Rushkoff Article Analysis
Douglas Rushkoff is a writer, podcaster, and American social problem theorist. He’s written several books and articles all pertaining to similar concepts involving our technology and what direction we need to be moving with it.
Human beings are flawed — we make mistakes. We have somehow convinced ourselves that technology can do no wrong. That it is perfect and error-free. A quote from Rushkoff’s article that stuck out to me more than anything else was “our leading technologists increasingly see human beings as a problem, and technology as the solution.” What have we done to get to this point? Are we officially in the middle of an AI taking over the world phenomenon and don’t even realize it?
As I was reading Rushkoff’s article, particularly the section about harvesting our data, I got an ad for a hoodie I was thinking about buying last night. Not only did this seem wildly ironic, but also served as a reminder that we are being so closely watched, and not by humans either. AI bots are literally programmed to keep reminding us of these things we looked at one time until we cave and buy them because we’ve seen it so many times. And then we’ll probably keep seeing those ads even after we purchase whatever it is!
Rushkoff talks about how ultimately we are all on a different internet. If you are familiar with the new media platform TikTok, you’ve heard “what side of TikTok are you on?” This is in reference to the many “sides” of TikTok, which are actually just personalized feeds based on what you watch — similar to our feeds on every other social media platform. We are all being fed different versions of media depending on what the algorithms think we will enjoy and will keep us online longer. This sounds harmless but it has single handedly created a major political divide, a plethora of miss information, and people who are on whole different “sides” of the world and internet.
At the beginning of the article, Rushkoff introduces the familiar term “tech backlash” that we have been experiencing the last decade. Broussard talked about technochauvinism in her article and about how technology really isn’t always the answer. But Rushoff is taking it even further to say that technology is actually the root of a lot of our problems and we have let it take us over in the last ten years. The people who are coding and developing these sites and technologies are not thinking about how what they’re creating will affect its users, positively or negatively, they’re thinking about how it will make them money.
This is a concept that was also touched on in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. The documentary features many different people who formerly worked in this field as it was being developed, and all of them had the same thing to say — big tech giants didn’t know technology and social media was going to have such a negative impact on people when they were creating it, but once they realized it was they didn’t do anything to change it because it was a money making machine. If anything, they continue to make things worse by creating new ways to keep us online.
But like Rushkoff says, is it really their fault? Many of those who helped create these technologies haven’t worked on them in ten — twenty years. We can’t blame them or anyone really when this issue has snowballed into something bigger than any one person or company.