Throwing rocks at the Google bus : how growth became the enemy of prosperity / Douglas Rushkoff
- Author
- Rushkoff, Douglas
- Published
- New York, New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2016]
- Physical Description
- viii, 278 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Contents
- Introduction: What's wrong with this picture? -- Removing humans from the equation. Digital industrialism ; Mass mass mass ; The digital marketplace : winner takes all ; The economy of likes ; The big data play ; Sharing economics : getting humans back "on the books" ; The unemployment solution -- The growth trap. Corporations are programs ; The platform monopoly ; Recoding the corporation ; The steady-state enterprise -- The speed of money. Coin of the realm ; Reprogramming money--bank vaults to blockchains ; Money is a verb -- Investing without exiting. Finance ls nothing personal ; Do algorithms dream of digital derivatives? ; Investment gamified : the startup ; Ventureless capital : the patience of crowds ; Fully invested--factors beyond capital -- Distributed. Digital distributism ; Renaissance now?
- Summary
- "Why doesn't the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone? What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else? When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn't between the unemployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Rather, a tornado of technological improvements has spun our economic program out of control, and humanity as a whole--the protesters and the Google employees as well as the shareholders and the executives--are all trapped by the consequences. It's time to optimize our economy for the human beings it's supposed to be serving. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and author Douglas Rushkoff tells us how to combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology. Tying together disparate threads--big data, the rise of robots and AI, the increasing participation of algorithms in stock market trading, the gig economy, the collapse of the Eurozone--Rushkoff provides a critical vocabulary for our economic moment and a nuanced portrait of humans and commerce at a critical crossroads."--Dust jacket.
An exploration of the digital economy draws on contemporary and historical sources to argue for a new economic program that utilizes the unique distributive power of the Internet while breaking free of the winner-take-all game-defining business today. - Subject(s)
- ISBN
- 9781617230172
1617230170 - Bibliography Note
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-266) and index.
- Source of Acquisition
- Purchased with funds from the Paterno Libraries Endowment; 2015.
Purchased with funds from the Paterno Libraries Endowment; 2015 - Endowment Note
- Paterno Libraries Endowment
View MARC record | catkey: 17036904