Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
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.
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6recommend
16mentions
12people
2016–2020years
63% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The author Douglas Rushkoff ("Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus," etc.) has a lot of good things to say about the long term dangers of relying on huge retailers like Amazon (and now apparently Google).
I am making an effort to find much smaller online retailers. About 4 months ago I started using VitaCost for some food items, an to be honest their service initially was not great (possibly they were overwhelmed at the beginning of covid-19 lock-down). However, they just kept getting better and better and now I use my shopping history to reorder very quickly. Reading their privacy policy, they do share your purchase history with marketing partners and I can only hope this is on a smaller scale than having Google having my purchase history.
A counter example: my wife and I needed a new coffee pot and I knew the brand I wanted. I went to that company's web site, tried to order, but was referred to Amazon and Walmart Online. Oh well.
- Too many. As a liberal I still find conservatives Kevin D. Williams (The Smallest Minority, Independant Thinking in the Era of the Mob) and James Rikards (Currency Wars, Aftermath, etc.) to be interesting and useful. Then there is Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century), Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus).
Anyway, these few were enjoyably, but a warning: I have loaned books by the first two conservative authors to liberal friends and they didn’t like them, too far outside the bubble they like to live in. I like reading authors that have differing world views from myself.
EDIT: The Devil’s Chessboard is also a good read, but parts of it were disturbing to me.
- The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian.
Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/
- This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus"
I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"
- Really a nice article and I especially liked the finish when he mentions Douglas Rushkoff's latest book 'Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus' that is largely a prescription for building new types of companies and organizations with more stability and robustness - similar to advice offered up in Nassim Taleb's book 'Antifragile'
Edit: a short video where Rushkoff summarizes the big ideas in his new book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOyOULWKUo - recommended!
- re: "a great time to be alive": compared to the later "enlightenment" period were serfs were separated from the results of their hard work. Douglas Rushkoff talks about this in his very nice book "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus." The author of "The Crash of 2016" also talks about how serfs were better off during the Dark Ages.
