Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

January 25, 2016
This interesting, thoughtful dissection of the modern digital economy and its shortcomings starts off with a clarion call. Rushkoff, a digital futurist turned critic, believes the speed and scale of digital commerce and corporate expansion since the 1990s is a “growth trap” that could “derail not only the innovative capacity of our industries, but also the sustainability of our entire society.” He may be right, and he is cogent and clear about Silicon Valley’s accepted trajectory for startups: seek massive amounts of capital and win a monopoly position to dominate the competition. But Rushkoff’s critique—that the scale of digital economics is propelling modern capitalism into an unsustainable state—dwarfs his prescriptive remedies. The book’s calls for more peer-oriented companies, “inclusive capitalism,” and alternative models such as the mission-driven “benefit corporation,” seem inadequate to the challenge of replacing the system described here. Calling for a rejection of the winner-takes-all, zero-sum-game approach is a reasonable response to current economic developments, yet Rushkoff has done this in a way that is interesting without being truly compelling.

January 1, 2016
Rushkoff (Theory and Digital Economics/CUNY, Queens; Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, 2013, etc.) looks behind marketing hype to examine the nexus of digital technology and the economy. Taking issue with those who extol the virtues of the intermediary role of platforms like taxi-service replacement Uber or hotel alternative Airbnb, the author relentlessly peels back layers of confusion and obfuscation and reveals how these successful businesses have been brought into existence on the back of the government's original investment in the Internet. In Rushkoff's view, online businesses--whether the older, established ones like Amazon, Netflix, and Paypal or newer startups--are best seen as extensions of the advertising and marketing industries. He contends that it is the users of these companies that constitute their major "product," and their "likes," reposts, and "favorites" became vastly important (books and movie rentals are just means to the end). User preferences and data become grist for the mill of big data companies, who execute complex analytical work-ups for their customers. These digital platforms have consistently wreaked havoc across broad sectors of the market--one of the earliest and most obvious examples is what Amazon did to the book business. "Monopolistic commerce platforms are not true peer-to-peer systems," writes the author, "and they are anything but freeing." The results are often job loss, declining living standards, and depreciated assets. As Rushkoff shrewdly notes, "the job of the company is to extract value from local communities and pay it to investors. Its customer base, as well as its employee population, ultimately grows poorer." The author then extrapolates further: "you can only extract value from a region or market segment for so long before it has nothing left to pay with." Rushkoff hopes that the software creating the problems can also help organize a shift toward more equitable solutions. A powerful expose of an underdiscussed downside to the digital revolution.

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March 1, 2016
Welcome to the futurists' game of guess where we're headed, as Rushkoff (Present Shock, 2013) opines about what the world needs to be in terms of commerce. Rushkoff's position: For the sake of humanityliterally and figurativelywe must embrace the idea of distributed wealth and forsake business growth in the name of prosperity for many. Though he's not necessarily influenced by the recent reports of drastic decline in middle-class numbers, he is rather resolute in his insistence on transforming five segments of the marketplace: employment, corporate growth goals, currencies, investment, and distribution. For each, a long narrative sets the stage, followed by a handful of strong recommendations. Take employment, for instance. Rushkoff suggests four strategies: reducing the 40-hour workweek, employee-company sharing of productivity goals (and results), guaranteeing minimum incomes, and getting paid to address real needs. Is all of this just nirvanaor realistic? He points out enough examples to make us quasi-believers, from Unilever and B corporations to bitcoin.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)