Douglas Rushkoff and the Information Society

Donnacha DeLong

16/12/2010

This essay was written as part of my studies in 2010/2011, reading a Masters in Political

Communication in City University, London. The essay was the assessment in the course The

Information Society and answered the question:

“Which thinker(s), and why, in your view, offer the most persuasive account of the

information society? Justify your argument by comparing a range of thinkers encountered

on this module and engaging with empirical evidence.”

Douglas Rushkoff and the Information Society

Donnacha DeLong, 16/12/2010

I would argue that none of the theorists we have covered give a comprehensive description of what

an information society is and, in fact, none of those I have focused on use the term. I would also

argue that the terms “information society” and “information age” are not synonyms; that the former

implies the basic structures of society have been fundamentally altered by information, while the

latter is a vague description of an historical process.

To use a single word, like information, to define an entire society would imply a level of universality

and fixity – that this society has been irrevocably changed by information. That society has been

changed in different ways at different times in different places by the availability of information,

facilitated by information technology, is without doubt. However, this change has not been

consistent and is constant. Change hasn’t stopped, it continues and some argue that it’s getting

faster.

The thinker I regard as the most persuasive when writing about the information age is Douglas

Rushkoff. Rushkoff is a public intellectual who has written about the changing nature of culture,

society, science and technology since the early 1990s. He wrote a series of books in that decade –

“Cyberia” (1994), “Media Virus” (1994), “Playing the Future (UK: Children of Chaos)” (1996) and

“Coercion” (1999) – that traced the development of what he saw as evolutionary change inspired

by the computer, chaos math, chemicals and creativity. He returned to the media space of his early

works in 2010 with the documentary “Digital Nation” (February 2010)1, in which he looks critically at

the actual impact of the technologies he had once enthusiastically promoted. He followed this with

a new book “Program or be Programmed” in November, which presents his “Ten Commands for a

Digital Age”.

1
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/
The Industrial Age

The distinction between an age and a society can be seen by looking at the historical development

of the industrial age. It can easily be argued that the industrial age began in parts of the United

Kingdom in the first decades of the 19th century, as the industrial revolution began to take hold.

Productivity increased, transport was revolutionised and the society began to change.

However, it would be hard to argue that the society of Britain in 1820 was an “industrial society”.

Industrialisation continued for decades and, combined with the Enclosure Acts that drove the

agrarian populations off the land and into the factories, unleashed two waves of social conflict – the

Luddite uprisings and the Chartist movement, which both reflected the opposition to

industrialisation amongst artisan and agricultural communities – before it could be argued that

society had been changed.

Further, the mass immigration from Ireland after the Great Famine of 1845-1848 swelled the

working classes in Great Britain and, thus, the numbers available to work in factories helped make

industrial production the dominant part of the British economy. The major social conflicts in Great

Britain from this point can clearly be seen in the context of the industrial society as trade unions,

increasingly made up of people working within the industrial sector, became the primary vehicles

for collective action – for example, the wave of new unionism in the 1880s and the syndicalist

Great Unrest period from 1910-1913. It is important to note that the majority of the island of Ireland,

what subsequently became the Irish Republic, never had an industrial revolution and remained a

largely agricultural economy until the 1980s.

Therefore, it is conceivably possible to talk about an information age, while not accepting the

existence of a fully formed information society. The information space is one of conflict – for

example the current Wikileaks controversy – but these issues are not the defining conflicts of any

modern society. In most of Europe, much older questions about state funding of social services,

benefits and education are primary. In the United States, the dominant issue bringing people onto

the streets appears to be the size and role of the state – a very old issue in the context of American
politics. In many ways, we have seen, since the 1980s, the collapse of a number of the defining

narratives of modern society – most recently the neoliberal economics that have been in place

since the 1980s, but also earlier narratives such as the legacy of the New Deal in the US or the

post-WWII settlement that created the welfare system in the UK. “The cultural institutions on which

we have grown dependent – organized religion, our leaders and heroes, the medical

establishment, corporate employers, even nation states and the family itself – appear to have

crumbled under their own weight, and all within the same few decades.” (Rushkoff, 1997, p. 2)

Rushkoff and the information Age

The term “information Age” has appeared in Rushkoff's work, but he has critiqued the term.

Speaking at Disinfo.Con conference in February 2000, organised in New York by The

Disinformation Company, Rushkoff (2004) argued that using information as the defining term for

the changes wrought by developing technologies was an attempt by business to make money out

of the changes really taking place in communications. He argued that information, unlike

communication, can easily be commodified – that it can be bought and sold. He pointed to the

emphasis on copyright issues as one example of the focus on commodifying cyberspace.

Copyright has been an area of conflict since the earliest days of the internet – the so-called

“Hacker Crackdown” centred as much on the illegal free distribution of copyrighted material as on

the hacking itself. (Sterling, 1992) Enforcement of copyright law – i.e. making sure people get paid

for their products and pay for what they use – has clashed with the internet as a facilitator of free

distribution. The most controversial aspects of the Digital Economy Act 2010 in the UK have been

the measures to deal with copyright infringement – and these measures are currently the subject of

a judicial review.

"This was not an information revolution, this was a communications revolution - this was people

talking to one another. We were the content of this thing, not information." (Rushkoff, 2004) In his

most recent book, “Programme or Be Programmed” (2010), he uses the term Digital Age instead.

At the end of the '90s, Rushkoff dealt with the increasing commercialisation of the internet and the
impact of the development of the flat, one-way World Wide Web over the early free spaces of the

early internet. He watched the corporate co-option of the ideas in his book “Media Virus” (1996).

His work identifying how hidden agendas in popular culture impact on society was interpreted by

the PR industry as a guide to how to market their products in the modern world. The concept of the

media virus itself has become a marketing concept. In “Coercion” (1999), he analyses the methods

of advertisers, PR men and other sales techniques. The Disinfo.Con saw him speaking a year

later, after the dotcom bubble burst, and what he termed a “pyramid scheme” had just crashed the

hopes (and bank accounts) of those who thought they had conquered the internet for big business.

(Rushkoff 2000)

Constant change

In “Children of Chaos”2, Rushkoff (1997, p. 2) argues that “[o]ur world is changing so rapidly that

we can hardly track the differences, much less cope with them.” He lists a number of technical

innovations of the mid-90s that seem totally outdated 13 years later – call-waiting, MTV, digital

cash, or fuzzy logic. However, replace the examples with the HTC Desire, Twitter, X-Box Kinetic

and the discovery of bacteria with arsenic instead of phosphorus in their genetic structure, and the

point is clear. Rushkoff continues: “We are bombarded every day with an increasing number of

words, devices, ideas, and events we do not understand.”

“Cyberia” begins with a quote from John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder of the

Electronic Frontiers Foundation – “On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror feeling like

an immigrant in a place where your children are natives […]” (Rushkoff, 1994, p 1) Rushkoff (1997,

p. 2) develops this theme further in Children of Chaos, arguing that the children of immigrants are

the ones who adopt the aesthetic, cultural and spiritual values of their new host nation. He argues

that we are all immigrants to a new territory in the twenty-first century and, like immigrants to a new

country, should be “watching our children for cues on how to speak, what to wear, when to laugh,

even how to perceive the actions of others.”3

2
Published in 2006 in the US as “Playing the Future”.
3
The concept of “Digital Native, Digital Immigrants” is now most associated with Marc Prensky, who is
credited with coining the terms in a 2001 book, but he has acknowledged the earlier use of the concepts by
Barlow and Rushkoff (Prensky, 2006).
Rushkoff’s early work focuses on the cultural activities of two overlapping groups of digital natives.

In “Cyberia” (1994), it is young computer hackers and Silicone Valley employees; house and

industrial music fans; users of smart drugs and psychedelics. The book defines cyberians as those

who believe that humanity is on the verge of accessing a new dimensional plane – a space

accessed via technology, shamanic/magickal activity or drug-fuelled dancing. “Cyberia is the place

alluded to by the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every science, and

the wildest speculation of every imagination.” (Rushkoff, 1994, pp. 3-4) In “Children of Chaos”

(1997), he looks back at the cultural influences on the broader group he calls screenagers – the

children of the baby-boomers – from slime-like toys to Marvel comics; Japanese Anime to Pulp

Fiction; role-playing games to the Gothic subculture. Screenagers are defined as humanity's

evolutionary next step capable of living with and thriving in the uncertainties of postmodernity.

The children of the baby-boomers are now in their thirties, but, to a large degree, the dominant

forces in society – politicians, business leaders – are from the Baby Boomer generation. Barack

Obama, born in 1961, falls within that category. If we accept the logic of the digital immigrants, that

these people are the immigrants – the people who are uncomfortable and unsettled in this new

age, then society is clearly not yet aligned to the dominant features of the age. If you look at who

worked on Obama's innovative election campaign, you see a team of younger people. Thomas

Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital and the man credited with masterminding the

campaign is seventeen years younger than Obama. In other words, the digital immigrant looked to

the digital native screenagers to help him win.

There are similarities between Rushkoff’s basic premise and the ideas contained in Daniel Bell’s

post-industrial society model, Manuel Castells’ Network Society and Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid

Modernity. However, the difference is in who they look at and their basic outlook.

Examining the work patterns of the then current work force, as Bell (1973) did in the early 1970s,

and finding that increasing numbers of people were working in services, missed what was coming
next – the computer industry. In 1973, an 18-year-old Steve Jobs was designing computer games

for Atari with his friend Steve Wozniak. They also built a telephone “blue box” – a phone

“phreaking” decide that allowed people to make free calls. Within three years they had founded

Apple Computers. (Vader, 2010)

Rushkoff, in Cyberia (1994, p. 211), lists Jobs as one of the role models whom the “fledgling

cyberians” are eager to please. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation – one of

the most important early personal computer software companies, is another. The others are major

counter-cultural figures of earlier decades, Timothy Leary and William Burroughs. To the cyberians,

Jobs and Kapor were the early technology trailblazers, emerging from the hacker/phreak culture to

commercial success, but also contributing to social change through the technologies they built.

They are seen as equally important as the cultural trailblazers – Burroughs who developed a

discontinuous cut-up style of literature and the psychedelic guru Leary.

In a talk to the British media regulator Ofcom in November 2008, Rushkoff argued that the mass

production is the defining element of the Industrial Age. Products were not produced because

people needed them, but to support the needs of capital. He argues that the multinational

corporate system is doomed, because “[…] the natural evolution of a person using technology, is

from consumer to producer.” (Rushkoff, 2008a) In the speech, he pointed to the collapse of the dot-

com bubble as the origin of the problems that culminated in the financial crash of 2008.

Thus, rather than Bell's service-based Post-Industrial Society as an end in itself, Rushkoff's

concept is the emergence of a society based on small-scale and DIY production – something that

was to be seen in the early days of home computing in the form of DIY kits and can now be seen in

the production of mobile phone apps by individual freelance developers. Rushkoff's “Media Squat”

radio show, which ran from December '08 to November '09, focussed on “open source, bottom-up

solutions to some of the problems engendered by our relentlessly top-down society.” (Rushkoff,

2008b) Shows included reports on attempts to build the kind of localised, small-scale economy he

proposes, including localised currencies and artisan-style businesses.

Castells' (2007) work is more contemporary than Bell's and therefore has a far better analysis of

the impact of new technology. His conception of the Network Society within the information age

describes the top-level impacts of technology and the growth of networks on politics, business and

power relations in society. However, I would contend that, in describing these impacts as reshaping

society into a definable form, he has jumped the gun. All of the issues he identifies are in flux. The

global financial industry's reliance on complex computerised mathematical models without human

intervention and the globalised nature of the banking networks were among the main causes of the

near-collapse of the world's economy in 2008. The aftershocks of the financial crisis continue, as

do debates about the need for human regulation. Barack Obama's election campaign in the same

year made innovative use of networking via the web and social media, but it is not yet clear

whether that has created a paradigm shift in political campaigning.

Castells identifies the ability of social movements and other political actors to penetrate the space

of flows in the networks as part of their resistance to domination (ibid, p. 14) and a collapse of

political legitimacy (ibid, p. 12), but what's not yet clear is what comes next. The collapse of

confidence in parliamentary democracy amongst a large section of the UK's youth (particularly

those who voted for the Liberal Democrats on the basis of their student fees pledges) has led to a

revival in extra-parliamentary activity that is likely to grow next year. Following the lead of the

students, trade unions are threatening massive strike action in 2011. Right now, student protesters

and anti-cuts activities are making use of networks and networking tools in ways unimaginable two

years ago. For example, Twitter is granting them direct access to influential journalists and public

figures in a way that was not possible until recently, while also allowing them to communicate plans

widely and distribute up-to-date information about what's happening at on the ground.

Bauman (1994), writing for Demos, identifies the growth of uncertainty within post-modernity and

the consequent growth of individualism (the “privatisation of life in general”) and the collapse of

tradition, community and the difficulties of generating solidarity amongst individual “flotsam” (ibid,

p. 23). He identifies that “[a]n increasingly privatised life feeds disinterest in politics.” In the
conclusion of his piece, Bauman argues for awareness of the “intimate connection [...] between

autonomous, morally self-sustained and self-governed [...] citizens and a fully-fledged, self-

reflective and self-correcting political community.” (ibid, p. 45) He argues that this will be necessary

to create a more ethical society. What Bauman appears not have been aware of in 1994 were the

seeds of a new form of politics being planted. One year later saw the emergence of a group called

Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in London, a group that was to become an international movement and,

ultimately, one of the most important influences on the emergence of the so-called “anti-

globalisation” movement in 1999. The anarchic convergence politics of RTS were based on people

coming together in solidarity as autonomous individuals – the Zapatista slogan “Many yeses, one

no” became one of the primary slogans of the “anti-globalisation” movement.

The roots of RTS were, in many ways, in the cyberian culture examined by Rushkoff (1994). The

end of the 1980s into 1990 saw a number of social conflicts in England, the biggest of which was

the campaign against the Poll Tax, which culminated in riots in London. However, the acid

house/rave culture – detailed by Rushkoff – had seen serious clashes with police as they clamped

down on illegal parties and drug use from 1988. Even earlier, 1985 saw the “Battle of the

Beanfield” as police clashed with new age travellers attempting to access Stonehenge. New age

travellers subsequently played a major role in the early development of the acid house/rave

culture.

The development of RTS saw a convergence of many of the veterans of these conflicts and

cultures. New agers and ravers were politicised by their fights with the police, while they brought

large elements of their culture into radical political circles. An important characteristic of Reclaim

the Streets actions (and subsequent radical actions in the UK) has been the mobile sound-system

pumping out dance music to the demonstration. While RTS and the anti-globalisation movement in

general went into decline after 2001, many elements of the movement have recently been revived

in the context of the student demonstrations. The BBC's Paul Mason (2010) wrote about the music

being played at the 9 December demonstration, calling it the “Dubstep rebellion”.

Bauman (1994, p. 18) argues that the “catchword of our times is recycling” – a world based on the

end of continuity, fragmentation and inconsequentuality. For Rushkoff (1997, p. 240), the word is

recapitulation – he describes a renaissance that sees old ideas being reborn and introduced into a

new context. Examples include the use of psychedelic imagery and pagan/magickal concepts in

the house music/rave scene. Where Bauman identifies the negatives of the new order, Rushkoff

celebrates them. The reason for this would appear to be that Bauman is looking at the digital

immigrants, those for whom the uncertainty of the post-modern era is threatening and anxiety-

causing. Rushkoff, on the other hand, is literally hanging out with the kids, the digital natives, who

have experience nothing else and are having fun in the chaos – even when they're demonstrating

on the streets (at least until the police move in).

Rushkoff's analysis of the impact of the Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK points to the

reason why. He identifies the film as a watershed in the context of discontinuity. The event itself

created a discontinuity in the political process – the president was changed outside of the normal

political process. Presidential assassinations were not unprecedented in the United States, but

there hadn't been a successful attempt since 1901 (President McKinley). Rushkoff (1997, pp. 42-

44) points to the film and its subsequent use in the media as the start of a new era of cultural

discontinuity. The film was repeated continuously, analysed frame by frame, over and over again.

Yet the footage gave no real answers, rather it created more questions and increased the

discontinuity of the event.

Rushkoff identifies three reactions to the event and film – the first is to ignore the discontinuity

completely, to accept the official explanation as satisfactory, ignore the outstanding questions, and

go on with life. Rushkoff states that the subsequent resignation of President Nixon, the end of the

Cold War and the emergence of the post-modern culture have left these people in “...a state of

unimaginably irreconcilable cognitive dissonance” (ibid, p. 43). The second reaction he identifies is

to the attempt to build a new narrative, to connect the discontinuous aspects and invent

connections where there were none. He categorises these as conspiracy theorists and equates

them with the baby-boomers. He argues that their reaction led to political actions of the latter part
of the 1960s – the antiwar protests, civil rights demonstrations and the cultural revolutions of the

hippies and the more political Yippies. They attempted to impose their own narrative instead of

what they saw as the corrupt narrative of the political system. “It's like a game of connect the dots.

The young baby-boomers wanted to change the numbers on the dots, so that the lines would come

out different.” (ibid, p. 43)

I would argue that Bauman's reaction to the postmodern era falls somewhere between the two

reactions. His response to what is going on around him is negative. His analysis of the collapse of

continuity and certainty is largely a negative one, rather than a cause for celebration at the collapse

of the modernist system he also criticises. He has an idea of how things can get better, but does

not appear to see the seeds of a new society in the current one.

The third response to the Zapruder film Rushkoff identifies is that of the children growing up with

the assassination as their “...first presidential memory. To anyone under thirty-five, presidents are,

by definition, people who get assassinated.” He argues that they do not expect answers or

coherent narratives from the media, on the contrary, they have an expectation of discontinuity. He

says that they are comfortable in “the disassembled mediascape because they are armed”. (ibid,

pp. 43/44)

Rushkoff (1997, also 2003, 2004) identifies the remote control as the first weapon in the armoury of

the screenager. Television programming (which he contends is just that) before the remote control

was a top-down system, the viewer sat in the chair and consumed what was being fed to them.

The physical requirement of walking over to the machine and changing the channel meant that

most people didn't change the channel and consumed the programming and the advertisements.

The remote control changed that and gave the viewer more power. If they don't like what's

happening, they can change. The ad break starts, they can change. The remote control led to

channel-surfing as the number of available channels increased. The viewing patterns of

screenagers became more discontinuous as they surfed back and forth between channels, mixing

parts of one programme with parts of another.

After the remote control came the joystick – the weapon that allowed the user to control what was

on the screen even more directly. Rushkoff argues that the remote control demystified the content

of television, while the joystick and video games demystified the technology. Then came the VCR

and camcorder, their potential impact revealed in 1991 as the tape of the Rodney King beating

became word news and led to riots in dozens of American cities. Gaming was followed by the

computer – with its mouse and keyboard. In the early days of the internet, what appeared on

screen was text only, but the user was as likely to be a contributor as a consumer. Usenet, internet

Relay Chat, Bulletin Boards were developed as open spaces where people could collaborate and

share ideas. Early software development was distributed as shareware and freeware – the

precursor to today's open source movement. Rushkoff argues that the “internet revolution was a

do-it-yourself revolution.” (2003, p. 24) “Open Source Democracy” (2003) pulls together a lot of his

earlier thought and applies it to the political sphere. In it, he argues for the development of a new

form of politics, based on the open source model of software development, based on bottom-up

organisational models. By this stage, not only was the open source movement emerging, but he

saw the re-emergence of interactive platforms on the web in web-based bulletin boards and blogs.

His most recent book, “Program or be Programmed” (2010) could be described as him taking stock

of what's happened and recognising that some things aren't going the way he originally thought

they would. The book is a handbook for achieving freedom from the more controlling elements of

the Digital Age, an attempt to reintroduce the human into the machine to achieve the fully liberating

potential of interactive technology.

Conclusion

It's hard to do justice to Douglas Rushkoff's work in just a few thousand words. He is a prolific

producer of media and each contains a wide range of ideas and illustrations. To sum his work up in

a few words, though, Douglas Rushkoff is an optimist. He believes that technology has the

potential to liberate humanity from control from above – whether by dogmatic ideology or religion,

or by big business trying to coerce us into buying things, or by politicians trying to make us toe their
line. The course of his work traces the changes in new technology and the changes in attitudes

towards it. Rushkoff understands the technology from the point of view of a longtime user and

emerged from the counter-culture as counter-cultural ideas influenced mainstream culture.

Ultimately, the best thing about his work is that it focusses on people and what they do. Unlike

many of the theorists of the modern era, whatever term is used, he examines the nitty-gritty of

modern culture – the television programmes, the comic books, the games, the music, etc. For him,

watching children playing with fake slime is more important than the all-encompassing theory. He

has used Alfred Korzybski's (1933) famous phrase of general semantics on a number of occasions

- “A map is not the territory”. Theories may be useful to help us start to understand what's going on,

but we shouldn't start believing them, because they're not reality. Reality, in all its diversity and

chaos, is out there.

References

Bauman, Z. 1994. Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty. London: Demos.

Bell, D. 1973. Post-industrial Society. In: F. Webster, ed. 2004. The information Society Reader.

London: Routledge. Ch. 7.

Castells, M., 2007. An introduction to the information age. City, 2 (7), pp.6-16 Available through

City University Moodle database [Accessed 12 December 2010]

Korzybski, A., 1933. General Semantics. The Gestalt Therapy Page. [Online] Available from

<http://www.gestalt.org/semantic.htm> [Accessed 14 December 2010]

Mason, P. 2010. Dubstep rebellion - the British banlieue comes to Millbank. BBC News: Idle

Scrawl Paul Mason's blog [Blog] 9 December, Available at:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/12/9122010_dubstep_rebellion_-

_br.html> [Accessed 13 December 2010)

Prensky, M., 2006. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Origins of Terms. Marc Prensky's Weblog,

[Blog] 12 June, Available at: <http://www.marcprensky.com/blog/archives/000045.html> [Accessed

13 December 2010]

Rushkoff, D., 1994. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Rushkoff, D., 1996. Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. 2nd Edition. New York:

Ballantine.

Rushkoff, D., 1997. Children of Chaos >* [Surviving the End of the World as we Know it]. London:

Harper Collins.

Rushkoff, D. 1999. Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say. New York: Riverhead Books.

Rushkoff, D. 2003. Open Source Democracy - How online communication is changing offline

politics. Demos. Available at: <http://rushkoff.com/wp-

content/downloads/opensourcedemocracy.pdf> [Accessed 13 December 2010]

Rushkoff, D., 2004. Disinfo.Con disinformation* The Complete Series [DVD] New York: Rycodisc.

Disc 2.

Rushkoff, D., 2008a. Global Citizens and Consumers in the internet Age Ofcom International

Conference [transcript] London, 20 November – 21 November 2008. Available at:

<https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcx2kzpr_84gs64btgw&pli=1>, video:
<http://blip.tv/file/1509286> [Accessed 13 December 2010]

Rushkoff, D. 2008b. The Media Squat: Radio with Douglas Rushkoff. [Online]. Available at:

<http://rushkoff.com/videoaudio/mediasquat/> [Accessed 13 December 2010]

Rushkoff, D., 2010. Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: Or

Books.

Sterling, B. 1992. The Hacker Crackdown. London: Penguin.

Vader, D., 2010. Biography: Steve Jobs. [Online] Apple Museum. Available at:

<http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=49> [Accessed 13 December 2010]

Appendix

Douglas Rushkoff biography

Douglas Rushkoff wrote a series of books in the 1980s – “Cyberia” (1994), “Media Virus” (1994),

“Playing the Future (UK: Children of Chaos)” (1996) and “Coercion” (1999).

By the end of the decade, his somewhat breathless enthusiasm and optimism had become

tempered by how he saw his work being co-opted by the corporate system and the free spaces of

the internet being colonised by business in the dot-com boom.

His work in the next decade narrowed to more specific issues and he produced works of fiction

(“Exit Strategy”); books on religion (“Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism”), politics (“Open

Source Democracy”) and innovation (“Get Back in the Box”); and graphic novels (“Club Zero-G”

and “Testament”). He also wrote and hosted two Frontline documentaries for PBS on the themes in

of “Coercion” – “The Merchants of Cool” (2001)4 on the influence of corporations on youth culture

and “The Persuaders”5 (2003) about the landscape of marketing.

However, in 2008, his focus returned to the big picture as he was working on “Life Inc.”, a radical

history of the growth of the modern corporate system and its impact on society. He gave the talk to

Ofcom in the UK. He led his second course at the MaybeLogic Academy online learning institution

in January/February 2009 around the content to be published in “Life Inc.”. Students engaged with

and discussed draft chapters of the book. From December 2009 to November 2009, Rushkoff

hosted the “Media Squat” radio show. The publication of “Life Inc.” in June 2009 saw a flurry of

media interest, including an appearance on The Colbert Report6. The book was accompanied by a

video7 that helped promote it in the media sphere.

It is clear that his work around “Life Inc.” brought his ideas full circle – having argued at the end of

4
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/
5
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/
6
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/238643/july-15-2009/douglas-rushkoff – video
only available in the US.
7
http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated
the ‘90s that corporate influence was endangering the bright new future he had anticipated, the

end of the ‘00s saw him arguing that elements of the emerging culture he had described in his

early books was going to destroy the corporate system. He looked critically at the actual impact of

the technologies he had enthusiastically promoted in a third Frontline documentary “Digital Nation”

(February 2010)8. He followed this up with a new book “Program or be Programmed” in November.

Rushkoff teaches media studies at NYU and the New School University, serves as technology

columnist for The Daily Beast and lectures around the world. He has won a number of awards,

including The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology for “The

Merchants of Cool” (2001), the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of

Media Ecology for “Coercion” (2002) and the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in

Public Intellectual Activity (2004) (Media Ecology Association, 2010).

8
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/