Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.


 * "For me, the most illuminating thing about psychedelics was the insight that I had been living in a particular reality tunnel that had been constructed for me and that I constructed for myself, and we all kind of live in these reality tunnels, and there's ways to remove some of the filters and some of the constructs temporarily in order to see, or at least see second-hand through the chemical, that there's a whole bunch of other ways of looking at things. It set me on a mission, really, since college, when I had those experiences, to help people get that the reality we're living is much more "up for grabs" than most of us aknowledge on a daily basis. To use the programming metaphor, that reality is open source, and that if you learn the codes through which it's programmed, you can be a reality programmer rather than just a user. And that we walk around our daily lives mistaking a lot of what is actually software, for hardware. That there's stuff we accept as given circumstances, as the way things are, that are actually the way things happen to be. And many of them are the way things happen to be because other people decided that's the way they should be."
 * Rushkoff and Pinchbeck Dialogue http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3099573935248548861