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Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
The former techno-optimist has taken a decisive political left turn. He says it’s the only human option.
He gets the occasional student who recognizes his work—“He’s a famous author,” one writes on Rate My Professor, “just do a Google search”—but most of them are busy people logging in to class from their phones, more interested in fulfilling their degree requirements than in the dense collage of Rushkoff’s book covers taped to the wall behind his desk. In Cyberia, Rushkoff tried to conjure an epochal synthesis out of his dispatches from the nascent digital subculture: “Things like virtual reality, Smart Bars, hypertext, the WELL, role-playing games, DMT, Ecstasy, house, fractals, sampling, anti-Muzak, technoshamanism, ecoterrorism, morphogenesis, video cyborgs, Toon Town, and Mondo 2000,” he excitedly prophesied in the book, “are what slowly pull our society—even our world—past the event horizon of the great attractor at the end of time.” This was high-quality, uncut cyber-futurism, and people ate it up. Others in his cohort, such as experimental theorist artists Genesis P-Orridge and R. U. Sirius, dragged out remnants of the counterculture into the ’90s, but Rushkoff gained wider prominence by keeping one foot in the straight world, where he forecast the cultural and social implications of emerging technology for everyday people.
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