Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

People are building apps that are doing super-crazy things, and there's a lot of talk about modeling and microtargeting. Facebook can predict when people are going to break up, and Target is able to predict if a woman is pregnant before she knows just based on the type of lotion she bought.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

We're guided by consumer data, and it helps give us the confidence to invest where the consumer is going.

Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.

In order to be a great marketer, you have to be focused and intense and look at scarcity, urgency, activity and passion in the marketplace.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

I got really excited about the idea of data-driven startup just as I was starting Kaggle.

We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

So if I want to buy a light in a shop and I don't find a light that I like, I think to myself what would I like? What would I like to buy? Then I started to imagine and design it for myself a lot of the time.

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

I understand demographics.

People don't like to be sold, but they love to buy.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

During the early 1960s, I decided to supplement research support for quantitative economic studies at Pennsylvania by selling econometric forecasts to private and public sector buyers.

I've actually spent a lot of time researching beauty products, how they are produced and how they are sold.

I'm no editor, no artisan, no expert. And certainly no arbiter of what you should buy, wear, or eat.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.