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"Is Your Technology Biased?"

We thought you'd find this article recently published in the Washington Post interesting.  Is our technology biased?  Do we really understand its influence on ourselves and others? Is anything really private anymoer? One of our favorite cutting-edge thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff, weighs in in this piece by Dominic Basulto.

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Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff

More on Douglas Rushkoff

Monday MP3 Free Download - Program Or Be Programmed Lecture with Douglas Rushkoff

Enjoy this enlightening and extemporaneous lecture by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff for free (usually $9.95). This live presentation and discussion takes the content covered in the book to another level of detail, humor and insight.

Free for a limited time only. Click here for preview and free download.

Monday MP3 Free Download - Life Inc Lecture with Douglas Rushkoff

This week's MPFree Monday title is an englightening talk with media theorist, Dougla Rushkoff.  Get it free for a limited time only. Download here

Check out his groundbreaking conference at ContactCon

Excerpt 2 from "Program or Be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff

We are delighted to offer another transcribed excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff's mind-expanding book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. In this book -- and this excerpt -- Rushkoff challenges us to take control of we interact with the ever evolving world of digital technology.

The way people approach me about this problem is they will say, “Well look, I know how to drive a car but I’m not an auto mechanic and I’m fine with that. When my car breaks, I’ll take it to the auto mechanic. I’ll take it to the garage.” Or the dealer at this point because people don’t trust the garage anymore. That’s another story. Take it back to the branded dealer and let them fix it. But I’m not talking about the difference between an auto mechanic and an automobile driver. I’m talking about the difference between an automobile driver and an automobile passenger.

Excerpt 2 from A Talk Based on "Program or Be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff -- -- winner of the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity -- challenges us once again to not take the world around us for granted in this talk based on Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age.  The following transcribed excerpt outlines the basis for this phenomenal book.

The talk itself, it may seem off the topic of this book Program or Be Programmed. It begins with me very concerned about the nature of democracy. And I had just reread the letters back and forth between John Dewey and Ed Bernays, who really was a great educational advocate and really the founder of public relations, looking at whether democracy is possible.
 
The reason it’s not off track as a conversation is what their conversation is really about is whether human beings are capable of understanding the world that they live in.

Excerpt 2 from A Talk Based on "Life Inc." by Douglas Rushkoff

In this excerpt from a talk based on Douglas Rushkoff's book Life Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back, Rushkoff challenges the notion of what is free online and elsewhere, and how corporations conspire to charge for it all.  Rushkoff is widely considered one of the most cutting-edge thinkers of our time, especially regarding the digital revolution.

Here is one of their conferences. It was a conference called “Free Economy” and what they were looking at was something that a lot of people have been talking about -- this notion that on the internet everything wants to become free, and what happens is things become more and more free, and in reaction to the kinds of books like Free written by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine or The New Rules of the New Economy written by Kevin Kelly. This whole notion that everything is going to become free online as information is passed around and here is what you can do about it. So as I see it, this whole notion of free, this whole world that they brought people to come in and speak about, is really not about free. For business people, what this is about is how do we figure out how to still charge for stuff that’s free.
 
In other words, how do we not accept and push through and embrace this tremendous revolution and value creation and value exchange that the net has wrought, but rather how do we resist it? So when I look at the assortment of my colleagues, if you will, the great cyber thinkers, who are out there lecturing on economics these days. They pretend to be lecturing and sharing on how to embrace the revolution when actually what they are doing are sharing the most reactionary approaches to a world where things are becoming free, but they are not teaching companies, people, and businesses how to survive in and embrace what is going on. They are teaching them how to resist, how to hang on to the old economy in the face of a new economic order rather than how to maintain sustainable business practices in a new economic order.

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Douglas Rushkoff Bio and Links

Excerpt 1 from "Program or Be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff

 We are delighted to offer the audiobook version of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff on BetterListen!  Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, says that we should “Read this book [Program or Be Programmed] before and after you Tweet, Facebook, email, or YouTube.”  We agree.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from this fascinating book, read by Rushkoff himself.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak.  When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. As we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple. Program or be programmed. Choose the former 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.