A deep dive into one of this century's most potent questions: do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it?

This compact new edition of a paradigmatic text packs a big and actionable punch. Updated with a new section on the unique challenges posed by AI, Program or Be Programmed presents a spirited, accessible poetics of new media. On these pages (and screens), Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age.

The debate over whether the internet is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it's here; it's everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? Choose the former, writes Rushkoff, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make. In eleven commands, Rushkoff provides cyberenthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.

Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The subject? How to survive the Event the societal collapse they know is coming. Rushkoff argues that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they and their cohort can escape a disaster of their own making--as long as they have enough money and the right technology.

Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. Through fascinating characters--master programmers who want to remake the world as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced incentivized capitalism will prevent environmental disasters--Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change the world have no interest in doing so. He argues that the only way to survive the coming catastrophe is to ensure it doesn't happen by rediscovering community, mutual aid, and human interdependency.

Anticipating the mass layoffs and institutional collapse that have recently rocked Silicon Valley, Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest is a necessary and timely read (Los Angeles Review of Books) with a prophetic message about the future of tech and our human community.

Team Human is a manifesto--a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff's most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together--not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups.

Team Human delivers a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff's own words: Being social may be the whole point. Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity--together--we can make the world a better place to be human.

Five mysterious billionaires summoned theorist Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive the Event the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they and their cohort can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making--as long as they have enough money and the right technology.

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters--master programmers who want to remake the world from scratch as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced that incentivized capitalism is the solution to environmental disasters--Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so. And he shows how recent forms of anti-mainstream rebellion--QAnon, for example, or meme stocks--reinforce the same destructive order.

This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset created--a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies--and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. In a thundering conclusion, Survival of the Richest argues that the only way to survive the coming catastrophe is to ensure it doesn't happen in the first place.

Douglas Rushkoff was one of the first social commentators to identify the new culture around the internet. He has spent nearly a decade advising companies on the ways they can re-orient their businesses to the transformations the internet has caused. Through his speaking and consulting, Rushkoff has discovered an important and unrecognized shift in American business. Too many companies are panicked and operating in survival mode when the worst of the crisis has already passed.

Likening the internet transformation to the intellectual and technological ferment of the Enlightment, Rushkoff suggests we have a remarkable opportunity to re-integrate our new perspective with the work we actually do. Instead of running around trying to think out of the box, Rushkoff demonstrates, now is the time to get back in the box and improve the way we do our jobs, run our operations and drive innovation from the ground up.

Combining stories gleaned from his consulting with a thrilling tour of history's dramatic moments and clever readings of cultural shift we've just experienced, Rushkoff offers a compelling vision of the simple and effective ways businesses can re-invigorate themselves.

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.

Rushkoff is a cultural treasure and an eccentric author of big, strange ideas, never less than fascinating and always entertaining. -Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine, Red, Trees, and Transmetropolitan

Douglas has been one of my personal heroes, and I've been a most attentive reader of anything he cares to put between covers, knowing that his combination of a cold eye and a warm heart is guaranteed to astonish and embolden my own thinking about what's possible in the world--about what's possible to enact in the space between one human being and another. He occupies the ground of our most immediate perplexities, and his reports of what he finds are breaking news. -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Best American Comics and The Fortress of Solitude

In Life Inc, award-winning writer Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. The resulting ideology, corporatism, has infiltrated all aspects of civics, commerce, and culture--from the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self, from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking, from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of Facebook. Life Inc explains why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business. Most important, Rushkoff illuminates both how we've become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

Set in the near-future (2008), Exit Strategy is a darkly comic send-up of the dot.com mania of the late 1990s and a modern-day retelling of the story of Joseph. Like Joseph, Jamie Cohen is betrayed by his compadres but unexpectedly finds himself at the right hand of power. He helps a huge venture capitalist build pyramids - except these are investment pyramids based on technology idols. An additional narrative conceit is this: 200 years later, anthropologists find the virtual manuscript of Exit Strategy and begin annotating the text. Hundreds of readers have already contributed footnotes for the book - they are charming, wacky, compelling and Rushkoff has selected one hundred of his favorites for inclusion.

El debate sobre si la red es buena o mala es irrelevante: la red está aquí para quedarse y si bien somos cada vez más conscientes de los muchos problemas que ha engendrado la era digital, lo que se requiere ahora es una respuesta humana a la evolución de estas tecnologías. Para Rushkoff es imprescindible empezar a codificar los cambios por los que estamos pasando y desarrollar un nuevo patrón ético, comportamental y comercial para guiarnos.

Estamos viviendo un cambio de paradigma real y sin embargo tenemos escasa comprensión de lo que nos ocurre y de cómo superarlo. La verdadera pregunta que debemos plantearnos es, dirigimos la tecnología, o nos dejamos dirigir por ella y aquellos que la han dominado? En el paisaje altamente programado en el que vivimos podemos crear el software o podemos ser el software; programar o ser programados. Hasta ahora, nos hemos limito a ser programados. En este pequeño y valioso libro Rushkoff ofrece tanto a los entusiastas cibernéticos como a los tecnófobos las pautas para navegar en este nuevo universo digital y recuperar el control de nuestras vidas.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A friendly little book with a big and actionable message helps readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age.

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: It's here; it's everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? Choose the former, writes Rushkoff, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

In this spirited, accessible guide to poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off to create a template through which to see beyond the social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. In ten chapters, composed of ten commands accompanied by original illustrations from comic artist Leland Purvis, Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.