The trouble with tech
The early 1990s were heady days in the world of computers. Early adopters were communicating with one another through networks whose role was soon taken over in 1993 by arrival of the Internet. A sense of novelty and techno-optimism was in the air. One such tech-head was Douglas Rushkoff. Active in the cyberpunk movement, he maintained friendships with a range of counterculture figures including Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna.
Being a fan of the “open source” approach, by the end of the decade Rushkoff had become disillusioned as a result of seeing corporate greed take over, and shifted his perspective. Today he has reinvented himself as a media theorist unafraid to share some pointed criticism. Technology is inevitably a double-edged sword, a reality that he was formerly inoculated against noticing but now fully acknowledges. He believes that current trends are taking us in entirely the wrong direction, but has proposed a solution.
In Rushkoff’s view, technology fosters such undesirable trends as individualism, corporate exploitation and radicalisation. His 2019 book is a type of manifesto for combating social atomisation, with the challenge for humanity being to resist these negative dynamics and cooperate together as a society.
