglas Rushkoff: Official Site