Lavin speakers Douglas Rushkoff and Shoshana Zuboff have both been nominated for the 13th annual Porchlight Business Book Awards. The awards recognize the best business books published this year, and look beyond traditional business titles to important works that businesses should be considering.
Douglas Rushkoff’s title, Team Human, explores how the internet has divided us into increasingly smaller, radicalized groups—and delivers a call to arms to resist these destructive forces. With wide-ranging research on human psychology, evolution, and biology, he shares how being human is really a team sport—and why we have to fight to protect this fundamental truth. Team Human is nominated in the Management & Workplace Culture Category. Witty and astute, Rushkoff has made many media appearances, from NPR and PBS, to The Colbert Report and being a correspondent on digital business and society for CNN. He is the Marshall McLuhan Award for Media Writing, as well as the Founder of the Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff—praised in the New York Times in three separate features—explores how our access to smart devices and social networks is developing in such a way as to both serve and manipulate us. Surveillance capitalism—a concept coined by Zuboff herself—defines the current age in which we’ve all consented to the commodification of our personal information. Optimistic but realistic, she asks, what is the real cost of putting a price on private data? How can our leaders come up with novel responses to a new era? Nominated in the Big Ideas & New Perspectives category, Harvard Business School emerita Zuboff explores how this urgent matter isn’t just about our individual lives: the modern economic order is reshaping democracy in ways that threaten our freedoms like never before.
The winners of the Porchlight Business Book Awards will be announced January 2020.