Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff (born 1961) is a media theorist, professor of media theory and digital economics at CUNY’s Queens College, host of the Team Human podcast, and author of some twenty books including Program or Be Programmed, Team Human, and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). He chronicled cyberculture’s utopian dawn in the early 1990s — and has spent the decades since documenting its capture by what he calls “The Mindset.”

The Mindset and the machines

Survival of the Richest opens with Rushkoff being paid to advise five billionaires who mainly wanted to know how to control their security guards after civilizational collapse. The book traces AI futurism, Mars colonies, and bunkers to the same impulse: technology as an escape hatch from the consequences of one’s own business model. In 2024 interviews he sharpened the point — those evangelizing AI are less interested in saving the world than in surviving it.

His critique of generative AI itself is that it is structurally conservative. In a 2023 essay recounting a CNN appearance — where he trolled the network by reading ChatGPT’s answer to their question on air — he argued the models can only average the past: “Only a human has the ability to challenge all that history.” He has also suggested the technology is “plateauing,” doing “the thing that it does” rather than approaching intelligence. Unlike full abolitionists, though, Rushkoff holds that appropriately built AI could still “foster a new human-centered digital society” — if we stop embedding extraction in its values.