What Do You Think of the Internet?

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A lot of those narratives around the potential transformative effect of the internet are also seized on by people who want to promote kind of the economic vision of the internet. Do you think that they were naive in what they potentially offered or what they saw as being possible through this technology? Was it always kind of set in stone that the way that we went was one where the market kind of took over the internet and vastly commercialized it just as though it takes over every other part of our society? Yeah. I mean, there were multiple forms of naivete. You know, the easy one was John Barlow came along and wrote the Declaration of Independence and Cyber Space. He was a grateful dead lyric

Paris Marx is joined by Douglas Rushkoff to discuss why internet visions of the 1990s were wrong to ignore corporate power, how the dot-com boom was like a Ponzi scheme, and why we desperately need to stop elevating tech billionaires.

Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His most recent book is Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires and he’s the host of Team Human podcast. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushkoff.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

An excerpt from Survival of the Richest was published in The Guardian.
Paris was recently on the Team Human podcast to discuss Road to Nowhere with Douglas.

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