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."
