Doug Rushkoff, a prolific writer and media theorist, was one of the original believers in tech's limitless potential. In the nineties, as a cyberpunk representative of Gen X, he championed the internet as the surest way forward to a renegade, antigovernment future. As Silicon Valley gave over to Big Tech, he stayed on the fringes, resolutely pushing his humanist values in the face of corporate greed. These days, however, Rushkoff has finally cut ties with the technosolutionism crowd and ditched his utopian dreams for good. What happened? This is the question Malcolm Harris takes up in a thoughtful and astute profile of Rushkoff. Harris, himself a prominent voice of the millennial generation, practically grew up on Rushkoff. In high school he watched Rushkoff's canny PBS documentaries exposing the ills of advertising; years later, in an early job, he encountered Rushkoff's writings on the benefits of a prosocial internet. That was 2010, a time when it was still possible to believe that the internet could be a connector of people and creator of material abundance. But the rise of companies like Uber and Airbnb, and the increasing reach of Amazon and Meta—not to mention the recent fall of FTX and the cryptocurrency scammers who ran it—have put these ideals to rest. "I've come to see these technologies as intrinsically antihuman," Rushkoff tells Harris. He's still rooting for the revolution—it's just that now, tech is no longer a part of it. — Camille Bromley | Features Editor |
