Vice's Motherboard has a good interview with our friend Douglas Rushkoff.
Understanding how things work In order to make them work better is the basic hacker ethos, but Rushkoff has applied it to his broader discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc., Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he’s sought to show how we the users routinely get screwed by an “operating system” that’s over 500 years old.
“We’re leveraged in so many ways, it’s like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive,” he says. “It’s leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, ‘this is it’?” Or, rather, “How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That’s sort of what I’m trying to help people with.”
Motherboard TV: Douglas Rushkoff in Real Life
Bada bing, bada banned. China has blocked Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, tonight.
A really bad new law in Australia gives police the right to force companies like Apple to ‘backdoor’, or create encryption circumvention alternatives, in all their products. The issue has been controversial in the U.S. for a long time, and spiked in 2016 after the mass shooting in San Bernardino.
“A single suicide by an Uber investigator who posts that they could not ‘take’ the job demands any longer will be fodder for the national if not international news media,” the memo said.
In a competitive business landscape, employers need to know that their management hires are going to produce results. And if there’s one way to show that, it’s with a certification in Lean Six Sigma, the logic-driven methodology that gets project managers and their team from point A to point B quickly, cleanly and under budget. […]
For the newbie, Python can seem like the most intimidating programming language. After all, it can be used to create everything from simple apps to vast networks of web crawlers. But there are fundamental principles that underlie all the uses of this versatile platform, and you can absorb them all with the Python Master Class […]
Building a website on WordPress has always been easy. But if you really want to make your website stand out from the growing crowd, you’re going to need some help. For our money, a subscription to Storeshock WordPress Themes & Elements does the trick almost as well as having a pro designer by your side […]
