Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.

Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

In every aspect of life, including the economic dimension, we are always challenged to do the right thing. In many cases in the market system, which allows a great deal of latitude for human choice, people can get carried away to excess.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.

Our system is dynamic, always shifting gears. What I do is I build models to beat the market.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

When we had the 'flash crash' in 2010, where the price of some stocks briefly fell to zero, high-frequency trading played a big role in that event.

While technology is important, it's what we do with it that truly matters.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

Simply to pit "society" against "nature," "humanity" against the "biosphere," and "reason," "technology," and "science" against less developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their solutions.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

There’s a lot of money in making financial products whose risk few understand. Simplicity might be good for economics, but it’s lousy for Wall Street bonuses.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

As machines take over the decision-making that saves lives, we are left with fewer chances to save lives later.

We can prevent unfair advantage, and we can avoid the destabilizing effect that high frequency trading can have.

Of course, technology is not an exogenous force over which humans have no control. We are not constrained by a binary choice between acceptance and rejection. Rather, the decisions we make every day as citizens, consumers, and investors guide technological progress.