We’ve Let the Internet Get Too Powerful
Who’s Doug?
Douglass Rushkoff is a media theorist and professor who teaches media theory and digital economics at the City University of New York. He’s written books on media, tech, and digital culture, and is known for his advocacy of open source solutions to the many social problems we face as a result of widespread technology adoption.
What’s the point?
In his article “We’ve spent the last decade letting our tech define us. It’s out of control”, Rushkoff wants to inspire action in readers of this article. He wants people to stop sitting around and blaming everyone else for problems that are the direct result of our own laziness. He wants the world to stop blaming developers and “big tech” for ruining politics or giving rise to digital white supremacy or letting Jeff Bezos singlehandedly control the online shopping market. Sure, those people are partially responsible for many of the digital problems we see today, but Rushkoff says we’re past the point where we care about that. We’re complicit in helping digital issues arise and survive. We started a fight against letting technology control and divide us and we lost — handily.
How does this connect to other readings and the broader digital studies curriculum?
Just last week, we talked about technochauvism and how the prospect of technology being the answer to all our problems is complete trash. In her book Artificial Intelligence, Meredith Broussard echoes many of the same sentiments that Rushkoff’s article brings up, but neither of them point to technology being the problem. Broussard and Rushkoff both point their fingers at users (aka, you and me) instead. Broussard finds issue with people blinding having faith that throwing more effort into technological solutions instead of taking the time to properly test the code that powers our devices. Rushkoff, on the other hand, criticizes us for being complicit in sharing our personal data with companies we know are going to sell it off for a profit. Both readings identify huge issues with the current state of our digital world, but they do it in completely unique ways.
How is digital studies supposed to help?
Simply being aware that these problem exist is a great way to fight back against some of the problems that Broussard and Rushkoff bring up. If we stop placing our blind faith in digital machines and algorithms, and stop handing our precious data to bad actors without a care in the world, we might actually be able to make some changes in this digital wild west. Knowing about how these issues affect different groups of people can also help us be more empathetic to victims of the problems caused by technological issues. Most of all, though, knowing that we are a significant part of the problem can complete our maps on digital studies because it fills in one of the pieces we pay the least attention to: ourselves.
We’ve spent the last few semesters studying all kinds of groups and the ways they use social media and other digital tools. Rarely do we step back and take a look about how we use those very same platforms. Rushkoff points out that our version of the internet is wholly unique from everyone else’s due to targeted ads, browsing patterns, and simply being interested in different types of content. How often do we analyze how that uniqueness might be harmful to us? Do any of us realize that the way we see the world might be completely different than someone else using the exact same devices, or even living in the same house as we do? That’s what Rushkoff wants us to think about, and the information we’ve learned in the DS minor so far should give us the ability to think long and hard about what kinds of effects these digital tools have on us, whether we notice them right away or not.
