Never heard of this Rushkoff guy, but he seems not 100% OK himself. Very weird tone throughout. e.g.
>They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see.
>They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see.
The thing that always gets me is that they pretend to offer the insider view (rubbing shoulders with billionaires), but actually it's them fixing on these handful of figures and companies, ignoring 99.9% of the industry.
I also find it difficult to take seriously anyone who holds up 2016 as some kind of milestone in internet manipulation and propaganda... because the Obama campaign already bragged in 2012 how they used social media to win. They harvested data from Facebook, just like Cambridge Analytica would do, but Facebook looked away, and the press spun it as tech savvy democrats leaving republican dinosaurs in the dust.
There are no principles in this area, just people fighting for a team.
The fact he sounds weird is interesting because it is really the degree that everything has become dominated by the culture of San Francisco.
It is the degree that Silicon Valley beat Silicon Alley. He is expressing the side that lost the culture but it could have gone the opposite way. Wallstreet money didn't have to go very far to get to Silicon Alley.
Pseudo.com was basically doing real audio/video podcasts from Silicon Alley in the late 90s. I don't think that whole scene really recovered from the dot com bust though.
It’s funny because there was a whole New York start up scene and basically none of them made it and all the big stuff that lived was west coast.
This guy seems ok albeit a bit out there.
Edit: Re-read the article, he seems about the sanest out of all people talking on the subject lately.
Sociopaths.