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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Douglas Rushkoff

We can be fully human in a world of technology.

WORLD-RENOWNED THINKER | Bestselling Author of Team Human, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Present Shock, and Survival of the Richest

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Lavin Exclusive Speaker

Instead of trying to optimize ourselves for the automated future, we should be designing technology for human beings, says DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF. A world-renowned philosopher and futurist named one of the world’s 10 most influential thinkers by MIT, Douglas has written over a dozen bestselling books and coined such concepts as “viral media,” “social currency,” and “digital natives.” Douglas knows that technology like ChatGPT can help unleash human creativity—or stamp out an essential function of being human entirely. Now is the time to set the agenda on Generative AI. He helps communities, companies, and governments navigate the tech-augmented landscape ahead, and teaches us how to embrace large change while centering human connection and solidarity.

“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 Andersen, New York Times bestselling author of Evil Geniuses

An author and documentarian, Douglas Rushkoff has spent his prolific career thinking about how new media and technology are impacting culture, business, and the economy. 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, Rushkoff’s insights have never been more crucial.

In expansive and exuberantly perceptive keynotes, Rushkoff touches on subjects as varied as how educators can retain the value of live presence in classrooms populated by screens, or how branding and advertising professionals can communicate with the human consumers behind the statistical profiles. We can re-humanize our technology and economy, he says. 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 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—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—Rushkoff 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 how to transcend a landscape of algorithms and intelligences that actively reward our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. He 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 bestselling books, translated to over 30 languages, are Present Shock, an exploration of our instantaneous, always-on culture, Program or Be Programmed, a clarion call for digital literacy, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, a critique of the digital economy and a set of actionable principles for thriving within it. A witty and astute media presence, Rushkoff has made many television, NPR, and PBS appearances, including his Frontline documentaries Generation Like, about teens and social media; The Persuaders, about the arms race between marketers and the public; and The Merchants of Cool, about who really drives youth culture. Rushkoff has appeared everywhere from Occupy Wall Street to The Colbert Report. 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, as well as the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Testimonials

A heartfelt thanks. You were your usual articulate, scholarly and charming self. Such a performance demands either much rehearsal, spontaneous brilliance, endless reserves to call upon, or all three: the pacing, the insights—the impact of your talk left every single person in that room talking about your charisma, and more than that, your positively Grecian powers of rhetoric. Thank you from all of us.

Princeton Progressives

Testimonials

I just wanted to say thank you so much for participating yesterday. It was great to meet you and the feedback has been amazing from the audience in house and those watching the livestream (some of whom were glued to their laptops for the entire day, which is saying something!). It’s good to have a such a passionate and engaging speaker to shake things up a bit.

Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Testimonials

We cannot begin to thank you enough for traveling all the way to Memphis to be one of our conference featured speakers. Your energy and intelligence really ignited the room and provided some very good food for thought. We sincerely appreciate your willingness to work with us to make this part of your book tour. It was a great pleasure and honor to meet you and hear your thoughts on growth and the digital economy.

Alliance for Nonprofit Excellence

Testimonials

The presentation was excellent. One of the best we have had. Douglas is intelligent, engaging—and visionary. The audience found him very insightful as well as entertaining. He has a casual style but it is very refreshing. And he had quite a group stay after to speak with him.

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Speech Topics

Civic Engagement

Team HumanIt’s Time to Remake Society Together as the Team We Are

To Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of his most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In this talk, drawn from the book which won Porchlight’s Management and Workplace Culture Book of the Year award, Rushkoff argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not apart. Today, society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. But Rushkoff will show you how we can overcome it as a team—as a company, school, church, or any other group—and in doing so, retrieve the collaborative spirit at the heart of what we do.

This talk is Rushkoff’s impassioned call to arms—to recognize that being human is a team sport. In his own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff will show your audience that when we work together, we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity—together—we can make the world a better place to be human.

Technology

Survival of the RichestEscape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive The Event: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Douglas came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making—as long as they have enough money and the right technology.

In this engaging and eye-opening talk, Douglas traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset created—a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. Instead of changing the people, he argues, we can change the program.

Artificial Intelligence

Creativity in the Time of Chat-GPTHow Artificial Intelligence Can Augment Humans Instead of Replacing Them

With the meteoric rise of generative AI technologies—such as ChatGPT and DALL-E—many of us are asking big questions about artificial intelligence and where it fits into our corporate culture and creative processes. Douglas Rushkoff, bestselling author of Program or Be Programmed, argues that rather than replacing human creativity, appropriately developed AI can augment human imagination and expression. Instead of substituting for human relationships, AI can help foster collaboration and compatibility. Instead of doing students’ homework for them, AI can challenge them to do deeper analysis and dig for deeper insights.

In this engaging talk, Rushkoff breaks down how AI works, what it threatens if we turn to it for the wrong things, and how we can use it in ways that augment human flourishing. He draws on the entertaining stories and actionable conclusions he’s learned over his long career examining how technology changes society. With his trademark energy and thoughtfulness, Rushkoff argues that our technological future depends on our understanding of what makes humans fundamentally different from machines, and our willingness to embrace the novelty that comes from human actors working together toward human aims. Rather than repressing human agency, AI can unleash the creative potential of our organizations, if we dare.

Politics & Society

Remaking the Landscape without Remaking PeopleFour Steps to Major Cultural Change

When we think about making a better society, we often assume that the first step is to get people to change. But bestselling author and intellectual Douglas Rushkoff says we don’t need to “get people” to do anything—we can create a better world by recognizing the underlying assumptions behind our economy and institutions, and shifting them to work for us rather than against us.

Named one of the ten most influential intellectuals in the world by MIT, Rushkoff has built an enormous following by tracking how technology has changed us and our society. In this brilliant, energetic talk, he offers four steps to creating real social change, drawn from his long career chronicling and examining the rise of the digital age. He shows us how we must start by questioning the underlying assumptions of our world and our economies. Then, we have to rewrite the codes we live by, so that they serve more people and reflect our own values. Thirdly, we must learn to work as a team—making it easier for people to ask for favors, to establish rapport, and to build solidarity. Finally, we need to cultivate awe: experiencing ourselves as a part of something greater.

Rushkoff gives us practical ways to put each of these steps into action in our own lives and communities. Through this process, he argues, we can bring about a better world without needing to change who we are as humans. Audiences will walk away entertained, enlightened, and equipped for the work ahead.

Technology

What’s Challenging You About Technology?Rushkoff Composes a Talk in Real Time Based on the Audience's Top Concerns

Douglas Rushkoff has built an enormous following by examining the rise of the digital age, and how it’s fundamentally changed our world for the better (and sometimes for the worse). His vast experience, encapsulated in over a dozen bestselling books, has given him an unparalleled perspective on every issue audiences care about: from political polarization to generative AI to the rapidly changing media landscape, and everything in between.

In this fully customizable keynote, Douglas asks audiences to come up with the ten social, technological, or economic issues they find most urgent, and then weaves a single coherent talk that combines them all. He shows how each issue—any issue—is interwoven with all the others, and how they’re all part of the same story. Then he shows how this helps us find community, so we can tackle all these topics as a team. This personalized talk is a must-listen for anyone who’s interested in how the concerns we face all overlap, and how we can find a way through all of them, together. Audiences will walk away with the tools, solidarity, and hope that we need to navigate our complex landscape.

Technology

DistributedA New Operating System for Business and the Economy

In this inspiring talk drawn from his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff offers a new program for business in the digital landscape.

Digital technology was supposed to usher in a new age of endless prosperity, but so far it has been used to put industrial capitalism on steroids. Social networks surrender their missions to data mining, while brokerage houses abandon investing for algorithms—tactics driven by the need to stoke growth by any means necessary. Internet startups sell for billions, but destroy more jobs than they create, extract more cash from circulation than they put in, and disrupt entire marketplaces and neighborhoods in the process. We know that something’s wrong—but we’re not sure how to fix it, or even what to call it.

Media scholar and technology author Douglas Rushkoff argues for a new economic program that utilizes the unique distributive power of the internet to break free of the winner-take-all game defining business today. In this keynote, Dr. Rushkoff will offer a series of practical steps for businesses, consumers, investors, and policymakers to remake the economy from the inside out—and prosper along the way.

Marketing

Present ShockLiving Outside of Time

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real-time, and always on. Wall Street traders no longer invest in a future; they expect profits in the ultra-fast moment. Voters want immediate results from their politicians, having lost all sense of the historic timescale on which government functions. Kids text during parties to find out if there’s something better happening in the moment, somewhere else. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is. If the end of the 20th century could be characterized by futurism, the 21st is about presentism. We are no longer contending with future shock. The future is now.

In this talk, Douglas Rushkoff will convey “present shock” as it manifests on myriad levels: how it changes the way we make and experience culture, run our businesses, invest our money, conduct our politics, understand science, make sense of our world, and form our beliefs, cultures and religions. He will share panic reactions to present shock (such as Narrative Collapse, Fractalnoia, Overwinding, and Apocalypto) right alongside more successful approaches to living outside what we have always thought of as time. In addition to general audiences, this talk is of particular interest to marketers and messagers attempting to communicate in a post-narrative age.