Professor of Media Theory & Digital Economics
Media Studies /  Laboratory for Digital Humanism
Queens College, City University of New York

“Solving for Humans: How the Digital Economy Reverses Figure and Ground”
SATURDAY, APRIL 8 • 1:00-2:30p

Douglas Rushkoff is a writer and documentarian, whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age, the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He is the recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Award, the Jacques Ellul Award, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Rushkoff has written and hosted award-winning PBS FRONTLINE documentaries including Generation Like (2014), an exploration of teens, marketers, and social media, Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier (2010), The Persuaders (2004), and The Merchants of Cool (2002). His best-selling books on media and popular culture have been translated into over thirty languages. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Penguin, 2016) argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Penguin, 2014) explores the always-on, simultaneous society in which we live, as well as how this new temporal landscape influences media, culture, economics, politics, and meaning. Rushkoff is also author of Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010), and Life Inc. (Penguin, 2010), which was made into a short, award-winning film.

His commentaries have aired on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered, and have appeared in publications from The New York Times to Time magazine. Rushkoff wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times and The Guardian, as well as regular columns for Arthur, and Discover Magazine. He was recently featured in the interview “Re-writing the Core Code of Business” (openDemocracy, 2016).

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