Our world is getting more complex every day. Faced by a media run amok, a rapidly expanding global economy, the collapse of national and social boundaries and the profound impact of technology on our lives, we all feel like immigrants to a very new territory. Gone is the predictability of an organized civilization, overwhelmed by a seemingly random wave of change. Like any new immigrants to an unfamiliar culture, we must look to our children for signs of how to act and think. Natives of chaos, they have already adapted to its demands. Douglas Rushkoff believes that this is the moment we have been wating for - not an apocalypse at all, but a renaissance in which children's culture will lead us through despair and powerlessness to a new sort of hope. In this text he deconstructs the culture of the generation he calls the "screenagers" - from Japanimation and Nintendo to rave and new primitives - in his search for strategies on coping with, and thriving amidst, the discontinuity of the post-modern experience.

Children of Chaos: Surviving the End of the World as We Know It

Politics & Social Sciences

Rushkoff, Douglas

Social Sciences

Flamingo

When the young, hypertalented idealists who call themselves ECSTASY CLUB find an abandoned piano factory in Oakland, they make it the focus of a round-the-clock rave the likes of which the Bay Area has never seen before. They also make the factory a base camp in their search for a method of time travel that combines computer wizardry, esoteric spirituality and mind-altering substances. The club's mesmeric leader, Duncan, and the story's resourceful narrator, Zach, actually manage to "break time" online, only to discover that an unsettling array of characters has beaten them to it. Government agents, corporate saboteurs, religious zealots and even the local cops are suddenly out to get the club. As they battle an ingeniously conceived conspiracy (think Thomas Pynchon meets The X-Files), Zach battles his own growing affection for Duncan's lover, Lauren, and begins to wonder whether enlightenment is all it's cracked up to be.

Ecstasy Club: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

HarperOne

The author of Cyberia explains how the media culture of today's youngsters is preparing them for the future and for a world in which surprise is constant and information pours in rapidly from hundreds of sources. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Harpercollins

On a landscape that seems to be transforming itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment strategy, businesses rush to embrace change by trading in their competencies or shifting their focus altogether. All in the name of innovation.
But this endless worrying, wriggling, and trend watching only alienates companies from whatever it is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush to think "outside the box," the full engagement responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants, new packaging, new marketing schemes, or even new CEOs are no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise as individuals and as businesses.
Indeed, for all their talk about innovation, most companies today are still scared to death of it.
To Douglas Rushkoff, this disconnect is not only predictable but welcome. It marks the happy end of a business cycle that began as long ago as the Renaissance, and ended with the renaissance in creativity and collaboration we're going through today.
The age of mass production, mass media, and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation it engendered between producers and consumers, managers and employees, executives and shareholders, and, worst of all, businesses and their own core values and competencies.
American enterprise, in particular, is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process -- and fun -- of discovery.
"American companies are obsessed with window dressing," Rushkoff writes, "because they're reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink, rebrand, or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived."
Rushkoff backs up his arguments with a myriad of intriguing historical examples as well as familiar gut checks -- from the dumbwaiter and open source to Volkswagen and The Gap -- in this accessible, thought-provoking, and immediately applicable set of insights. Here's all the help innovators of this era need to reconnect with their own core competencies as well as the passion fueling them.

Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out

Business & Money

Biography & History

Harper Business

Douglas Rushkoff was one of the first social commentators to identify the new culture around the internet. He has spent nearly a decade advising companies on the ways they can re-orient their businesses to the transformations the internet has caused. Through his speaking and consulting, Rushkoff has discovered an important and unrecognized shift in American business. Too many companies are panicked and operating in survival mode when the worst of the crisis has already passed.
 Likening the internet transformation to the intellectual and technological ferment of the Enlightment, Rushkoff suggests we have a remarkable opportunity to re-integrate our new perspective with the work we actually do. Instead of running around trying to "think out of the box," Rushkoff demonstrates, now is the time to "get back in the box" and improve the way we do our jobs, run our operations and drive innovation from the ground up.
 Combining stories gleaned from his consulting with a thrilling tour of history's dramatic moments and clever readings of cultural shift we've just experienced, Rushkoff offers a compelling vision of the simple and effective ways businesses can re-invigorate themselves.

Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business

Now in paperback with a new introduction by the author, "a dizzying and dangerous guided tour through 'cyberspace,' an unfolding terrain of digital information . . . redefining reality."--Publishers Weekly. Rushkoff profiles the thinkers, technologies, sciences, and philosophies that are moving our society into the 21st Century.

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

A trip through modern computer culture that examines the cyberpunk movement, the hacker sub-culture, virtual reality, and smart drugs

Douglas Rushkoff was mugged outside his apartment on Christmas Eve, but when he posted a friendly warning on his community website, the responses castigated him for potentially harming the local real-estate market. When did these corporate values overtake civic responsibilites? Rushkoff examines how corporatism has become an intrinsic part of our everyday lives, choices and opinions. He demonstrates how this system created a world where everything can be commodified, where communities have dissolved into consumer groups, where fiction and reality have become fundamentally blurred. And, with this system on the verge of collapse, Rushkoff shows how the simple pleasures that make us human can also point the way to freedom.

Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

Vintage

Why doesn’t the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone? What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else? When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn’t between the unemployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Rather, a tornado of technological improvements has spun our economic program out of control, and humanity as a whole—the protesters and the Google employees as well as the shareholders and the executives—are all trapped by the consequences. It’s time to optimize our economy for the human beings it’s supposed to be serving. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and author Douglas Rushkoff tells us how to combine the best of human nature with the best of modern technology. Tying together disparate threads—big data, the rise of robots and AI, the increasing participation of algorithms in stock market trading, the gig economy, the collapse of the eurozone—Rushkoff provides a critical vocabulary for our economic moment and a nuanced portrait of humans and commerce at a critical crossroads.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

Economics

Penguin Publishing Group

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Penguin Books, Ltd.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rushkoff, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rushkoff, Douglas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rushkoff, Douglas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Children of Chaos: Surviving the End of the World as We Know It

Ecstasy Club: A Novel

Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos

Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out

Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus