Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the trend in technology towards ownership rather than sharing, highlighting the cycle of consumerism it creates.
Douglas Rushkoff's quote emphasizes the shift in technology from collaborative sharing to individual ownership. This trend benefits companies that produce increasingly complex and resource-heavy software and hardware, which in turn compels consumers to continuously upgrade their devices and systems, perpetuating a cycle of consumption and dependency on technology.
In practice
In a discussion about the latest tech trends at a conference, one might say, 'As Douglas Rushkoff points out, technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership.'
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.
We think Android is very, very fragmented, and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn't forced to be the systems integrator.
If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
With us air people, the future of our nation is indissolubly bound up in the development of air power.
Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.
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