how to survive being chronically online

In his latest work, Program or Be Programmed , the 15th anniversary edition, Rushkoff proposes four methods to avoid being programmed by digital technology, and to instead become the programmers of our world.

What we require is to:

1. Denaturalize power by revealing social constructions which are ideas we merely invented, and are not pre-existing laws

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In that way, some consumers have yielded to a type of techno-fatalism. People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there’s not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices.

It’s been endlessly argued that algorithms influence too much of what we watch, listen to, read, and even think. Personal taste erodes while decision-making is outsourced to the platform.

The collection of so much personalized data—around what time of day we turn to Sade or how many seconds of a NewJeans song we play—suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.

When I feel unsettled, it’s usually because I haven’t sat down to write in a while.

Unsettled is a good word to describe the weirdness of modern life, and I think one of the main reasons many of us feel unsettled is because no one feels like they’re getting much done. Which isn’t surprising when you consider that people are spending upwards of 6... See more

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.