sustainability and reasonable profit over unrealistic growth objectives that largely benefit the 1% ( )

This is a tough book to rate and I ended up giving it 4 stars but it is probably a 3.5. I liked a lot of it and felt very challenged by the ideas, but I do not totally buy into his ideas and in the end I felt like it was more of a lecture than instruction. I do not respond well to lecturing. I definitely like the idea of getting away from the "extraction economy" we currently live in and hope that we can get to a place where instead of horrible companies like Uber (with no employees but lots of "free lancers") we can get to where the drivers can directly sell their services and thus take all of the money they have actually EARNED. I doubt we will ever get there though, people value convenience way more than doing the right thing. Myself often included I must say. ( )

Interesting ideas, somewhat overoptimistic and gets a bit repetitive driving home the same point over and over. Like many idealists whilst imagining the future world of plenty he assumes that everyone on the planet is as nice a person as he is. It's like those people have never seen a bell curve or experienced a prisoner's dilemma situation in real life.

This is a nitpick but it sometimes gets a bit new-agey with all those homely, artisan, hand-made, heirloom, tactile things and at the end goes off the rails pointing at the pope, the Amish and aboriginal farmers as sources of knowledge. I assume we should learn how to treat women from the Amish and how to profit from money laundering from the pope. The author's rose tinted glasses just don't do it for me. ( )

This has some interesting points but is very hard to read. The author comes across as paranoid and smug and a conspiracy theorist. Do not recommend. ( )

Dan Dreiberg: What happened to us? What happened to the American Dream?
Edward Blake: "What happened to the American Dream?" It came true! You're lookin' at it...
- Watchmen (Allan Moore) - 1999 directed Zack Snyder.

Doug Rushkoff's premise cannot be more pertinent than now - very thought provoking , warning us of the pitfalls of technological advances which can end up becoming an existential threat to humanity itself . However the problem does not lie with technology i.e robotics , machine learning etc which is tipped at eliminating 40-50% of all jobs by 2040 affecting blue collar to executives ; but rather in the way current financial systems operate where near term profits trumps longterm sustenance .

Behemoths like amazon,facebook etc which started or at least claim to be forebear's of egalitarian , altruistic views of "bringing people together" eventually end up eliminating people all together and reducing them to data which can be mined by algorithms only to be sold to the highest bidder and creating a alternative economy of "likes","tweets" which do not create any value to human-life but rather perpetuate a quasi realistic realm of equality and connecting people .

I knew certain aspects like the concept of the modern day worker's alienation from production was something Marx had theorized centuries ago and eventual pathological neurosis with symptoms from apathy and lack of accountability , since the current "worker" has no real stake other than paying mortgage debts and keeping his head above water .
However Rushkoff's sites some important differences eg. how the operational model of Uber and SideCar differs and how to keep investors and general populous engaged meaningfully in the future , since we are no longer battling scarcity anymore - we have an abundance and but cannot profit from it .

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