Douglas Rushkoff

“Douglas Rushkoff has always been a singular observer and thinker. Embedded near the epicenters of the digital revolution, he has never flinched from honestly delivering fresh, radical, humane critiques of the emerging world.”— Kurt Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Evil Geniuses

An internationally celebrated author and documentary filmmaker, Douglas Rushkoff has spent his prolific career revealing how new media and technology are impacting culture, business, and the economy. He’s written over a dozen bestselling books and coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency.” He shows us how we can turn technology to work for us, advocating for human autonomy in a digital age and challenging us to create the hopeful, thriving future we want to live in. His talks are a culmination of his pioneering work, and offer a clear-eyed look at what’s to come. In an age of artificial intelligence and countless other rising technologies, his insights have never been more crucial.

In expansive and exuberantly perceptive keynotes, Douglas shows us how we can re-humanize our technology, education, and economy. In his book Team Human, which won Porchlight’s Management and Workplace Culture Book of the Year award, and his popular podcast of the same name, he shows how to reconnect people at work, home, school, in our faith practices, and even in politics. We’re a team, he says—and if we act like one, we’ll be able to regain the collaboration and solidarity we crave. His approach yields better, longer-lasting results, both for individuals and the connected communities we form together.

In his newest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires—named one of Amazon’s 20 best Business and Leadership books of the year—Douglas examines how tech elites are shaping (and eroding) the world in their image, before trying to literally escape it for island bunkers, the planet Mars, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us that, even in the face of cynicism, a tech-dystopia, and threats to democracy, the power of collective human action is stronger than any algorithm. We don’t need an escape strategy. We can still fight for the world we want to live in.

Among his 20 books, translated into over 30 languages, are Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. A witty and astute media presence, Douglas has made many television, NPR, and PBS appearances, including his Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and The Merchants of Cool. He is also Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY, a correspondent on digital business and society for CNN, a consultant to the United Nations and the State Department, a graphic novelist, and the winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Media Writing and the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.