Douglas Rushkoff

An author and documentarian, Douglas Rushkoff has spent his prolific career thinking about how new media and technology are impacting culture, business, and the economy. He shows us how we can turn technology to work for us, advocating for human autonomy in a digital age and challenging us to create the hopeful, thriving future we want to live in. His talks are a culmination of his pioneering work, and offer a clear-eyed look at what’s to come. In an age of artificial intelligence and countless other rising technologies, Rushkoff’s insights have never been more crucial.

In expansive and exuberantly perceptive keynotes, Rushkoff touches on subjects as varied as how educators can retain the value of live presence in classrooms populated by screens, or how branding and advertising professionals can communicate with the human consumers behind the statistical profiles. We can re-humanize our technology and economy, he says. In his book Team Human, which won Porchlight’s Management and Workplace Culture Book of the Year award, and his popular podcast of the same name, he shows how to reconnect people at work, home, school, in our faith practices, and even politics. We’re a team, he says, and if we act like one, we’ll be able to regain the collaboration and solidarity we crave. His approach yields better, longer-lasting results—for individuals, and the connected communities we form together.  

In his newest book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires—named one of Amazon’s 20 best Business and Leadership books of the year—Rushkoff examines how tech elites are shaping (and eroding) the world in their image, before trying to literally escape it for island bunkers, the planet Mars, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend a landscape of algorithms and intelligences that actively reward our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. He shows us that, even in the face of cynicism, a tech-dystopia, and threats to democracy, the power of collective human action is stronger than any algorithm. We don’t need an escape strategy. We can still fight for the world we want to live in.

Among his bestselling books, translated to over 30 languages, are Present Shock, an exploration of our instantaneous, always-on culture, Program or Be Programmed, a clarion call for digital literacy, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, a critique of the digital economy and a set of actionable principles for thriving within it. A witty and astute media presence, Rushkoff has made many television, NPR, and PBS appearances, including his Frontline documentaries Generation Like, about teens and social media; The Persuaders, about the arms race between marketers and the public; and The Merchants of Cool, about who really drives youth culture. Rushkoff has appeared everywhere from Occupy Wall Street to The Colbert Report. He is also Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY, a correspondent on digital business and society for CNN, a consultant to the United Nations and the State Department, a graphic novelist, and the winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Media Writing, as well as the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.