Douglas Rushkoff

“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”

“Our digital experiences are out of body. This biases us toward depersonalised behaviour in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present - and are much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm”

“Wal-Mart’s relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador’s eyeglass. Like temporary forts built solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time.”

“And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.”

“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”

“Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”

“Engaged in a new form of serfdom---only bound now to banks and mortgage lenders instead of to lords---her more highly leveraged neighbors pore over the business section of the newspaper each day looking for some sign that the government will soon step in to “freeze” their mortgage rates where they are before a scheduled adjustment hits.”

“Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.”

“Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.”

“Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, andmortgages became derivative investments.”

“The plague did not lead to Europe’s economic collapse. Rather, Europe’s currency-driven economic collapse led to the plague.”

“Computers don't kill books; people do.”

“The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”

“Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.”