Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff

Overview

Capital in the Twenty-First Century meets The Second Machine Age in this stunning and optimistic tour de force on the promise and peril of the digital economy, from one of the most brilliant social critics of our time.

Digital technology was supposed to usher in a new age of endless prosperity, but so far it has been used to put industrial capitalism on steroids, making it harder for people and businesses to keep up. Social networks surrender their original missions to more immediately profitable data mining, while brokerage houses abandon value investing for algorithms that drain markets and our 401ks alike--all tactics driven by the need to stoke growth by any means necessary. Instead of taking this opportunity to reprogram our economy for sustainability, we have doubled down on growth as its core command. We have reached the limits of this approach. We must escape the growth trap, once and for all. 

Media scholar and technology author Douglas Rushkoff--one of today's most original and influential thinkers--argues for a new economic program that utilizes the unique distributive power of the internet while breaking free of the winner-take-all system the growth trap leaves in its wake. Drawing on sources both contemporary and historical, Rushkoff pioneers a new understanding of the old economic paradigm, from central currency to debt to corporations and labor.

Most importantly, he offers a series of practical steps for businesses, consumers, investors, and policymakers to remake the economic operating system from the inside out--and prosper along the way. Instead of boycotting Wal-Mart or overtaxing the wealthy, we simply implement strategies that foster the creation of value by stakeholders other than just ourselves. From our currency to our labor to the corporation, every aspect of the economy can be reprogrammed with minimal disruption to create a more equitably distributed prosperity for all.

Inspiring and challenging, The Growth Trap provides a pragmatic, optimistic, and human-centered model for economic progress in the digital age.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698153660
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Present Shock as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, Life Inc and the novel Ecstasy Club. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He wrote the graphic novels Testament and A.D.D., and made the television documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He lives in New York, and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: What's Wrong with This Picture? 1

Chapter 1 Removing Humans from the Equation 13

Digital Industrialism 13

Mass Mass Mass 16

The Digital Marketplace: Winner Takes All 24

The Economy of Likes 30

The Big Data Play 39

Sharing Economics: Getting Humans Back "on the Books" 44

The Unemployment Solution 54

Chapter 2 The Growth Trap 68

Corporations Are Programs 68

The Platform Monopoly 82

Recoding the Corporation 93

The Steady-State Enterprise 97

Chapter 3 The Speed of Money 124

Coin of the Realm 124

Reprogramming Money-Bank Vaults to Blockchains 138

Money Is a Verb 151

Chapter 4 Investing Without Exiting 168

Finance Is Nothing Personal 168

Do Algorithms Dream of Digital Derivatives? 178

Investment Gamified: The Startup 184

Ventureless Capital: The Patience of Crowds 196

Fully Invested-Factors Beyond Capital 206

Chapter 5 Distributed 224

Digital Distributism 224

Renaissance Now? 232

Acknowledgments 241

Appendix 245

Notes 247

Selected Bibliography 263

Index 267

Community Action Guide 279

Editorial Reviews

01/25/2016
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Douglas Rushkoff is one of today’s most incisive media theorists and a provocative critic of our digital economy. He’s also fun to read.”
—WALTER ISAACSON, president and CEO, The Aspen Institute, and author of The Innovators
 
“If you don’t know Rushkoff, you’re not serious about figuring out what’s going to happen next.”
—SETH GODIN, author of Linchpin
 
“Thoughtful, provocative, and essential reading for our economic moment.”
—JOI ITO, director, MIT Media Lab
 
“We’ve optimized for growth. But have we lost our way? As an economy? As a community? As a society with a value proposition that doesn’t make sense on a human or economic level? Rushkoff asks questions that matter. A challenging and necessary read.”
—SHERRY TURKLE, author of Reclaiming Conversation
 
“Every great advance begins when someone sees that what everyone else takes for granted may not actually be true. Douglas Rushkoff questions the deepest assumptions of the modern economy and blazes a path toward a more human-centered world.”
—TIM O’REILLY, founder, O’Reilly Media
 
“Douglas Rushkoff is a true digital visionary. Read this rousing call to reboot our society from the bottom up before it’s too late.”
—ASTRA TAYLOR, filmmaker and author of The People’s Platform
 
“In what could be seen as a crisis, Rushkoff shares his smart, optimistic, and pragmatic perspective about how both businesses and consumers can reimagine today’s current economic operating system in the digital age—and prosper.”
—BONIN BOUGH, chief media and e-commerce officer, Mondelēz

“Powerful truth telling… The crux of the argument that Rushkoff makes is that the digital economy is a house of cards built on fictional growth metrics that drive companies to raise money, undercut human workers, sell on the public markets and then—almost inevitably—collapse under the weight of public market demands.”
—Forbes
 
“A brilliant, bomb-hurling critique of the flaws in our digital economy, identifying what has gone wrong and what can be done about it.”
—Financial Times
 
“A powerful exposé of an underdiscussed downside to the digital revolution.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-12-20
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 exposé of an underdiscussed downside to the digital revolution.

Kirkus Reviews