Douglas Rushkoff

Media theorist, author, and host of the Team Human podcast. One of the earliest analysts of viral digital culture, his seminal 1990s book Media Virus identified the meme-like logics of the internet long before social media emerged. He is also the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Present Shock, and many other works on digital society and corporate capitalism.

In the Network Nations podcast, Rushkoff contributes to the analysis of how narratives and memes shape political realities on the internet. He draws on his experience of early internet culture — the cypherpunk and raver utopian movements — to distinguish the liberatory potential of early network culture from today’s techno-libertarian corporate enclosure. He is a proponent of local, bottom-up, cooperative community structures as alternatives to both state and platform power, resonating strongly with the commons and mutualism emphasis of Network Nations.

Appears in: Ep 2: Pathways to Commons-Based Sovereignty