Is Social Mobility Stagnating?

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The promise of an American dream has evaporated as inequality has gotten so much worse. Now everyone wants to be a sports player or a YouTuber or what have you because that is kind of your one shot at getting out of whatever situation you're in now, right? The beauty of college was it was four years away from the job market to actually develop your whole instrument. And now it's very few people look at it that way.

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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